![]() ![]() ![]() On a regular bus line, the driver has to decide how to deal with a passenger who doesn’t pay, and it’s the No. Metro buses in the Twin Cities now prowl the streets advertising the starting wage for bus operators of $26.16 an hour, with a signing bonus of up to $5,000.Ī driver on the D Line who asked not to be named said the best thing about operating BRT is not having to collect fares. The cuts are a function of a bus driver shortage that’s affected transit authorities everywhere. Dozens of other bus lines are seeing reduced service as well. The 5 bus has been largely replaced by the D Line buses still stop at every block along the route for people who need localized service, but they only come every 60 minutes. ![]() On the same day that Metro launched the D Line, it began service cuts to a number of other bus lines. The BRT line includes 61 new bus shelters, 78 crosswalk restripings, 24 traffic signal upgrades, and 246 electric heaters, which can be turned on by passengers at the press of a button. are going not just into town, but they’re really living their lives along these bus corridors.” “Those routes serve such a great variety of trip purposes. “When we think about arterial BR, it’s focused on these workhorse, urban, local bus routes,” Roth says. Though routed through downtown, its fortunes aren’t tied to the fate of the central business district, Roth says. Routes like the D Line, which mirrors the 5 bus, serve people in every part of the city. And Metro is expecting the BRT upgrade to improve ridership on the D Line as well other bus lines in the Metro system saw 30 percent increases in ridership when they were switched to BRT, she says. But its BRT lines have recovered more quickly than other modes, Roth says. Like every other transit system in the U.S., Metro has seen steep declines in ridership since the pandemic. In all, the project includes 61 new bus shelters, 78 crosswalk restripings, 24 traffic signal upgrades and 246 electric heaters, which can be turned on by passengers at the press of a button. It went through planning and community engagement from 2016 to 2018, engineering in 2019, and it began construction in 2021. Metro began assembling funding for the D Line in 2014, Roth says. That’s a sharp contrast with the system’s Southwest light rail project, which is years behind schedule and still facing shortfalls on its drastically expanded budget. The $75 million D Line was completed on time and under budget, says Katie Roth, the director of arterial bus rapid transit at Metro Transit. Metro officials say the BRT lines run about 25 percent faster than the regular bus.īRT also tends to be much cheaper than building rail lines. Allowing riders to prepay fares reduces idling time as well. In Minneapolis, BRT buses like the D Line operate mostly in traffic, with some signal prioritization to trigger green lights when they’re falling behind schedule. The most robust BRT networks have fully dedicated bus lanes to keep vehicles out of the regular flow of traffic and allow them to operate like trains. But different transit agencies have taken different approaches to BRT, selecting from a menu of features that improve the experience for riders. The main benefit of bus rapid transit is that it’s faster and more reliable than the bus, in large part because it makes fewer stops. The D Line runs along what has been one of the most heavily used bus runs in all of Minnesota: An 18-mile arterial route where a quarter of households don’t have access to a car, according to officials. “And I have to pee.”Įarlier that morning, a group of local transit officials, county commissioners, mayors and members of Congress had gathered at the Mall of America to cut the ribbon on the D Line, the newest bus rapid transit (BRT) route in the Twin Cities’ Metro Transit network. “I only have seven minutes,” the driver said as he disembarked. A little more than an hour after it left, the bus came to a stop at a transit station in Brooklyn Center surrounded by shopping outlets and surface parking lots. On Fremont Avenue, three teenagers realized they were on the wrong line and got off. At 7th Street it turned left onto a dedicated bus lane, painted red, and continued through an apocalyptically unpeopled downtown. It took a short detour onto a parallel route as it approached 38th Street, the intersection - now a memorial - where George Floyd was killed by a police officer in the spring of 2020. It rolled up Chicago Avenue, passing new platforms every half-mile or so, idling briefly at red lights and picking up stray riders. on the first Saturday in December, with temperatures in the single digits, a stretch bus pulled out of the transit station at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., with one passenger, and headed north through Richfield into South Minneapolis. ![]()
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