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.
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
