Twin City Bike Parking #44

 

[University Avenue, St. Paul.]

[Highland, St. Paul.]

[Seward, Minneapolis.]

[West 7th, St. Paul.]

[Hamline-Midway, St. Paul.] 

[Grand Avenue, St. Paul.]

[Hennepin/Central, Minneapolis.]

[Minong, WI.]

Metro Transit Ridership is Not as Bad, or As Good, as it Looks

[Red Line riders: the dawn of fast, frequent transit]

 Axios raised an alarm today in their newsletter about declining transit ridership. Here's what they said:

Metro Transit's sluggish post-pandemic recovery is growing even more concerning as ridership numbers are sliding in the wrong direction.

Why it matters: A 7% decline so far this year is especially worrisome considering the backdrop — Twin Cities employers have been tightening their remote work policies, which means more people commuting.

The big picture: National ridership was up 7% in the first quarter of the year and reached 85% of pre-pandemic levels.

• Metro Transit's pandemic recovery has fallen back to 57%, despite the addition of several speedier bus rapid-transit routes in the past five years that were meant to increase usage.

By the numbers: Year-over-year crime on the system was up 7% in the first quarter of 2025, also a reversal of 2024 trends.

The other side: "We believe our ongoing service improvements and the steps we're taking to provide a more consistently clean, safe, and welcoming experience on transit will lead more people to choose transit over time," Metro Transit general manager Lesley Kandaras said in a statement. 

• Eric Lind, director of the Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies, told Axios that Metro Transit should be compared to other metro agencies with similar transit infrastructure and population, like Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas and Portland.
• He said those systems have 60 to 75% recovery rates, which means Metro Transit is not as far out of step as it may seem.

Reality check: That is true for some cities, but Dallas was already 78% recovered back in 2023 and Portland was at 68%, though Denver's transit recovery rate was only 62% last year.

Between the lines: Lind, who previously worked at Metro Transit, noted that a 2022 survey of riders showed 7% are primarily Spanish speakers. Even though Metro Transit police don't ask about immigration status, some riders may be trying to avoid contact with law enforcement after ICE ramped up arrests, Lind added. 

State of play: As a growing number of employers call workers back into the office, it's likely that freeways and parking ramps get jammed.

The bottom line: The next few months of ridership data will be ever more important in telling the story of Twin Cities riders' confidence in the system.

Two quick points:

1. Back to School

I looked a bit more deeply into the numbers. One big caveat here is that the State Fair and the return to school after Labor Day almost always sees spikes in transit usage. I expect that to be true this year as well. University students return in early September. 

(Of cousre, this is another reason to return light rail to its pre-COVID ten-minute frequencies. If you are only providing 80% of the light rail service to the system, you are kneecapping any ridership recovery right out of the gate. This is particularly important for lollygagging students on their way to their first class of the day.) 

[Green arrow = summer troughs, before September boosts ridership.]

2. Indeed, this is not great

If you look at the ridership data by mode, there's a plateau and decline starting last winter that seems to be ongoing. What happened? I don't know. The fact that the Green Line was running slow AF for months surely did not help. Maybe it's the fact that Hennepin Avenue South hasn't existed for the last two years?

I think the return to office narrative is a bit overblown; even under the ambitious RTO plans I am not seeing a lot of downtown businesses going to five-days-a-week. Anything less will be much more flexible, with workers coming in maybe part of the day or half of the week. 

Anyway, stay tuned. Not great news! I do think the E Line and B Line will be making a positive difference on these numbers and habits soon. It takes time for that to matter. But the best thing Metro Transit could do right away is hire more train operators and bring light rail back to where it should be. 

[What happened to transit during the winter of 2024-2025?]

Twin City Sidewalk Vendors #7

 

[Kingfield, Minneapolis.]

[St. Anthony Park, St. Paul.]

[Rondo, St. Paul.]

[Frogtown, St. Paul.]

[Denver.]

[Downtown, St. Paul.]

[Highland, St. Paul.]

[Hamline-Midway, St. Paul.]

Four Thoughts on the Green Line Construction

[The closed Central Station entrance during the 10-day maintenance period.]

For those of us who rely on transit in St. Paul, July was a challenge. The Green Line shut down for 10 days (including two weekends) replaced by shuttle buses. The construction period unfortunately coincided with the downtown Yacht Festival, as you might have heard. 

Anyway, I took the replacement bus (or tried to) a few times during tech outage. (See one such trip detailed at the end of this post.) 

Here are four observations about that experience, and the situation.

1 - Ongoing Track Break Problem 

[Green Line track break by the East Bank station.]

