If You Want People to Use Public Transit, Connect the Places Where People Want to Walk

A couple weeks ago, at a Strong Towns staff retreat, a bunch of us rode the light rail one evening from the Summit Hills neighborhood in St. Paul into downtown Minneapolis to see the Twins play the Toronto Blue Jays at Target Field. 

It was a little hot, upper 80s to low 90s, but otherwise a nice summer day. There were about 10 of us from our organization on the Green Line platform at Victoria Street. We were the only ones waiting on the platform for the train, but when it showed up there were definitely riders from previous inbound stops.

My colleagues had agreed to a bit of a hot walk and a 50-minute trip in order to get off the train right at Target Field, which was my suggestion. If we had driven two cars, we could have made the trip in air conditioning in about 15 minutes and parked in a garage (or a “ramp,” as they say in Minnesota) just a five- or 10-minute walk to the entrance of the stadium. But I work with nice, accommodating people—who are also curious about transit.

Target Field, Home of the Minnesota Twins. (Source: Author.)

Strong Towns Staff at Target Field. (Source: John Pattison.)

The Victoria Street stop had a mixed-use apartment complex with half-empty retail spaces on one corner and there were a smattering of retail businesses on the other three. There were few people around and several of the businesses had “Space for Rent” signs in the windows.

Victoria Street platform on the Green Line, St. Paul, Minnesota (looking east). (Source: Google Maps.)

Victoria Street platform on the Green Line, St. Paul, Minnesota (looking west). (Source: Google Maps.)

One engineer in our group estimated the Victoria Street Green Line platform probably cost $15 million to build. It was meant to be an infill station, supporting new development nearby. Along the train ride to Target Field, we could definitely see evidence of new development occurring adjacent to the $1 billion Green Line. The 11-mile line connecting the downtowns of the Twin Cities runs almost exactly parallel to I-94, a few blocks away, so many people may not make the same travel mode decision we did. But people are definitely riding it: 13.8 million in 2018, a record pre-pandemic number. 

The Twin Cities are plenty big enough to support healthy transit ridership, but as it turns out, size doesn’t matter in transit. On last week’s Strong Towns Podcast, Jason Slaughter from Not Just Bikes and Strong Towns’ Chuck Marohn sat down to talk about what America keeps getting wrong about public transit. Building it in cities that are too small isn’t one of them. 

In a nutshell, many American transit systems are underused not because the cities they serve are too small, but because the places they stop at are places people don’t want to be on foot. Transit has to be a “walking accelerator,” with destinations people want to walk in. A stop on the side of a 4–6 lane stroad in the middle of a business park by the airport will not be well used.  

Strong Towns friend Ray Delahanty at CityNerd created a metric to measure the least-used transit systems in major cities in America. Delahanty’s video, “The 10 Worst Transit Cities: US Metro Areas Where Taking the Bus or Rail May Just Crush Your Soul,” has the original CityNerd recipe of smarts, snark, and baseball parks. 

These 10 cities with poorly used networks have a lot in common. Lines next to surface parking, empty industrial parks, single-family home neighborhoods with fully developed access to interstates for car commutes. A companion CityNerd video looks at the highest transit ridership in American cities with populations below 1 million. 

Delahanty shows in both these videos, as Slaughter and Marohn discuss, that it’s not the size of the city but the destinations and the surrounding land uses that contributes most to determining the success and failure of transit. The best transit should connect places people want to be. Good transit won’t happen without appropriate land use, and vice versa. 

Delahanty has another video where he analyzes urban rail use with a metric he invented, called Train Trips per Track Mile. This analysis highlights our consistent failure in station placement with inappropriate land use: stations next to vast freeway interchanges, institutional parking, and single-family home developments. 

The best transit in America connects densely populated areas with lots of foot traffic, but it doesn’t always have to follow the development. There are many instances where development does successfully follow train infrastructure. It’s just that most of them pre-date the auto-centric, suburban development models which arose after WWII.

“[So] here’s the problem,” Slaughter says in one of his videos on transit, “if you propose building transit in North America where there is no development, you’ll be laughed out of the room.”

“But historically, almost every town in the U.S. and Canada was built this way. Towns were built next to rapid transit … [n]ow, that type of  development is considered crazy. But for some reason we don’t think twice about building roads—and even highways—before development is started. This is seen as completely normal.”

My guess is that 10 years from now, there will be quite a few more mixed-use infill projects built out along the Green Line between St. Paul and Minneapolis and more of those empty first-floor commercial spaces I saw this month will be occupied. As long as they are places people want to walk to. Whether or not the $1 billion price for the Green Line is justified, I’ll leave to another day. 

The Twins lost, by the way, but I loved Target Field. Great views, great people and you can lock your bike up at Gate 6 and walk right in there if you don’t want to pay to park a car several blocks away. 

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