Jim Mork says, while talking about how to get pedestrians across Hiawatha, that train stops shouldn't be too close together, since train speeds are what makes the train a good idea.
The stops are generally about a mile apart, except downtown and at 80th and 81st in Bloomington, where the owner of what was the CDC building stomped his feet (I won't develop more of this property if I don't have a stop at the main entrance to the main building) and got met council to agree to build two stops two blocks apart (at around a million bucks each). The train speeds are not going to exceed auto speeds along the route, for safety. That's why it will take 30 minutes to travel the route (around 22 mph average). The acceleration/deceleration rate is 3 mph/second. That means that if the train's top speed is 35, 23 seconds out of every run between stations will go to starting and stopping and and about two minutes for running time, if the distance is a mile. Multiply that by ten to get running time outside of downtown. Much slower downtown. Plus stopped time. Lots of suburbanite bashing when talking about roads, as usual. Ever looked at how many city residents use the same roads to get to their jobs and other destinations in the suburbs? As far as the large amounts of development some people dream about along the lrt, look for more subsidies to make that happen. The city and met council already have set aside around $9 million for subsidies in the supposedly attractive areas around the train stops. In Portland, Oregon, the city council looked at the very small amount of development that had happened around lrt stops after ten years and voted in a ten year property tax waiver for those building within a certain distance of a station (1/4 mile or 1/2, don't care to look it up). Development hasn't jumped since then. Look to the newspaper archives out there for info on the Beaverton Round, a transit-oriented development built around a station. I think the city kick-in is at least $10 million now, two or three developer bankruptcies later. As someone I know says, the spin-meisters in Portland count every gallon of paint and every nail sold near stations as "development", such as the mall that was remodeled. It was there before the lrt and would have continued without it. As a Seattle developer has said: "It's transit-ORIENTED development, not transit-DEPENDENT development. It has to be able to succeed without the lrt to be practical." Bruce Gaarder Highland Park Saint Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
