Bus Rapid Transit

The Gateway Corridor Commission still can't decide if they want bus rapid transit (BRT) or light rail transit (LRT) on Hudson Road in St. Paul. They have a lunchtime talk for Monday, June 24, 2013 (11am-1pm) at the Oak Marsh Golf Course, 526 Inwood Av N, Oakdale. There is no cost to attend and a light lunch will be provided. Registration is required (St. Paul Chamber or Woodbury Chamber). Joseph Calabrese, the Cleveland RTA $243,386/year manager, will explain Cleveland's HealthLine bus, formerly known as the Silver Line, formerly known as the Euclid Corridor Transportation Project.

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT)

Bus Rapid Transit is a bus. Sometimes it has stations with platforms, sometimes dedicated lanes, sometimes it uses honor-based fareboxes, and sometimes it's really just a bus route with an expensive name. As a bus, it has braking and steering advantages over light rail trains and its capital infrastructure costs are less than light rail. Buses have transparency and accountability advantages over light rail. On a bus, you can see the driver and what the driver is doing. As the bus goes by you can see how many people are on the bus. On light rail the windows are obscured with film preventing the operator from being seen and preventing the lack of riders from being seen from outside.

HealthLine - Cleveland's BRT Example

HealthLine is a $197 million, 6.8 mile($29 million per mile) RTA Euclid Avenue bus rapid transit system in Cleveland, Ohio. Construction began in 2006, was completed in 2008, and inconvenienced Euclid Avenue consumers and businesses, causing many businesses to close.

HealthLine bus passenger lists the problems:
   ♦  most bus riders must stand (BRT has half the seats of a traditional bus)
   ♦  half of the bus seats are on raised platforms (difficult for seniors & disabled)
   ♦  narrow aisles & 18" seats
   ♦  station platforms not marked as eastbound or westbound
   ♦  riders don't know where to stand on the platform or which doors to go in
   ♦  two foot leaping gap between bus & station platform
   ♦  fareboxes that don't work
   ♦  bus shelters with 2 or 3 cold metal seats

HealthLine buses are slower than expected, 25 mph in pedestrian zones. The rules were changed to allow buses a 35 mph limit. Either way it's not rapid transit (10.6mph average speed), has problems with traffic signals and crashes. Euclid Avenue had 411 reported collisions from October 2008 to July 2011, plus:
► 2013 March 12 - HealthLine bus hit a car at Euclid & East 4th at 10:30am sending 8 people to hospitals, including both drivers.
► 2011 November 1 - HealthLine bus hit a car at Euclid & East 89th at 2pm. Both vehicles were westbound. The car wanted to make a right turn.
► 2011 October 24 - HealthLine bus hit a car at Euclid & East 9th at 12:30pm.
 
HealthLine uses New Flyer articulated buses made in Winnipeg, Canada; Crookston, MN; and St. Cloud, MN. (Light rail uses Siemens and Bombardier trains from Germany.)

Here's another Cleveland opinion of HealthLine.

Gateway Corridor Bus Rapid Transit

The problem with the Gateway Corridor is that it can't beat I-94.

The best place for a bus rapid transit is where it can be rapid -- on the highway. Buses can't travel fast on residential streets, like the St. Paul portion of Hudson Road. Many express buses already run successfully on I-94 (MetroTransit express 294, limited stop 350, express 351, express 353, express 355, express 375), using the shoulder to move around traffic instead of a dedicated lane. And the Gateway Corridor ridership can't justify the opportunity cost of dedicating an I-94 lane each way for either a bus or a train.



Bus rapid transit on Hudson Road in St. Paul would be painfully slow for Woodbury travelers and would not be beneficial to Hudson Road residents and businesses. Snow plows would hack at the dividing curbs. But buses have the breaking and steering advantage over trains (improved safety) and reduced infrastructure (lower capital costs and maintenance).

The Gateway Corridor Solution

If the list of eastside buses above aren't enough, add another bus to I-94, with seating like existing MetroTransit buses and without removing a lane from traffic.

Signs of Light Rail

 Once upon a time, this sign was the only sign a train needed.

