{"id":48067,"date":"2014-10-14T12:10:05","date_gmt":"2014-10-14T17:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=48067"},"modified":"2014-10-14T10:45:26","modified_gmt":"2014-10-14T15:45:26","slug":"thats-one-way-to-speed-up-the-green-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=48067","title":{"rendered":"That’s One Way To Speed Up The “Green Line”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The “Green Line” – nee <\/em>the “Central Corridor”, aka “The current Met Council’s $1.4 Billion monument to its own wisdom” – has, exactly as predicted in conservative circles, turned out to be a very, very slow variety of “rapid transit”.\u00a0 In its first four months in service, it’s clocked the trip between the downtowns at well over an hour; that’s about the same as the 50 Line limited stop bus it replaced, not that <\/em>much faster than the 16 Local that it trudges down University with, and slower – much<\/em> slower – than the 94 Express that it shouldered out of existence, except during rush hour.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Part of the problem – exactly as I discussed on my radio show in 2007-2008 – is that the train operates at street grade level, and has to obey the same traffic signals as all the cars, trucks and buses on the street.<\/p>\n

But at least one MTC driver seems to have figured out a way to jumpstart his route times – by ignoring traffic lights<\/a>; the video in the attached story shows a “Green Line” train crossing a street in Prospect Park (southeast Minneapolis) against a green light on the cross street.\u00a0\u00a0Note that that green light is on throughout the entire motion of the train across the street.<\/p>\n

The MTC has an explanation, of course:<\/p>\n

Metro Transit spokesperson Drew Kerr declined to answer specific questions about the video because “you can’t see what signals were indicating to the train. A train doesn’t follow green or red lights like a car does.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If the train driver’s special signals conflict with the lights that the cars around it are seeing – as they clearly do?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’m no Met Council traffic engineer, but I’m seeing a problem, here…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The “Green Line” – nee the “Central Corridor”, aka “The current Met Council’s $1.4 Billion monument to its own wisdom” – has, exactly as predicted in conservative circles, turned out to be a very, very slow variety of “rapid transit”.\u00a0 In its first four months in service, it’s clocked the trip between the downtowns at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minneapolis","category-trains-and-automobiles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48067"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48069,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48067\/revisions\/48069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}