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Twin Cities’ new light rail line tops 1 million rides in September
I am prompted to paraphrase an old Yogi Berra quote, “The Twin Cities Green Line…no one rides it anymore. It’s too crowded.” Great news for an improved transportation system and hoping some of the NIMBY’s who are fighting expansions to the system will be quiet in the future!
I wonder whether Twin Cities radio gasbag Joe Soucheray is still railing against light rail as being stupid because nobody will use it?
I guess those who called it “Blight Rail” are going to have to eat crow now?
There are a lot of things wrong with the Green Line, but linking the Twin Cities two downtowns through the U of M is not one of them. The demand for public transit is certainly there and the value-add from future redevelopment in the Midway area will be enormous. The negatives: It is slow. It has insufficient capacity that is hard to improve because Blue and Green lines share tracks in downtown Minneapolis. Getting to the mid-street stations is a nightmare for pedestrians. The station where Blue and Green lines converge with considerable transfer traffic has side platforms rather than a center platform so transfers have to walk around the trains and across the tracks! We can do better than this! And don’t get me started on the Green Line extension to the southwest where to save a few bucks the planners are completely missing the point of a light rail lines as a redevelopment tool by going through areas that do not want or need redevelopment while ignoring other routes that have great potential.
Build it and they will come.
Exactly what a trolley is supposed to do. Anyone who has ridden the B line of the T on Boston can identify with the student need for cheap and reliable transportation, not to mention the same need of the recently graduated. Like, Duh. Too bad some have blinders on for government programs except, of course, for those that put money in their pockets like farm subsidies.
Hey naysayers: how can you call light rail a boondoggle whet the ridership exceeds predictions? Oh, I’m sure you trolls would say: “Predictions were artificially low and the data was contrived”…
Allen from Michigan…I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I saw your comment about Joe Soucheray, although I doubt most of the reader know who he is. You really hit the nail on the head!