Star Tribune
Metro Transit ridership creeps up, but rush hour no longer rules
Riders continued to return to Metro Transit buses and trains last year, but ridership remains stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels. And rush hour is no longer peak transit: more passengers are taking trips in the middle of the day and weekends.
Metro Transit officials said they were pleased with the 16% gain made last year over 2022.
“The key message is that ridership is increasing, and we’re solidifying fast, frequent transit service throughout the system,” said John Harper, Metropolitan Council’s manager of Contracted Service, at a Transportation Committee meeting Monday.
Nearly 49 million people took Metro Transit trains and buses, Northstar commuter rail, and Metro Mobility and other kinds of transportation last year. That’s about 60% of pre-COVID levels.
The pandemic decimated transit ridership here and across the country, largely due to the rise of remote work. As people return to the office, transit ridership has steadily crept back, although it’s unclear whether it will ever reach the 78 million rides provided by Metro Transit in 2019.
Nationally, most transit systems are operating at about 77% of pre-pandemic levels, according to a policy brief released by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) in December.
The APTA report notes that medium-sized cities like the Twin Cities have struggled more than more-populated metro areas because the return of office workers has lagged and many employees have access to other ways of getting to work.
Joey Reid, Metro Transit’s principal data scientist, said ridership trends in the Twin Cities are similar to those experienced in Seattle and Boston.
Local bus service remains the workhorse of the Metro Transit system, accounting for nearly half of all the rides provided, with light rail following at about a third of the service provided.
The biggest percentage increases in ridership came from relatively small pieces of the transit pie. Shared-ride Transit Link service and a microtransit pilot program in north Minneapolis surged 47% to 186,493 rides. Northstar Commuter Rail, which connects downtown Minneapolis to Big Lake, increased 26% to 92,265 rides.
Service aboard the Green and Blue light rail lines increased 19% to 14.8 million rides, despite highly publicized safety and nuisance issues on both. Bus service wasn’t far behind with a 15% annual increase.
Within the bus ridership category, bus-rapid transit (BRT) service surged 120% last year, a figure that includes the first full year of the D Line’s operations between Brooklyn Center and the Mall of America, a heavily used route. BRT service involves people paying before they board from stations spaced farther apart. In some cases, such as the Orange and Red lines, they often operate in dedicated lanes along highways.
Ridership numbers show new passenger behaviors have emerged since the pandemic – Metro Transit officials call it the “new normal.” Traditional morning and evening commuter ridership has morphed into middays and afternoons being the busiest part of the day. In addition, traditionally sluggish weekend traffic is growing faster than weekdays.
Anti-police brutality activists interrupted a Minneapolis City Council meeting Thursday to call for Police Chief Brian O’Hara’s firing, saying his department failed a Black man who begged police for help for months, to no avail, before he was finally shot in the neck by his white neighbor.
John Sawchak, 54, is charged with shooting Davis Moturi, 34, even though three warrants had been issued for his arrest in connection with threats to Moturi and other neighbors.
Activists showed up at the council meeting and asked for time to talk about the case. Instead, the council recessed and activists took the podium and castigated the city for failing Black people, even as state and federal officials are forcing the police department into court-sanctioned monitoring because of past civil rights violations.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, founder of the Racial Justice Network, said O’Hara needs to be held accountable.
“This is not the first time instance where the community has raised concerns about his poor judgment, poor leadership, blaming the community and excuses. It’s completely unacceptable for him to get away with it,” she said. “How many Black people’s doors have they kicked in for less?”
On Thursday the council voted to request the city auditor review the city’s involvement in and response to the matters between Moturi and Sawchak.
Mayor Jacob Frey released a statement in response saying he supports the council’s call for an independent review of the case, but O’Hara “will continue to be the Minneapolis police chief.”
Protesters also questioned why the public hadn’t heard from Community Safety Commissioner Toddrick Barnette, who called a news conference within hours to say he’s not going to fire O’Hara and the city leadership supports him.
A Girl Scout from Troop 58068 told the Woodbury City Council recently that they should allow backyard chickens in the city: They cheer people up, she said.
It turned out that chickens were on an upcoming agenda and, perhaps pushed a bit by the scout’s lobbying, the Woodbury City Council at their next meeting passed a new ordinance allowing for backyard hens.
The new ordinance went into effect on Oct. 23, the night of the council meeting, and will allow people who live on property zoned R-2, a “rural estate” district, to have backyard chickens. A typical city lot is zoned R-4 and those areas still cannot have chickens, the council said.
The city has received requests “here and there” for the last several years about backyard chickens, City Council Member Andrea Date said.
Backyard chickens come have home to roost — and never leave — in a host of other Minnesota cities that allow them, from Hopkins to Thief River Falls. It’s long been allowed in both St. Paul and Minneapolis, and new cities started approving backyard coops during the pandemic, when interest spiked.
In Woodbury, it wasn’t until the question was included on the city’s biannual survey that city staff knew how people felt. The survey found less support for chickens on a typical city lot — just 13% of respondents said they strongly approve of the idea while 43% percent strongly disapproved — but a majority approved of backyard chickens on lots of 1 acre or more.
The city’s rules until recently only allowed chickens on “rural estate” properties of five or more acres.
The new ordinance allows up to six hens, but no roosters, on property less than four acres that meets the zoning requirements. Larger properties can have an additional two chickens per acre above four acres. The ordinance also sets a height limit for chicken coops of 7 feet. No license or permit is required in Woodbury for backyard chickens.
Star Tribune
Anonymous donor pays overdue bill for Fergus Falls home where town’s first Black resident lived
A $10,000 overdue special assessment bill threatening tax forfeiture of a historic Fergus Falls home was paid off this week thanks to an anonymous donor.
Prince Albert Honeycutt lived at 612 Summit Avenue East, renamed Honeycutt Memorial Drive in 2021. Not only was Honeycutt the town’s first Black resident — settling there in 1872 from Tennessee — he was the state’s first Black professional baseball player, first Black firefighter and first Black mayoral candidate.
He was an early pioneer and prominent businessman who owned a barbershop in town. Missy Hermes, with the Otter Tail County Historical Society, said Honeycutt and his wife were likely the first Black people in Minnesota to testify in a capital murder trial of a man who was convicted and hanged in Fergus Falls.
“In other places, you would never have a Black person testifying against a white person, especially a woman, too, before women could vote even,” Hermes said. “Obviously he was respected enough.”
Nancy Ann and Prince Albert Honeycutt with their children inside the now-historic Honeycutt house in 1914. Photo from the collections of the Otter Tail County Historical Society.
When dozens of people from Kentucky moved to Fergus Falls in April 1898, known as “the first 85,” Honeycutt helped integrate them into the community.
He died in 1924 at age 71 and is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Fergus Falls.
Up until 2016, several owners lived in the Honeycutt home. But the city bought and sold the house to nonprofit Flowingbrook Ministry for $1 to take over the tax-exempt property and operate the ministry.
Ministry founder Lynette Higgins-Orr, who previously lived in Fergus Falls, moved to Florida several years ago and little activity has been going on in the historic home since. But she said there are plans to make it into a museum.
