Star Tribune
Uber and Lyft threaten to leave Minneapolis. How would we get around without the services?
There was a time when hundreds — okay, more like 1,600 — cab drivers roamed Minneapolis roads. They picked up riders who had either called a company dispatch center or stood on a curb, raised a hand and shouted “taxi!”
Not so anymore.
These days we’re used to opening a rideshare app and having a driver arrive within minutes. Upward of 12,000 Uber and Lyft drivers work within city limits, according to the companies. Now, the two biggest players in the rideshare game are threatening to leave the city over a new City Council ordinance hiking driver pay.
That would leave the nine remaining taxi companies, which employ 14 drivers, to pick up the slack. What does it look like to hail a taxi in Minneapolis these days? And how does it compare to using the Uber and Lyft apps to order a ride? We took two trips to find out.
For the first, reporter Eder Campuzano and news intern Alex Karwowski rode from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport to the Seven Points shopping mall in Uptown. The second trip was a ride from the Whittier neighborhood to downtown St. Paul, simulating a night of drinks followed by an event at Xcel Energy Center.
Here’s what we found:
MSP to Uptown
Our reporters began their journey at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport where we synced up our watches, figuratively speaking, in front of the Delta Airlines kiosk in Terminal 1. From there, we went our separate ways.
Alex set off for the airport’s designated rideshare area and Eder took another escalator up to the taxi waiting area. There were three cabs parked in the waiting area, and two drivers immediately acknowledged the waiting reporter. He was in a Classic Travel taxi within seconds.
Alex hailed an Uber and waited about five minutes before his car arrived.
The drivers took nearly identical routes. Eder’s dropped him off at the entrance to Curioso Coffee Bar 16 minutes and 59 seconds after he got into the vehicle. Alex’s left him between Girard and Fremont Avenues on 31st Street 22 minutes and 43 seconds after pickup.
While Eder’s ride was about 25% shorter, it was much more expensive. The fare alone was $39.50, while Alex paid $26.97 before tip. Taxis that operate out of MSP automatically charge $6.50 — that’s $4 for an airport access fee and $2.50 for a flag drop (a minimum fee).
Uber charged Alex a $2.75 booking fee and a $3.62 airport surcharge, or $6.37 in mandatory fees. His driver, Greg Lasica, said he does the gig full-time. He works for both Uber and Lyft in a bid to “maximize my efficiency.”
As he ferried Alex to Uptown, Lasica received a notification for a potential rider from the Uber app. The trip would take 13 minutes and pay $5. Lasica did some quick mental math — that amounted to a rate of a little more than $22 an hour. He declined the job.
“It’ll fit for someone else,” Lasica said.
Lasica likes the relationship he’s built with Uber and Lyft. He’s figured out a system that maximizes his profits. Lasica drives customers between MSP and downtown Minneapolis, picking up spare rides between the destinations.
Lasica believes the Minneapolis City Council should “stay out of it.” Eder’s driver declined to speak on the record. While the taxi and rideshare service models differed in price, the experience of traveling from the airport to Uptown was nearly identical.
But it’s not every day that Minneapolitans are landing at MSP and shuttling home. Sometimes, they’re merely looking for a ride to another neighborhood or to visit that other city across the river. And hailing a cab from one municipality to the other can prove to be a baffling ordeal.
Minneapolis to St. Paul
While Minneapolis proper has its fair share of venues for concerts and major league sports, a pair of notable destinations reside within St. Paul: Xcel Energy Center and Allianz Field. How much would it cost, and how long would it take, to take a taxi from a bar in the Whittier neighborhood in Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul?
We chose Mortimer’s Bar and Restaurant as the starting point for our experiment. Unsure of whether any of the myriad taxi apps in Apple’s App Store would be of use — many had one- or two-star ratings — we turned to Google.
A quick search for a cab company yielded several results, two of which allowed online booking and a quote for the ride. Blue and White Taxi estimated a cost of $28.50. Transportation Plus offered a lift for 60 cents less and a wait time of 23 minutes, so at 8 p.m. we prepaid for that trip.
The company texted a link to a map that tracked the driver as he left Golden Valley. At 8:15, the vehicle icon disappeared from the map, as did the estimated time of arrival. It popped back up at 8:21 with a new ETA, this time 11 minutes.
The driver arrived at Mortimer’s at 8:33 p.m and dropped off at Xcel Energy Center at 8:47 p.m. All told, it took 47 minutes to get from Whittier to downtown St. Paul. Lyft, by contrast, quoted a $16.90 fare at 8 p.m. with an estimated arrival at Xcel of 8:18 p.m.
Heading back to Minneapolis
While the trip from Minneapolis to St. Paul proved relatively easy, if a little long, returning to the Whittier neighborhood was something of a fiasco. Wary of the web-based taxi ordering systems, we went old school and dialed up three cab companies at about 10:05 p.m.
One of them quoted a fare of $60 and a pickup time of about 20 minutes.
A call to another went to voicemail. A dispatcher for a third company quoted a fare of about $40. There was just one problem: He didn’t have any drivers available to make the trip from the St. Paul Grill back to Mortimer’s.
We ended up ordering a Lyft at 10:17 p.m. The driver arrived at 10:19 p.m., just as the app advertised, with the $14.99 fare. We arrived at Mortimer’s 14 minutes later.
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
ROCHESTER – The Federal Transit Administration has green-lighted an $85 million grant supporting the development of the city’s planned Link Bus Rapid Transit system.
The FTA formally announced the grant on Friday during a ceremonial check presentation outside of the Mayo Civic Center, one of the seven stops planned for the bus line. The federal grant will cover about 60% of the project’s estimated $143.4 million price tag, with the remaining funds coming from Destination Medical Center, the largest public-private development project in state history.
Set to go live in 2026, the 2.8-mile Link system will connect downtown Rochester, including Mayo Clinic’s campuses, with a proposed “transit village” that will include parking, hundreds of housing units and a public plaza. The bus line will be the first of its kind outside the Twin Cities — with service running every five minutes during peak hours.
“That means you may not even need to look at a schedule,” said Veronica Vanterpool, deputy administrator for the FTA. “You can just show up at your transit stop and expect the next bus to come in a short time. That is a game changer and a life-transformational experience in transit for those people who are using it and relying on it.”
The planned Second Street corridor is already one of the busiest roads in Rochester, carrying more than 21,800 vehicles a day, and city planners have talked for years about ways to reduce traffic congestion in the city’s downtown. Local officials estimate that the transit line, which will rely on a fleet of all-electric buses, will handle 11,000 riders on its first day of operation and save eight city blocks of parking.
Speaking to a crowd of about 100 people gathered on Friday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the project shows Rochester is thinking strategically about how it handles growth.
“If you just plan the business expansion, and you don’t have the workforce, you don’t have the child care, the housing or the transit, it’s not going to work very well as a lot of communities across the nation have found,” Klobuchar said.
