urbanMSP

I'm reasonably optimistic that Ramsey County will get their shit together if Amtrak is seriously threatening to leave, given how hard they've been trying to make people walk through SPUD whether it makes sense or not, like with the whole push to make the Gold Line end at the bus platforms there inst...

They have about 90 days to lease another 270,000 square feet to avoid foreclosure.

Good luck to them.

Looks like they got another 8,250 square feet leased. Missed it by that much.

1st and Hennepin, attached to the Post Office.

Now that the 3rd Avenue Bridge is finally open, Rts 10, 17, and 25 will end their detour and return to that bridge on Wednesday, Nov. 1st.

U.S. Bank is renewing its entire 440ksf lease at 800 Nicollet for ten more years, but leaving their space in Richfield and consolidating those employees to Hopkins and downtown.

It's not free to have them operate out of a decaying office building in downtown either, though. The Public Service Center was already in rough shape, eventually it would need renovations to be a police station long-term.

Time is a flat circle.

Honestly don't care so much what happens to the interior of the building(s), but if the loggia and elevated walkway facing the river could be reopened (were they ever opened in the first place?), that would be huge.

Here's the resolution, and also Commissioner Fernando's statement. Seems like the County is fully aware of the implications of what the Legislature has required them to do, even if the Legislature doesn't seem to be.

We'll see what the report comes up with.

I'm unconvinced that adding half a dozen at-grade crossings and spending a pile of transit money on new freeway offramps and a bridge for car traffic is an improvement over the original Lyndale option.

Wild. I'm assuming it's only at night, when the LRT isn't running? I know the NJ Transit River Line works like that, but that was DMUs being added to an existing freight line, not freight being added to an electrified LRT line.

Special Northstar trains will be running for the Twins playoff games this week. Seems like a good sign that they're able to do last-minute special service like this again.

Is it not possible to replace the HERC plant with something that runs on renewable energy (wind, solar, etc.)? Sure - here's an article about just that . As is usually the case, the primary issue is that it'll be very expensive - the city, county, state, or all of them are probably going to have to...

Which I also haven't heard much about--there are non-garbage ways to produce steam (there are other steam plants downtown) but presumably the electricity for that comes from somewhere? I believe the other downtown steam plants are natural gas-fired (in Minneapolis, at least - the downtown St. Paul ...

That's a good point. Looked it up, and it appears that they specifically do not provide transfers. Maybe that's part of the study, to see how it affects the crosstown 32 vs the downtown-bound 62?

In 2019 , Metro Transit took in about 26% of its operating budget in fares. I haven't seen a breakdown on how much it costs to maintain TVMs, etc, but I'm reasonably sure it's not anywhere near $110M a year. Hard to see how losing a quarter of their operating budget wouldn't result in pretty severe...

TSP was installed quite a while ago on Central Ave, but it seems that it was turned off at some point. These stop cuts are long overdue. 4th, 6th, 18th, and 19th are all maybe 300 feet or so from the adjacent stop. 28th, 30th, and 34th don't have a paired SB stop, and 36th is adjacent to the railro...

Surprise (to me, at least) stop consolidation and TSP coming to the Minneapolis portion of the Rt. 10 in a couple weeks. Looks like it will generally drop stop spacing down to every other block in the areas that currently have a stop every single block. https://twitter.com/h_pan3/status/170632561438...

Glad to hear it! Honestly an embarrassing article from Janet Moore, who's usually pretty good. Just transparently bad faith to uncritically repeat arguments that removing car traffic from 10th would make it worse to walk on. My bike commute goes through there and I see people get almost hit by cars ...

In a twist no one could have expected, the gambit to avoid the NIMBYs on Lyndale by routing down 10th and Washington has run into NIMBYs on 10th.