 

 When did railroad tracks and a road become a light railroad?

There seems to be a progression of light rail development in Minnesota:
         -- from the Hiawatha Line running mostly along side of Highway 55
                   -- to Central Corridor running on University Avenue
                             -- to the Gateway Corridor fiasco running on residential streets -- by several schools and hundreds of houses. Running on their property!

What's next -- through houses, through schools, and through playgrounds?

It gets complicated. According to this sign, we can cross the tracks perpendicularly, but otherwise we have to drive along the tracks.

Is this sign telling us that the train is in the right lane or that we should be in the right lane? Which is it?

Do not drive on the tracks. That's clear. Except, how is the train to get anywhere if it can't drive on the tracks?

Do not be a passenger? Do not successfully cross in front of a train? What does this mean?

The rules of the road become far more restrictive with a train on it. No left turn. No parking. No buses. No trucks. Block driveway? There's no room to use a driveway. And many streets will be cut off. Remember, the priority is the train. Traffic lights will be added and will change for the train. Traffic congestion will need a decongestant. The traffic decongestant will cost another billion dollars.

Watch out for the train! If you think the train will always be on the right side of the tracks, don't bet your life on it. If you think your SUV will take the impact of a 25+ ton train, think again. You are no longer the monster truck of the road. You might as well be on a bike.

Children haven't been in many accidents yet, but that's part of the long list of problems with Gateway Corridor's plans for St. Paul. Weekday afternoons, kids walk home from school. That's the way things are in this part of town.

There is no way the train can travel slow enough to brake in time, especially on these sloping streets. Not for children, the elderly, the pets, or the wildlife.

Maybe they can just say no to pedestrians. Or children aren't allowed to live in the neighborhood.

Or have some sort of mandatory Train-Dangers Kindergarten for the neighborhood.

Light rail can't fund itself (for construction or operation) so its reason for existence is ridership. Except the Gateway Corridor project doesn't project having ridership. So its goals are anything. It is a tourist train -- see St. Paul's Eastside! It's a fast commute from eastern suburbs. It's a slow local train. And it's an economic development train, that will close existing businesses.

Beacon Bluffing:  Light rail will run on the street.

Home Depot:      How will that help a Home Depot store? Will the train have a lumber-loading car?

All this for a relatively-quiet residential neighborhood. With trees.

Here comes the 25 ton (when empty) train. How quiet is it? How quiet are trucks? Ride the relatively-level Hiawatha Line through its turns. Then imagine the elevation-changing, zig-zagging Gateway Corridor train. Not quiet. Then imagine the trains and the tracks aging. Not quiet at all.

Light rail accidents happen. When the route is kept away from people and vehicles, there are fewer accidents. Accidents will be colossal if planners put tracks on residential streets.

But the signs will stop people from doing stupid things, right?

Stop Gateway Corridor.

"We talked about changing the T signs to M signs to represent Metro as in Metropolitan Council and Metro Transit. Well, a certain person from a certain Capital city said that M also stands for Minneapolis. That's the last time I bring cupcakes to a meeting, you know, the ones with the bright artificial-colored frosting? Some of those went flying like paintballs, marking everything and everyone. When the giant paintballs were gone, I found out that the T signs are TO signs, as in, 'I'm going TO somewhere' or 'I'm going TO get more cupcakes.'"

The Ups and Downs of the East Side

If Gateway Corridor light rail comes to Seventh Street and White Bear Avenue, it won't last.

It would take less than a decade to be torn out and even less than that to be called a Colossal Failure and a riderless menace to the public good.

The conceptual flaws start with putting a train on a residential street (35 mph in a 30 mph zone) with hills and valleys, and no effective stopping distance (essentially no brakes). The result would be accidents and deaths on a scale beyond the current level of light rail accidents.

Accidents and deaths aside, the system flaws will include:
     ▼   high costs & cost overruns
     ▼   low ridership & system inflexibility -- is it for commuting or touring or selling old 3M property?
     ▼   neighborhood barriers & business closings
     ▼   noise -- the rumbling of 25+ tons of train, the squeal of wheels on rails as it makes ridiculous twists and turns, the DING-DING chimes...

