2025 is a big year for transit investment in the Twin Cities, and that goes double over the last two months. Two big-budget bus rapid transit (BRT) lines recently debuted, and the ribbon cuttings and shiny benches are an attractive sight for a city dweller.
The fascinating thing about the two projects — the B Line from South Minneapolis to St. Paul and the Gold Line from St. Paul to Woodbury — is that they couldn’t be more different. Despite using the same vehicles, for better and for worse they illustrate the wide range of what BRT can mean in an American city.
The B Line is much easier to describe; it’s a $65 million, 13-mileroute with 35 stops that is a key part of Metro Transit’s innovative aBRT program. The basic premise is to take the city’s most used transit routes, improve them with better stations and buses, and then speed them up with off-board payment, more doors, fewer stops and signal priority. There are few better routes for this luxury treatment than the B Line, which follows the route of the old Selby-Lake Streetcar through the heart of South Minneapolis and central St. Paul.
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(The route was initially going to stop at Snelling Avenue, halfway into St. Paul, and I am grateful that planners decided years ago to extend it all the way along Selby to downtown. That said, Selby Avenue’s bumpy asphalt is providing an extreme test for the bus suspension systems.)
Compared to the notoriously slow and complex 21 bus, the on-the-ground experience of the B Line is a revelation. Not only is it faster, though those speed gains vary depending on your trip, it’s much simpler and easier to use. The spacious buses, especially with its multiple door-level boarding, are a game changer. The stations have higher curbs that allow many more users to “roll” on and off with a stroller, cart or scooter — a benefit granting riders additional dignity while dramatically reducing previous delays.
But transit is not only about the vehicles. It’s inseparable from the quality of surrounding city space, and here is where the B Line truly shines. The diversity of ridership along the route is something to behold, and it offers the best of Minneapolis on full display. Seemingly every diverse cultural facet in the city can be found riding the B Line, and it’s the kind of thing that makes you fall in love with cosmopolitanism.
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The most visible change around the B Line is to the street itself. As I wrote earlier, Lake Street’s new “road diet” arrangement calms traffic and make the already vibrant Lake Street streetscape a more inviting place. Along with a few island medians, there’s also a new bus-only lane that works wonders in the west-bound direction, at least as long it’s not blocked by the inevitable delivery trucks. As I once wrote about Hennepin Avenue, this is how we should prioritize valuable street space to fight climate change.
Another feature will be largely invisible to most folks: the transit signal priority, which still seems like a work in progress. I noticed the bus getting extra green cycles at some spots like the corner of Marshall and Snelling, but needlessly stopping at many lights elsewhere. This is to mention the asymmetrical nature of the red-striped bus lanes, which for the most part exist only in the west-bound direction.
(The old route 21 bus also had weird one-way characteristics, which oddly made it easier to leave St. Paul than to return to it, so the current setup offers a nice historic parallel.)
The end result is that Lake Street seems more like a place for people, rather than a chaotic road between the buildings. The street’s new calmness and the high-frequency of the B Line buses physically link parts of South Minneapolis along an east-west axis, which is particularly important because it’s always been easier to go north-to-south in Minneapolis than east-to-west. (This is due to the block grid, the transit routes, large avenues, and natural and infrastructural barriers.)
The B Line cuts across that grain and links parts of town that, to me, have always felt distant. Fun fact to think about: St. Paul’s “axis” is perpendicular to that of Minneapolis. The two cities are “portrait” and “landscape.”
To sum up, the new B Line is a wonderful thing that will reshape the geography of transit all the way across Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Gold Line: Same bus, different in every other way
On the other end of town, the new Gold Line could not be more different. Opening last month, it traverses mostly low-density suburban geography once it leaves St. Paul’s East Side. It’s no exaggeration to say that there you can find more restaurants within walking distance of just one station of the B Line than you’ll find along the entire 10-mile Gold Line route.
That illustrates the key dynamic here: Transit is only as good as the streets and buildings that surround the station. Though these two routes use nearly the same vehicles, the B Line traverses some of the Twin Cities’ densest and most diverse neighborhoods outside of the downtowns, while the Gold Line delivers you to a mix of freeway medians, single-family housing, office parks and strip malls.
The new line makes you realize the difficulty of retrofitting transit into American suburbia. While I give the transit planners credit for trying, I fear that this is an expensive bus project that will not attract many regular riders, at least not without major changes in the surrounding land use. That’s not the fault of the planners, but an inherent feature of America cities. The east metro suburbs of Oakdale and Woodbury are transit-hostile places, and it’s difficult to imagine that changing.
The basic impetus for the Gold Line, a $485 million project that began planning a decade ago, was the desire to run transit that serves the 3M campus, a large job center just past the border of St. Paul, and to deservingly build transit investments through the East Metro. The bus’s dedicated guideway is its main feature, part of how federal transit requirements work, but the separated road provides an odd experience. At times, bus speeds are limited to 25 miles per hour as you glide past the front yards of dozens of 1950s rambler houses. Elsewhere, you zip under a tunnel, bypassing suburban arterials through a no-man’s land featuring little other than duck habitat.
The route is less than ideal because it runs parallel to Interstate 94, meaning that half the land “catchment” around the stations is unusable. Sure there’s a Culver’s and two motorcycle dealerships, but most anywhere you go on the Gold Line, you’ll hear the low thrum of I-94 traffic. It’s not necessarily an ideal place to build apartment buildings, though people certainly do it anyway.
Elsewhere, few of the stations offer much in the way of walkable destinations, especially once you leave St. Paul. The best opportunity for development lies at Sun Ray station, which boasts both bus connections and potential for growth, in the (unlikely) scenario that the strip mall gets redeveloped. The next stop, at the Greenway Avenue station, is close enough to the unique manufactured home community of Landfall, to offer its working-class residents some utility. Elsewhere, even the close-by multifamily buildings are oddly situated, and I am sure most residents have cars waiting in their garages.
The point is that suburban transit is hard to do well, and few cities can pull it off after-the-fact. Canada tends to do much better than the U.S. along these lines: a line like this might run directly into the center of the mall parking lot where there would be a transit station with frequent feeder buses running along arterials lined with walkable sidewalks. There’s a new park-and-ride, mostly empty, and very few connecting buses serving the surrounding area. You could theoretically walk the thousand feet from the end-of-the-line Wooddale station to the nearby big box strip mall — a Lunds and Byerly’s, Kohl’s and a Target surrounding a massive sea of parking — but it’d be an unpleasant experience and I doubt many will do it.
None of this is the fault of the transit planners, but it’s hard when almost every resident has a car waiting in an attached garage, and every destination is surrounded by empty surface parking lots. This doesn’t mean that the Gold Line is a lost cause. If Oakdale and Woodbury pull off some aggressive transit-oriented development, such as many more projects like the new mixed-use building a the Helmo station, that would help. 3M employees and other workers returning to the office every day would be a big benefit, but I would not hold my breath for that. Instead the most exciting feature of the Gold Line is its planned extension along I-94 to downtown Minneapolis, set for 2027, which will double the utility to the route.
This is to say that the official ridership projections, goosed by pre-COVID commuting patterns and the park-and-ride legacy patterns, seem optimistic. As the sports gamblers say, I’ll take “the under.” I can see the bus being popular for sports events or concerts downtown, but within a year I predict that there will be 10 times as many people on the B Line than on the much more expensive Gold Line. That big difference around transit potential and cost efficiency illustrates, as well as anything ever will, the wide range of possibility around transit in America.
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