Metro Transit didn’t go into a lot of detail about why they had to shut down the St. Paul Green Line for 10 days. A best I know, the closure was largely because of ongoing track breaks, a recurring problem for the last two years. After ten years of service, the rail itself has started to fracture and break during cold winter nights. 

The small breaks mean that the train is limited to 10 miles per hour over the breakage areas, something that slows the entire Green Line service because of its “dumb” signal priority technology (meaning that signals are triggered not based on where the train actually is, but on where the train is supposed to be if it’s going full speed… which it’s not). That’s why for the last 5 or 6 months, the Green Line has been unbearably sluggish. It's been stopping at intersections that, technically speaking, it should never stop at. It’s frustrating if you’re paying attention, and (more subtly) frustrating if you’re not.

Because the Green Line uses “embedded” track, where the concrete tightly surrounds the metal rail, fixing the breaks requires extensive concrete work and can’t be done overnight. That’s one of the main things that was happening during the 10-day outage, where crews in trucks were sawing away the concrete around the rails so that other crews could replace or weld the rails. 

(Also, there was a bridge at Cedar Avenue that needed some maintenance or something.)

This ongoing winter rack break problem sucks. I see no reason that it won’t keep happening. I am guessing that next winter will also be cold, and tracks will also break in tiny annoying ways, slowing the Green Line down for months again, once again causing delay and inconvenience. 

[Concrete repair crew fixing a Green Line track break.]

2 - Trains are Nice, Actually

[Replacement bus stop on University Avenue.]

Riding the Green Line replacement bus is like going back in time in a bad way. Experiencing the bumps of University Avenue, seeing folks schlep their grocery carts or wheelchairs onto a narrow confined space, watching people queue up at the chokepoint between the front door and the driver, you truly appreciate light rail trains again. Four wide doors per car open smoothly at stops, and there’s lots of room for people to navigate with bags, wheelchairs, strollers, bicycles, mobility scooters or a dozen other things they might have. Being able to walk past a stranger without brushing them with your knee is one of many frequently overlooked things that come together to create transit dignity. 

The bus is much worse, and I don’t miss it.

3 - Detours are Hard

[Big queue of people waiting to board a replacement bus.]

Theoretically it's pretty easy to run a bus along the Green Line route, at least for the portion along University Avenue. It’s when you get downtown that things become difficult, with its one way streets and limited access routes around the State Capitol. 

This is to say that the Green Line replacement bus detours were bad. I'm sure that Metro Transit did their best, but the downtown construction made a direct route impossible. The west-bound Green Line bus basically did loop-de-loops around downtown that added at least 10 minutes to what should have been a twenty-minute trip. (See below for a detailed accounting.) 

The delays also meant that the buses were off schedule, and ended up bunching together, i.e. a huge group waiting for a late bus, taking a long time to board, and compounding the delay. In my case, an empty Green Line bus actually passed the (late) full Green Line bus on which I rode. That’s the kind of thing that used to happen on then 16 back in the day. 

Fun fact: light-rail trains cannot pass each other.

4 - Speeds are Better, but Frequency Still Sucks 

That was then. Now, the track breaks have been fixed. Based on my small sample size, speed and reliability have improved. Taking the Green Line through St. Paul should be less frustrating, at least until next winter.

That said, the Green Line is still waiting for service improvements. It’s been over four years since COVID, and from what I hear, ten-minute frequencies are still not on the horizon. The agency hasn’t done well enough in recruiting and training light-rail operators. (This is despite events like this that I wrote about for Minnpost.) 

Also, Metro Transit is also not prioritizing green line signal timing improvements, though its nice to see multiple Ward 4 City Council candidates mention this in their campaign priorities.

[Timeline of my peak-hour trip on a Wednesday.] 

[Lost Fox, a Lowertown café, is great.]

4:20 Left Lost Fox, whose front door is just 20 feet from the Lowertown Green Line platform. Of course, the train is out of service, so I walked through the Union Depot down to the bus platform to catch the replacement bus. 

4:26 Arrived at bus platform; Transit App and platform message board say the bus is scheduled to depart in 4 minutes. There are many buses here, but none of them say Green Line. I ask another bus driver where the Green Line bus is? She has no idea what I’m talking about. “You mean Red Line? I’ve never heard of no Green Line.” 

4:30 Bus does not appear. Next bus is scheduled to depart in 14 minutes. Because the Green Line is such a high-capacity vehicle, I would have hoped Metro Transit would scheduled at least 10 minute frequencies for the much smaller replacement buses. Alas.

4:45 Green Line bus finally shows up, and I get on. This already sucks and I should be home by now.

