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there is a project here to expand one of our 2 light rail lines. it's pretty far along in the planning and is at one of those points where they can get a big chunk of federal transit money if they raise some of it locally but...nope lol. the bill to make this happen didn't actually raise any money at the state level, it just gave some kind of exemption to the area where the line is being built so the local government could raise the funds. and this wasn't passed because the House is being run by a Republican who doesn't seem particularly imaginative, and who has come up in politics during an era in which the legislature pretty much never finishes their drat work before adjournment. so he's refusing to even talk about it because he's butthurt that not all of his tax cuts got passed. also he's dog-whistling about a transit project he lives nowhere near, probably because he wants to run for governor  the line itself isn't the best, but lol
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Jun 29, 2016 13:05
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Munkeymon posted:it's to extend into the western suburbs, right? if not it's to go further south than MoA which is fine but having a giant parking lot on one route terminus isn't a bad thing http://www.swlrtcommunityworks.org/explore-corridor/map/map it extends the green line from target field station out to eden prairie. also there is already some kind of BRT service that extends south from MoA, i'm not really familiar with that though
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Jul 3, 2016 21:10
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Munkeymon posted:that would own so of course it won't happen i feel like the route they decided on wasn't very ambitious; one of the options involved tunneling under part of nicollet and having an underground stop in eat street, which i feel like would have been good because it would reach more people within dense areas of minneapolis. but i'm not any kind of transportation engineer and the route the chose isn't too bad really. linking up downtown with Bryn Mawr, Kenwood, SLP, Hopkins, all the way out in to EP isn't such a bad deal. Who knows, it might even reduce the bumper-to-bumper nonsense that is the ramp from 394 east going into the 94 east tunnel the problem is that the legislature is in shambles. kurt daudt is probably playing the tough big man (at least partially) because he wants to raise his profile or run for a higher office, so he's been dog-whistling and grandstanding about the LRT project, even going so far to pretend he had never heard of the last-ditch senate DFL plan to just let hennepin county raise the money themselves for the federal matching funds. this despite the house minority leader saying he personally witnessed the conversation between daudt and tom bakk about it finally, and this might be of interest to people outside the twin cities area, but there's a really cool blog called Streets.mn. It is weighted toward this region, of course, but there are also a lot of articles about transportation research, planning and theory in general
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Jul 4, 2016 02:38
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you could probably drink your through most neighborhoods of the city based on bars that have had songs written about them, haha. even "closing time" by semisonic is based on a bartender yelling at the drunks in the 400 Bar one night
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Jul 4, 2016 03:08
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the twin cities transit authority apparently uses a mix of bombardier and siemens LRT vehicles and i've never heard that there were problems with them. i don't follow this stuff very closely though and yeah if you want to legally scam the poo poo out of people with your business, go into government contracting and lobbying.
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Jul 10, 2016 00:25
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well at least we'll have self-crashing cars
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Jul 12, 2016 04:17
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my favorite american roundabouts are the ones in residential neighborhoods, where they just plopped down a circle of concrete into an existing intersection and called 'er good
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Jul 12, 2016 18:10
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Yeah, that's exactly what these are. Some of them are pretty nice: they dig up the pavement inside it, install a circular curb of equal height to the surrounding sidewalk curbs, and plant some bushes and stuff in the middle. But there are a few that are exactly like I said before, a sad little circle-ish disk of concrete that's just a couple inches tall. They make me think of those awards somebody made that all said "you tried" in comic sans.
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Jul 12, 2016 23:21
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Mr. Nice! posted:was there telescoping?  ??
