Metro Orange Line (Minnesota)

     METRO Orange Line
Overview
System METRO
Operator Metro Transit
Status Under construction
Began service 2019
Route
Locale (Hennepin County/Dakota County)
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Richfield, Minnesota
Bloomington, Minnesota
Burnsville, Minnesota
Lakeville, Minnesota
Stations 9
Service
Daily ridership 43,000 Est (2030) [1]
← {{{previous_line}}} {{{next_line}}} →

The METRO Orange Line, also known as the I-35W Bus Rapid Transitway, is a proposed bus rapid transit line extending from downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota to Lakeville, Minnesota along Interstate 35W.

History

Plans have been in place for decades to increase public transit on the I-35W corridor. Beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s light rail was studied but nothing was done. In the late '90s a commuter rail line that was proposed between Minneapolis and Northfield was cancelled, due to the Minnesota Legislature banning federal money from going to studies of the line. The I-35W corridor has a long history of transit, being the first freeway in the Twin Cities to have express bus service, starting in 1972.

Current plans and operations

For more details on the freeway corridor, see I-35W (Minnesota).

In January 2005, the Minnesota Department of Transportation released their plans to improve transit service on the corridor. They chose that BRT using existing and proposed HOV lanes would be the best option. This came just a month after Metro Transit did a complete restructure of I-35W bus services, adding better service to the corridor, including new route 535, an all-day highly frequent bus route between Downtown Minneapolis and South Bloomington Transit Center. Metro Transit's future plans in the restructure report show possible expansion of Route 535's service from just weekdays to everyday service, and route extensions to the University of Minnesota, and south to Burnsville Transit Station. About 20–30 years ago a bus stop was built on the I-35W bridge over Lake Street. The Crosstown Commons section of the freeway was reconstructed from 2007 to 2010. The project extended HOV lanes north to 42nd Street and added a station located in the median of the freeway at 46th Street. Future MNDOT and Metro Transit plans show a new freeway station located at American Blvd overpass and relocating the Lake St. Station to the median of the freeway.

A 2007, $133.3 million, Federal-State Urban Partnership Agreement, designed to alleviate congestion in the Minneapolis area, allowed the construction of a center high-occupancy toll lane or price-dynamic shoulder lane (for the exclusive use of buses, high-occupancy vehicles, and drivers willing to pay the dynamically priced toll) running on I-35W from Lakeville to downtown Minneapolis—a lane that could be used for the planned BRT line.

Plans released in 2012 call for the METRO Orange Line to run from downtown Minneapolis to the "offline" (off-highway) Burnsville Transit Station, stopping at the "online" (on-highway) stations at Lake Street, 46th Street, and American Boulevard, and the "inline" (slightly off-highway) stations at 66th Street and 98th Street, with a potential extension to the Lakeville transit station[2] in Lakeville that had been created with Urban Partnership Agreement funds.

Line color

In July 2011, the Metropolitan Council officially named this line as the METRO Orange Line. Corresponding Minneapolis-St. Paul transit lines are the existing METRO Blue Line LRT, the METRO Green Line LRT to St. Paul and the METRO Red Line BRT.[3]

References

  1. ↑ "35W Bus Rapid Transit Study". http://www.dot.state.mn.us/projects/brt/finalreport-print.pdf. URS. Retrieved 18 June 2014. External link in |website= (help)
  2. ↑ "Transportation Committee Advisory Information". Metropolitan Council. September 2012. Retrieved March 29, 2013.
  3. ↑ "Met Council approves line color names for region's developing transitway system". Metropolitan Council. July 2011. Archived from the original on August 7, 2011. Retrieved August 31, 2011.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, January 20, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.