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.