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Jul 13, 2016 00:47
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Bloody posted:can I Hail Satan uber is available in many cities, yes
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Jul 27, 2016 12:48
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i heard u like ground clearance dawg
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Aug 2, 2016 23:57
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its probably super fun to be a well connected engineer or architect in china right now. you can make all kinds of crazy poo poo and it doesn't need to be very safe, just play the game right and you can stack mad yuans too
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Aug 3, 2016 13:52
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you don't have to be inside the country or an actual ethnic han to be "a <profession> in china". if you're just  about the semantics of my last post, what i meant was someone doing work there or designing stuff for there. and really, even my bit about lower design standards isn't a necessary component of the equation (though it often is  )
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Aug 3, 2016 16:02
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Progressive JPEG posted:maybe your property taxes should be at the province level and then the province distributes the money (to its favorites) this is actually how it was done in minnesota for 30 years and it worked pretty well. from like 1971 to 2002, local government revenue came mostly from the state, instead of like, a town having to jack property taxes way up because of a sudden shortfall. it was the biggest help to rural areas and urban core areas (white flight era), and was prob the reason my high school in a town of 1000 people had a full complement of enrichment courses (art, home ec, agriculture, it/programming, building/machine trades, foreign languages, AP psych and biology, college English classes). then we elected a wannabe-reagan to governor for 8 years and he said  . so now we're back to local governments shuttering basic services and property tax rates that yo-yo up and down just to keep the lights on at the elementary schoole: also we have a faction of state republicans who just HATE the idea of building passenger trains of any sort, and my guess to why is that they know white people will ride a train, and they can't stand the idea of losing a key dog-whistle talking point
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Aug 6, 2016 03:19
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metro transit is finally rolling out the improved signs at transit stops outside of the pilot areas. i was reminded of how big of a nerd i am when i saw one near my house and was just so excited!!! they're going from hot garbage to hot sexiness:  (click for the new sign full-size) imo the improvement is like moses bringing down the tablets down from the mountain. seriously. i probably take transit a lot more than most car-havers around here, but i almost always use a smartphone mapping service. with these signs i might actually memorize more than two or three routes. and the improvement for people who don't ride very often (or at all) is even better Lutha Mahtin fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Aug 11, 2016 |
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Aug 11, 2016 18:12
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you mean removing the cute/colorful bus logo? the obvious thing (and probably the actual reason) was to make the "brand" more streamlined and consistent. their brand identity is basically the T logo and the blue/yellow colors, so emphasizing this across all encounters with their services makes sense. the colors are emphasized on all their vehicles (i think) and looking at their site it's all blue and yellow as well the more shadowy, probably not real but you never know reason, is that perhaps they were attempting to de-emphasize the bus iconography and buses generally. we all know white americans equate buses with the poor, the disabled, and the brown. so it makes sense to take the bus icon (which still exists in the new sign) and subordinate it to the larger brand of T/blue/yellow. because ya den, i recognize dem colors from when ve took da train down ta da twins dat time
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Aug 11, 2016 22:58
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minivanmegafun posted:am I missing something or is the goal to make the sign actually useful instead of "bus stops here and goes somewhere but you'd better have a map" because none of you are discussing that yeah, the previous signs were garbage, their only use was to denote the general area in which some bus, at some time, might stop. even at stops where there is a shelter with printouts saying what lines stop there and at what times, those printouts don't have any kind of explanation of the route other than its number and the couple of landmark words that that line's vehicles flash on their exterior LCD displays imo these are kind of just bringing up the usefulness of public transit signage to the level that signage for other modes of transport in the area already has. we have lots of useful signage for driving, walking, and biking already: things like signs saying to turn here to get to a certain highway, or a sign pointing out that this random huge staircase next to a street makes its way down to the greenway underneath
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Aug 12, 2016 22:28
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the transit voiceover person here is a lady. they're rolling out her dulcet tones to bus lines now, she used to just be on trains. the Spanish voiceover on the trains is also a lady
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Aug 13, 2016 15:33
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i guess the voice lady here is a fan of snoop? https://www.facebook.com/PioneerPress/videos/10155338339725405/ 
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Aug 13, 2016 17:11
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google maps tts still garbage. interstate 35 goes through this area and it splits into E and W forks, one going through each of the twin cities. everyone here pronounces them as "thirty five eee" and "thirty five double you" but the google lady calls them east and west. bonus is that it's a north-south road so she says like "take the ramp onto highway thirty five west north" 
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Aug 14, 2016 17:19
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oh man did i really just get somebody to out in the transit thread without mentioning trains
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Aug 14, 2016 17:29
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buena vista, virginia, is pronounced byoo-na vista. monticello, minnesota, is pronounced mahn-tih-sell-oh. the word "gross", as in "your posting is gross", is pronounced by some upper midwest teenage girls as "grohw-wehss-ah". the universe is imperfect and you will never correct the """wrongness""" of minor """errors""" in any significant fraction of humans
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Aug 14, 2016 23:27
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Bloody posted:getting mad over w being pronounced west in a context where w means west is kind of weird i'm not angry, i'm just expressing my existential disillusionment regarding how algorithms and mass communication erode local culture 