4:54 It takes the replacement bus a long time to get to the corner of Minnesota and 4th. There’s a huge crowd of people waiting to board. They take forever to get on the bus. Some of them try to pay and fumble with their cards. Technically the Green Line replacement bus is free, but the driver doesn’t tell anyone that and there’s no sign or anything. The should just put a cloth hood on the payment kiosk so that people know just to walk on. There are a group of three TRIP ambassadors here, but they're not really doing anything useful. Rather, they're just taking up what is now-limited space.

5:02 Because of Robert Street detours, the bus has to backtrack to the east. I am now at 7th and Jackson, roughly three blocks away from Lost Fox where I started my journey 40 minutes ago.  

5:13 The bus finally gets to Rice Street, where there is both a wheelchair and a baby carriage waiting to board through the front door ramp. The bus is standing-room-only. 

5:20 An hour after began my journey in Lowertown, an almost entirely empty Green Line replacement bus passes our chock-full replacement bus at Western Avenue. 

5:22 I finally get to my stop at Victoria Street, over an hour after I began a journey that typically takes about 15 minutes on the train. That’s seven stops, and a distance of 2.8 miles. It would have been faster to have have walked home.

Vote for Molly Coleman in St. Paul's Ward 4

I live two blocks from Ward 4, and consider myself, if not an honorary resident, at least someone with plenty of vested interest in the health of the neighborhood (i.e. what I’ve already called House Stark). After Council President Mitra Jalali stepped down earlier this year, there’s a special election for a new Council Member happening right now.

I’m endorsing Molly Coleman. If you live in Ward 4, please take the time to vote for her. 

I’ve met Molly many times, even before she announced her campaign. She’s smart, humble, experienced, wonky, and has good positions on some of the St. Paul’s thorniest issues like rent stabilization, housing, or economic development. She clearly loves St. Paul, and (for obvious family reasons) has deep knowledge of its neighborhoods and traditions. Most importantly, Molly Coleman seems like a good listener, a rarity in politicians these days. I’ve been impressed with her mix of curiosity and experience, and especially her desire to learn from others even as she brings a lot of St. Paul knowledge to the table. I think this election is an easy choice.

The other candidates: 

School Board member Chauntyll Allen is a nice person who’s been involved in local politics for years. I met her during an early discussion of the Rondo Land Bridge, and still remember a lot of what she said about that project. In this case, though, I don’t see her actively putting forward any reasons to vote for her in this situation.

I've never met her, but Carolyn Will is an communications person (and former SARPA president) running on a 'taxes are too high' / 'crime is out of control' message, making her the obvious conservative in the race. More importantly, she helped run the Save Our Street / Summit Avenue anti-safety campaign, which is both wrong about infrastructure and street design and actively wasting your tax dollars.

That's a terrible thing to be ring leading. For a year, I’d go out of my way to not bike on Summit Avenue, just because the signs infuriated me. The endless disinformation campaign is a bleak sign of the future, making it seem like any improvements to St. Paul's urban fabric are going to be slow and painful. There’s a toxic strain in St. Paul toward negativity, where anything “the city” is doing is inherently bad. Carolyn Will seems to personify this pessimistic defeatism.

Cole Hanson is a young organizer who is maddeningly inconsistent, and I cannot suggest supporting him either. For one thing, he is way too online, repeatedly getting into inane fights with people on social media. For another thing, he's both for and against policies that contradict each other; When it comes to rent stabilization or transportation policy, it seems like he’ll say anything. See for example: this weird video. (Sure, Snelling Avenue is dangerous — I've been saying so for 20 years — but random spitballing about something that’s not in the cards, and is out of the city’s control, is a waste of time at best. Why not talk about an issue that's actually in front of us?) 

Before launching his campaign for City Council, he'd apparently purloined the District Council mailing list where he'd been working. That's naive at best, and unethical at worst. 

The real sign of trouble with Cole Hanson is his parroting the disinformation around the Summit Avenue reconstruction project. The Summit Avenue reconstruction is a great litmus test for one’s susceptibility to bullshit, so that's a deal breaker. Without naming names, the City Council has already been a hot mess this year, rife with inexperience and lack of attention to detail. Cole Hanson would make that problem worse. In a time when St. Paul is in rather desperate straits, he seems like a random policy generator. 

We need positive visions and common sense, and only Molly Coleman passes the test. Her stance on the Summit Avenue process and other key dilemmas are great signs of how she’d make decisions at a time when we need thoughtful wisdom in City Hall. Please vote for her on or before August 12th!

[Molly with John Edwards on Wedge Live!]