Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Trains start running on the University Avenue Blight Rail this week. Watch out when crossing University.
Joe Doakes
I thought I’d noticed the signal lights along the track working that last few times I drove along the street.
By the way – I can’t imagine anything much more miserable than standing on one of those station platforms in this weather. If there’s anything that’d be more miserable than a bus stop, that’d be it.
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Time to start the dead pool predictions?
Something more miserable; waiting on an “El” platform in Chicago. Not as cold, usually, but the wind coming off the lake (there is only one lake if you live down there) makes it positively brutal, even around 30F.
But yeah, waiting for a train is misery. The only good news is that it appears that on really cold days, the train doesn’t come at all. Yay!
It would be interesting to find out out “how many hours are lost to economic productivity” by people waiting for mass transit to take them to their jobs. Since the time you are required to be at your job remains the same, the time lost is time you could spend writing poetry, or starting a business, or spending time with your family.
Let’s call it productive time lost to “mass transit lock”.
I took the Minneapolis LRT to work for a couple of years; it was reasonably convenient, and cost less than using downtown parking. Outside of a couple of encounters with would-be hoods that were more amusing than threatening it was ok. I gave it up when service was disrupted – ironically – by the failure of a bike-bridge over the tracks. I started driving again during the service outage and realized how much I missed the convenience.
One day I had to deal with bad weather and huge traffic jams that slowed my drive to work. It took me 45 minutes to get from door to door. As I counted up the minutes I realized that 45 minutes was absolutely the fastest (counting travel to the park and ride) I was ever able to experience on the train, and that was only if I hit it just right when arriving at the platform.
I am excited about the LRT starting service. I plan to use it a lot to go to the Ramsey County courthouse downtown.
See, I live in Como Park, so I can wait for a bus to take me down to University, wait for a train to take me downtown to the Union Station, then wait for a bus to take me to the courthouse. Total trip shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours, each way. Think of the Kindle books I’ll be able to read!
Oddly, on days when I have to go to downtown Minneapolis, it’ll actually be much more convenient and faster than going downtown St. Paul. Over there, the train actually goes to places where people want to go. Weird.
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