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Aug 15, 2016 00:12
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 very classy advertising campaign, yes
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Aug 16, 2016 22:55
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Endless Mike posted:navigation saying "west" is more appropriate since people who don't live there are less likely to understand local cultural context and will need accurate, useful navigation more than locals. locals will just know it's "wrong" and move on with their lives. this is some quality fishmeching. it's got the backpedal that's disguised as "well this is the real issue", the scientific-sounding assertion that comes with no sourcing, and the little hint of paternalism. good work also i just remembered that i actually tracked down the dallas/ft. worth thread a while back and asked the goons from there how they pronounce 35 E/W down there, because i was curious: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3032538&pagenumber=65&perpage=40#post449485946 but really, you should post the settled science that mndot and txdot are clearly ignoring about "accurate" and "useful" naming of roads, and/or that google is relying on here. i mean clearly that is the reason the google lady says it that way right Lutha Mahtin fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 18:08
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ehh, i think you're the only one who thinks anyone in this discussion is mad
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Aug 17, 2016 18:15
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i've yet to see any citations for anything anyone has asserted as law or scientific evidence about this topic. however this is indeed one of the dumbest derails in any discussion in the history of humanity so i'll just leave it here
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Aug 17, 2016 18:27
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i have to deal with our local paratransit agency on a weekly basis and sometimes i wonder how the contractors manage to keep their buses on the road 
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Aug 21, 2016 03:04
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Aug 22, 2016 00:46
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our third lrt project appears to have secured the local funding in order to apply for the big matching federal money. it's not a super good project. however this is america, so the quality of the project is irrelevant. my guess is that the main opposition (Republican speaker of the state House) is only opposing it because he has noticed that a certain segment of his supporters get really fired up when he talks against it
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Sep 1, 2016 22:40
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Some other factoids about it are pretty funny, too. The guy in question, Speaker of the Minnesota House Kurt Daudt, doesn't live near the proposed rail line. In fact he only barely, technically, and marginally lives in the Twin Cities metropolitan area; he lives in Isanti, a town that I don't think has any kind of public transportation services, public or private. He got into politics because he was unemployed and racking up credit card debt, i.e. he needed a job. And the job he had before being unemployed was, wait for it..... used car salesman 
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Sep 3, 2016 20:29
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quote:As Gov. Jesse Ventura prepares to leave office, he ends a term that saw one of the most dramatic four-year shifts in Minnesota's financial picture. Ventura inherited a $4 billion surplus, and leaves office with the state facing a $4.5 billion deficit. Will he be remembered as the man at the helm when the state's economy took a nosedive? Or as a competent CEO who left a lasting stamp on state government? i swear i am not making this up
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Sep 4, 2016 04:38
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hobbesmaster posted:will this one also be at grade? will it at least have synchronized lights? It's the Green Line extension going from Target Field out to Eden Prairie. The route is crappy but is also NIMBY'd to all hell so it might not actually have much conflict with roads. Regarding University, well, I'd be interested to see the phenomenon you are describing, as it is not something that I, a car left-turner have ever experienced on that street. Also I live within walking distance of it now so  or whatever.
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Sep 5, 2016 03:23
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to my ignorant butt, that looks like a super ambitious plan for a single ballot initiative
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Oct 7, 2016 19:43
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minivanmegafun posted:Illinois has a constitutional amendment up for vote this November to mandate that all gas taxes are used for transportation projects A thing like that passed in Minnesota a few years ago. All sales tax revenue from the sales of motor vehicles is now dedicated to transit spending. Interestingly, ours mandates that only up to 60% of this money can be put toward roads, thus at least 40% must be put toward public transit.
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Oct 7, 2016 21:27
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why yes, i would much rather be a transit-dependent person in LA or SF compared to NYC..
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Oct 8, 2016 00:18
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reminder that i think of this thread every time i pass a "useless" greenspace installation that provides valuable watershed and urban-tree-cover service
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Nov 18, 2016 04:59
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do you even know what a watershed is
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Nov 18, 2016 05:26
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hm yes this soil-scientist-approved infrastructure change that turns useless concrete no one uses into useful drainage land is a joke. yep ok
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Nov 18, 2016 05:44
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:there actually are real ways to provide rainfall detention and retention, and even help treat some of the nasty urban runoff that you get around roadways - they're called bioswales and they generally look like small runs of ditch (or swale) that're filled w/ various types of marsh-ey grasses and whatnot to slow the overland flow and help filter the runoff too i know i just wanted to word it in a dumb inflammatory way quote:also the term "watershed" just refers to the area of surface/ground/pavement/grass that drains into a particular place. as in "the ditch in my front yard has a watershed made up of the rest of the yard and the front half of my roof (and half of the road on the other side)". it doesn't have anything to do w/ groundwater absorption while you are technically correct that they aren't directly overlapping issues, i was referring more to how issues like groundwater absorption, water tables, etc., are often studied and measured based on local geography and geology, i.e. in terms of watersheds
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Nov 19, 2016 04:30
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