‘Transit’ Archives
TRANSIT””Transit Changes in the Med City
By JOHN CHARLES WILSON Unfortunately, there is no significant transit news in the Phillips neighborhood, or even the Twin Cities, for me to report this month. Therefore, I am going to digress from my usual local focus and talk about changes coming to the transit system in Rochester as of the 12th of July. The last time I wrote about Rochester Public Transit in the Alley was about three years ago when I first started this column. RPT was in the midst of a major service improvement from six days a week to seven. That”™s right: until a few years ago, buses didn”™t even run on Sundays in the Med City. Now, RPT is rectifying another shortcoming of their system: the complexity of routes. Most weekday routes don”™t run the same at night or on weekends: for example, to go to Apache Mall on weekdays, Routes 7 and 7A are the way there. At night it is route 7N, and on the weekends it is Routes 23 and 24. The minor variations between them are a lot to [...]
Transit – Politicians and Light Rail Safety
By JOHN CHARLES WILSON The Minnesota State Legislature is finally trying to do something about the rising tide of crime and harmful behavior on public transit, particularly on the Light Rail system. While many members of the community are saying, “It”™s about time!” it looks like what should be a universal issue is rapidly becoming partisan. Republicans from rural Minnesota and the outer Twin Cities suburbs have one vision of how to make urban transit safer, while Democratic politicians including the mayors of Minneapolis and Saint Paul have different ideas on how to achieve the same thing. Unfortunately, given Minnesota”™s history of gridlock at the Capitol, this may well mean nothing will get done, as it happens: another robbery, another stabbing, smoking on trains, loud and boisterous disturbances, etc. I have a friend who was robbed in broad daylight as he got off a Green Line train in Saint Paul a few months ago, so this is personal to [...]
Make a bee-line to the B Line
Transit By JOHN CHARLES WILSON In a few years, Lake Street bus riders will have an alternative to the super-slow Route 21. It”™s going to be called the B Line and will operate on the same principle as the already existing A Line on Snelling Avenue in Saint Paul, and C Line on Penn Avenue in North Minneapolis. (The reason for the disordered sequence is that originally the letter B was assigned to a project on West 7th Street in Saint Paul, which was cancelled and upgraded to a proposed streetcar line.) The B Line will go farther west than current Route 21, terminating at the junction with the Southwest Light Rail, which is now under construction. This is near the Whole Foods (a.k.a. “Whole Paycheck”) Market west of Bde Maka Ska. On the east end, it will terminate at Saint Paul”™s Union Depot, just like the current 21A. The original plan was for the east terminal to be near Midway Shopping Center at Snelling and University, but public input [...]