Light rail would scar the neighborhood. The neighborhood is still scarred from the trolley.

Drive Seventh, slowly. See the houses lower than the road? See the houses higher than the road? (Would you like to deal with the flooding issues and the lawn mowing issues?)

The slope of Seventh Street was changed for the trolley. It will have to be changed further for light rail. The trolley weighed nothing compared to light rail. Trolleys were light rail, more than light rail is light rail. Light rail is heavy.

Seventh Street is hilly, and it used to be hillier and wetter. The Mississippi River used to run through it.

Here's a topographical map of the East Side of St. Paul.

Notice how the railroads used river beds for their routes, instead of climbing bluffs and plunging into river valleys and climbing bluffs again, only to plunge back into valleys again, etc.

This map (above) shows a course of the glacial runoff, proto-Mississippi River #1, filling the Battle Creek valleys.

This map (above) shows a straighter-than-present-day, proto-Mississippi River #2, stretching north (along Etna & Barclay), connecting Lake Phalen (shown), Round Lake, Keller Lake, Gervais Lake, Kohlman Lake, then arcing eastward to Willow Lake, Gem Lake, Goose Lake, and White Bear Lake. Over time much of the proto-Mississippi River valley was buried in material, leaving behind a string of lakes and depressions (kettles).

This map (above) shows a zigzagging proto-Mississippi River #3 filling the Phalen Creek valley to Lake Phalen. This map does not mean to indicate that the areas between the proto-Mississippi River valley are high and dry. No. The neighborhood of Dayton's Bluff is porous with underground springs and sometimes above-ground springs.

This map (above) shows the path that the Gateway Corridor Commission likes to show as a potential light rail path. Notice how it drops from Union Station into the Phalen Creek valley (proto-Mississippi 3), then rises up Dayton's Bluff, then down to Earl Street, then up and down again (proto-Mississippi 2) and up to White Bear Avenue, then down to I-94, then down into the Battle Creek valley (proto-Mississippi 1), then up to Ruth Street and down again to Sun Ray shopping center to pick up groceries at Cub Foods and take them by train to Woodbury.

It's a ridiculous concept. The sanity of its planners should be questioned.

I question their loco motives.

Abrasive Advertising

The first step of advertising is a good name.

Gateway Corridor is in Cincinnati, Ohio and Greensboro, North Carolina and Seguin, Texas and might surround East St. Louis, Illinois. Since St. Louis is the Gateway to the West, the name makes sense, because East St. Louis would be the pathway (corridor) to the Gateway to the West.

In St. Paul, the idea of the Gateway Corridor is a meandering, roller-coaster train with a borrowed name, "rebranded and repositioned" by the Tunheim Partners.

They're confusing St. Paul with Minneapolis's Gateway Park (a.k.a. Skid Row or the Piss House). Or they think the Central Corridor is the gateway drug to the Gateway Corridor.

Here's the ups and downs of it. Starting at the Union Depot, the Gateway Corridor roller-coaster starts down a little (all roller-coasters do this), then it heads up (NE) to Mound,  then down (NW) to 7th, over the footings of the 1884 Seventh Street Improvement Arches (National Register #89001828), then up to 7th & Arcade and down to 7th & Earl, then up and up (E) to White Bear (Food Planet), then down (South) to I-94, and then up (East) to Sun Ray.

Committees, congresses, and commissions take reasonably educated people and turn their minds to something with the consistency of toxic waste. So the Gateway Corridor Commission (hopefully they aren't earning a commission on this) took the Gateway Corridor name from some other place and decided that commuting should be like a roller-coaster. Why?

Are they trying to park a train in front of Food Planet?

Or is the Gateway Corridor a way of selling off the old 3M property in St. Paul, the Beacon Bluff?

A St. Paul Port Authority committee thought up the name Beacon Bluff. The 61-acres that had been the 3M headquarters (1910-1962) had manufactured Scotch tape and sandpaper, but the committee couldn't use 3M Land or Scotch Tape Fields without risking trademark infringement lawsuits. The land lies near Dayton's Bluff and had been used to make beacons, so since it was late in the day and people were hungry, they decided on Beacon Bluff.

