MULTI-MODAL Mondays: Hub Dreams and Doubts Abound

One of the Minnesota Twin Cities--state capital St. Paul--is building a giant multi-modal transit center downtown by renovating its historic Union Depot railroad station, but there are doubts about its efficacy as a hub of productivity, growth and activity. The transit center will be connected to the light-rail line, now under construction and scheduled to open in 2014, which will link the state's capital burg with its larger twin, Minneapolis. Of course, it will only have a fighting chance if it's a true hub...for local buses, light-rail, Amtrak, bicyclists, and intercity buses (those are part of the plans).

Will it connect to bicycle paths? Will there be bike lockers? Will there be adequate signage designed to international standards that clearly display where all the various transit modes are located, and show clearly departure and arrival times? 

Stay tuned.

(Perhaps the good news in all this is that the opening of the light-rail line will connect St. Paul, by rail, and via the existing light-rail line from downtown Minneapolis, with MSP, reducing the carbon footprint of one of the largest airports in the Midwest)

Meanwhile, in the lower Midwest, Indianapolis is doing some soul-searching about how to how to improve public transit, after the bus system cut routes and trips. A Hoosier Transit Hub is still some years away.

One theme of recent transit spending--better late than never--is funding links from central business districts to airports, which are a huge source-point of carbon emissions from all those taxis, buses and cars feeding airplane passengers to the terminals--as well as taking them away to the ground destinations.

So, it's not surprising that the feds are handing out $1.58 billion to 27 transit projects, including a light-rail link from downtown Denver, CO to its airport--reducing the carbon footprint of that massive facility, the Environment News Service reports. Other projects including a New York rail connection from Long Island commuter lines to Grand Central station (the lines now go to Penn Station), further work on connecting DC to its Dulles International Airport, and a Minneapolis-St. Paul light-rail connection, which would (by implication) connect Minnesota's capital city to the Twin City's airport (MSP) via an existing link that runs from downtown Minneapolis to MSP.

By the way, rail links to LAX's (busiest airport on the west coast of North America) terminals are not even in the planning stage.