Coming to a street near you: Higher-speed bus routes.
The Metropolitan Council is proposing three new routes that criss-cross the metro area, with service every 10 minutes.
The Met Council will pick three projects to be completed between 2025 and 2030. In addition, the Met Council identified seven other rapid-bus routes, scheduled for completion after 2030.
The cost of all 10 lines will be about $700 million in 2020 dollars, according to Katie Roth, assistant director for Bus Rapid-Transit projects.
Officials will pick three routes to be built out of these four possibilities:
- The Como/Maryland Line, from downtown Minneapolis to the Sun-Ray Transit Center in St. Paul.
- The Rice/Robert Line, from the Little Canada Transit Center to the Dakota County Northern Service Center in West St. Paul.
- The Central Line, connecting downtown Minneapolis and Northtown Transit Center in Blaine.
- The Johnson/Lyndale Line, from the Silver Lake Village in St. Anthony to a future station at Knox Avenue and American Boulevard in Bloomington.
The Met Council is currently surveying the public to see which routes are the most popular. Whichever one of those four routes that does not make the cut will be considered for development later.
The service of the new lines would be comparable to the Gold Line, a proposed rapid-transit bus line connecting Woodbury and St. Paul.
The Gold Line would pick up riders every 10 minutes at peak-demand times. Riders would wait in heated stations, and would pay for tickets in advance, speeding up the process of getting on the bus. The rapid-transit buses would be up to 25 percent faster than bus service today.
“They are more customer-friendly,” said Roth.
Compared to the Gold Line, the new routes would differ in one dramatic way — the cost.
The Gold Line will cost $420 million, or about $38 million per mile — roughly five times more per mile than the other rapid-transit routes.
That’s because the Gold Line is an entirely new bus route. It calls for several miles of new roads dedicated solely to the buses. It includes a bridge overpass over Interstate 94, and 21 new stations.
The cost-per-mile is much lower for the new routes. They will travel on existing streets, along existing bus lines.
Roth said the Met Council might speed up the service by dedicating lanes to the buses or giving them priority at traffic lights. The stops would be stretched out, about a half-mile apart.
“Those are tools in our tool box,” she said.
The Met Council is seeking public opinion about the proposals. For information, visit the project website, https://ift.tt/389BDJq.
To take the survey, visit surveymonkey.com/r/futurebus. The deadline for taking the survey is Jan. 20.
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