The ad for the property shows an aerial view of the struggle to get trucks to an interstate. Beacon Bluff is on the far right. Trucks take the steep 7th Street hill down to I-94, not that that would get goods moving east-bound, or trucks can take Phalen Blvd. to I-35E, not that that would get them south-bound. The ad covers over the Dayton's Bluff neighborhood with a closeup of the property, since the neighborhood doesn't provide any direct transportation route. The only thing that could make trucking worse would be to plant a passenger train in the middle of the road.

Wait. There's more! The St. Paul Port Authority wants to make Beacon Bluff a shrine to 3M with monuments to sandpaper --

and outdoor tape dispenser lounge chairs --

Careful, that's the double-sticky chair!

And a shrine is fine, except for the inconsistency that somebody left toxic chemicals behind --

and the neighborhood is one of St. Paul's poorest. How will a 3M shrine give jobs to the area?

But then again, how would a Gateway Corridor roller-coaster and light rail line help the neighborhood to get jobs at any businesses that fill the Beacon Bluff? Or is that the bluff?

Beacon Bluff is a marketing plan in St. Paul for the old 3M property that some people think would sell better if a light rail roller-coaster (Gateway Corridor) went by it.

Light rail is not Green

The solution to climate change and over population is not to build more and develop more land.

The solution to climate change and over population is not empty street trains (light rail), slowly clanging and chiming all hours of the night (Metro Transit green line).


It is not slow, empty BRT (bus not-rapid transit) on dedicated lanes past the urban sprawl of St. Paul into undeveloped Lake Elmo or Woodbury (Gateway - gold line plan).

The Gateway planning people flew out to Los Angeles to study their transit, but Los Angeles Metro has fewer riders now than three decades ago, when buses were the county's only transit option. Metro has spent $9 billion of light rail trains, tracks, and subways but lost more than 10 percent of its riders from 2006 to 2015. “It's a bit perverse,” USC engineering professor James E. Moore II told the LA Times. “You're spending all this money and you're driving ridership down. If you're investing heavily in transit, you'd hope ridership would increase.”


Light rail (LRT) is not environmentally friendly. Walking is. Biking is. Light rail trains are not.

Light rail makes long traffic light cycles causing traffic to idle, waiting for the empty light rail trains. Minnesota took its busiest intersection, University and Snelling, and threw a slower-than-express-buses street-train into the traffic mix. Drivers wait longer or avoid the area.

Light rail removes all the big CO2 filtering trees and is infrastructure heavy. It is a huge building (& repairing) project, requiring miles of cement forms and pavements, thick enough to hold the weigh of a 50 ton train plus (some) tons of people.

"Cement manufacturing releases CO2 in the atmosphere both directly when calcium carbonate is heated, producing lime and carbon dioxide, and indirectly through the use of energy if its production involves the emission of CO2. The cement industry produces about 5% of global man-made CO2 emissions, of which 50% is from the chemical process, and 40% from burning fuel. The amount of CO2 emitted by the cement industry is nearly 900 kg of CO2 for every 1000 kg of cement produced... The high-temperature calcination process of limestone and clay minerals can release in the atmosphere gases and dust rich in volatile heavy metals, a.o, thallium, cadmium and mercury are the most toxic." - from the Cement wiki

Greenhouse gases... heavy metals... very un-green.

The Central Corridor (to be known as the Green Line -- snicker, snicker) will connect Minneapolis and Saint Paul downtowns. Its concrete will be 2' deep x 28' wide x 11 miles long (58,080'). It has to hold the weight of a 25 ton train, plus passengers.

Let's see, uh, 2 x 28 x 58,080 = 3,252,480 cubic feet
and one bag of Portland cement (50kg) makes 1.25 feet³
so there might be 2,601,964 bags or 130,099,200 kg (cement calculator)...

...converting kilograms to kilograms of CO2 emitted (900 kg of CO2 for every 1000 kg of cement)...
117,089,280 kg of CO2 or 117,089 metric tons of carbon dioxide...

And that's just for the rail bed itself, not the:
          ▲ reworking of the roadway
          ▲ curbs
          ▲ train stations
          ▲ utility forms and tubes
          ▲ deep footers for power line trees ¥...

What does the Central Corridor Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) say about the environmental impact of the project? Nothing.

What it says is that during construction, there will be trucks, and they will pollute when idling. It talks about that for several pages.

The FEIS says nothing about the environmental impact of all the cement, plus 22 miles of power lines and 44 miles of rails, or the trains themselves and power from power plants, like Minnesota's high polluting Sherco plant that emitted almost 14 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2011.

The closest it gets to comprehensive air quality issues is a response to a comment.

Responses to FEIS Comments Received (FEIS attachment C): Air Quality Impacts (AQ-1)
"One comment was received on the air quality analysis and questioning whether there would be any benefits to air quality as a result of the project. Response:  The focus of the air quality analysis disclosed in Section 4.5 of the FEIS was on identifying the potential for any adverse effects related to the proposed action. There was no discussion of proposed project benefits and this analysis has not and will not be completed as part of the NEPA process for the Central Corridor LRT project.  The project is included in the MPO’s regional transportation plan, which has been shown to be in conformity with air quality plans for the area; any significant benefits of planned transit system improvements, including the Central Corridor LRT project, were taken into account during the regional air conformity analysis of the metropolitan transportation plan."

I love this answer. It says, "Uh, that's not our job. Act like it's good." It also acts as if the materials are magically created and cured. Construction sites are just a bunch of idling trucks.

The New York Times quoted a 2009 study by Mikhail V Chester and Arpad Horvath of University of California, Berkeley, that compares light rail and regional commuter rail systems in Boston and California with small, medium and large aircraft, as well as buses and cars. "Neglecting to take into account the emissions associated with constructing buildings like train stations and laying the tracks may make train travel appear far more environmentally friendly than it actually is, the authors found... 'Most current decision-making relies on analysis at the tailpipe, ignoring vehicle production, infrastructure provision, and fuel production required for support.... We find that total life-cycle energy inputs and greenhouse gas emissions contribute an additional 63 percent for onroad, 155 percent for rail, and 31 percent for air systems' relative to those vehicles’ tailpipe emissions."

The study says, "Vehicle non-operational components often dominate total emissions. Life-cycle criteria air pollutant emissions are between 1.1 and 800 times larger than vehicle operation. Ranges in passenger occupancy can easily change the relative performance of modes."

It is a myth that light rail trains are green. But that's not the worst of it.

Three complications

There are three complications that make the environmental matters worse in the Gateway Corridor fiasco.

1. Destination. The Hiawatha Line connects the airport and Mall of America to downtown Minneapolis. That's going from destination to destination. The Central Corridor goes from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul. That's a destination to (nearly) a destination. Gateway Corridor wants to go from downtown St. Paul to nowhere. That encourages urban sprawl. And urban sprawl is bad for the environment.

2. Residential. It's one thing to put a huge construction project along a railroad right-of-way like the Hiawatha Line. It is another thing to plop a train down on a residential street with a speed limit of 30 miles per hour.

3. Pointless. Half of the bright ideas for the Gateway Corridor have the train slowly zig-zagging through residential St. Paul, working its way up a hill (Hillcrest) only to wind its way down the hill. What is the point of that? It's a waste of energy. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. And it hurts the environment.

Gateway Corridor - The Train to Nowhere

The Gateway Corridor is a plan in need of a goal.

The original plan for the Gateway Corridor was a high speed rail connection to Chicago. That was not going to happen. Amtrak has the Empire Builder from Minneapolis - St. Paul to Chicago. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said no to a train connecting Madison and Milwaukee.

The next plan was a light rail connection to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. That was stopped by Wisconsin.

The next plan was to connect to Hudson, Wisconsin. That was stopped.

The Third Street and Minnehaha Avenue neighborhoods rejected the trains.

The Seventh Street neighborhood has also rejected their front yards becoming rail yards.

The Gateway Corridor is currently a gateway to Woodbury. Wow. Woodbury to St. Paul.

And for that, they want $3 million dollars of study money.