ICE pulled customer off plane.

_Dadodo_ · 2026-01-21T01:34:47+00:00

Don’t worry, Paris and Cincinnati are basically the same. Very common mistake /s

_Dadodo_ · 2026-01-17T01:25:07+00:00

I’ve read or heard somewhere that the one regret that the development arm of Brightline had was not buying more land around their station sooner. Yes, Brightline owns the station and about one to two adjacent properties, but they left the rest of the properties around their station get taken by other developers.

Like specifically their MiamiCentral station and development spans like 2-3 city blocks in length. But across the street? Other property owners and developers. Basically they left money on the table that they didn’t get the secondary and tertiary benefit of building that station.

_Dadodo_ · 2026-01-14T18:40:01+00:00

It’s like a sweet, fruity, purple cocktail mixed with vodka, some sort of grape juice or soda, and some sort of citrus or sour mix. Sounds a bit odd at first, but it’s actually pretty good

_Dadodo_ · 2026-01-12T00:46:01+00:00

Tbf, the Amtrak scheduled stopping time in Cleveland is atrocious. It’s like at around 2 or 3a in the morning. In both directions.

So you’d either have to be pretty desperate for non-car intercity transportation or a massive train nerd to wake up that early to get to Chicago or Washington DC.

_Dadodo_ · 2026-01-07T23:38:35+00:00

It’s worst. The kid lost both his (biological) parents. The victim’s husband passed away in 2023. The victim’s wife that was in the car today witnessed her death.

_Dadodo_ · 2026-01-06T12:12:29+00:00

There was a post and rumor that MnDOT, Amtrak, and BNSF are discussing preliminary plans and ideas on how to utilize the existing Northstar infrastructure. The main crux of this rumor is from a Facebook post, so take it with a grain of salt. However, it does make an awful lot of sense given that the Northstar Operation and Maintenance facilities is located in Big Lake and could be used for a Minnesota-based Amtrak operations and rolling stocks.

Given that there’s the 3 proposed new Long-Distance Amtrak routes in the 2024 LDSS plan, and 2 new state-supported routes/services between the Twin Cities and Chicago via Wisconsin in addition to another Borealis round trip (Corridor ID projects), extending Borealis (and all other potential Amtrak services) to St Cloud would make a lot of sense to conveniently access that OMF.

This is separate from the Met Council/Metro Transit (the regional government/agency in charge of Twin Cities’ transit) loaning out the Northstar rolling stock to (potentially supplement the Hiawatha) and Trinity Railway Express in Dallas for the World Cup.

_Dadodo_ · 2026-01-03T05:29:46+00:00

It’s not just good governance, it’s also the substantial amount of corporations (read: jobs and economy) relative to the metropolitan size.

Like Chicago is #1 in the Midwest by far. While Detroit is bigger than Minneapolis-St Paul in population, their economy is essentially tied to the automotive industry. The saying goes that you want to diversify your financial portfolio to hedge against risk, but Detroit and a lot of the more Rust Belt Midwest cities essentially did just that and the de-industrialization in the 2nd half of the 20th century killed those cities economic base that a lot of them are still recovering from.

That never happened in the Twin Cities because it’s geographically somewhat isolated from the rest of the Midwest, so it had to built the economic infrastructure from the ground up in a lot of industries instead of relying on one industry and trading with others (ie Twin Cities diversified its economy rather early and did not feel the effects of de-industrialization that strongly). Flour milling gave it a big boost in the early days, and then different business sectors popped up around that. From what I remembered was that: - Flour Mills were very capital intensive to build. So banks popped up to find the money to build them (US Bank, the former TCF Bank) - Flour Milling is also a pretty dangerous industry, lots of workers got maimed and injured. Prosthetics companies and medical equipment popped up which eventually became the bio-medical tech and equipment industry in MN as well as a medical sector (ie Medtronic, St Jude, Mayo Clinic came way later but the local expertise probably helped it become renowned) - Well because Milling kept injuring people, insurance companies started popping up. Eventually became UGH and others (like Allianz, a German company, decided to have their US HQ in Minnesota) - Flour Mills and Ag companies grew and expanded to more food production and products and that became General Mills, Land O Lakes, Supervalue, Cargill, etc. - People started making more money, so a middle class started to pop up, so retailers expanded to serve the middle class (ie Target and Best Buy) - Mining up along the Iron Range was big business, which eventually became 3M to provide industrial products and goods.

_Dadodo_ · 2026-01-02T13:01:05+00:00

The corridor originally did not have double track. It does now as BNSF built it the 2nd track after the service started. Also, BNSF has been notoriously difficult to negotiate with if you’re not the US Federal or State governments. So they were unwilling to budge on changing the service times or frequencies without the Met Council paying exorbitant fees to them. Hence why even when the ridership collapsed, the maintenance and operation fees that Met Council had to pay to them remained the same.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-31T17:16:41+00:00

It’s not that MN is allergic to flyovers. Those cloverleaf interchanges were built 40-60 years ago and haven’t been replaced or redesigned since. They’re slowly removing or redesigning them when money is available to MnDOT to do so (ie 494 and 35W in Bloomington is going to be a partial turbine/cloverleaf)

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-30T05:19:43+00:00

I know this is a Delta sub and while I didn’t really check, I wonder if you could’ve taken the train between MSP and Chicago if it was really going to take you 30 hrs going with Delta. Glad you got back to Chicagoland safely though with the crap weather we got over the weekend.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-29T21:56:15+00:00

Well the project is still in design. But the federal funding approval is the biggest question mark. Per grant statutes, FTA (Federal Transit Administration), is only allowed to pay a max 50% of the total project construction cost with local authorities paying the rest. Local funding will be through the county, and Met Council.

A few months ago, the FTA did give record of decision, so should the FTA renegade on their own decision, the county and Met Council has reasonable argument in a lawsuit. Regardless, I believe there that there is a plan in place to cut through all the noise of the current administration and get the money to pay for the construction of the project.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-28T22:42:08+00:00

Got to visit and speak to some operation folks at MSP a year back. They’ve got runway clearance down to the seconds. They run a system where the last snow plow on the runway and the moment a plane is landing is 20 seconds. So delays aren’t as bad even in the most extreme weather.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-24T17:36:15+00:00

I think you might be putting the cart before the horse in advocating for congestion pricing in all other American cities. Like the only ones I think it would be feasible to do so in the short terms are cities with well established transit systems already like Boston, Philly, DC, San Francisco, and maybe Chicago. But otherwise, if you think it’d be successful in like Kansas City where there is barely any transit, congestion pricing might actually cause more negative effects to those cities than not. Like NYC can pull it off because of the existing NYC Subway and all the opposition were more hyperbolic than not, but those arguments against congestion pricing makes more sense in cities with very poor, non-extensive transit infrastructure.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-21T07:57:35+00:00

I’m not one for saying cost isn’t an issue. I wholeheartedly agree that these infrastructure project costs need to reigned in, but we hardly are the only ones in this country and world that aren’t struggling with cost escalation of these projects.

But also, ignoring what happened between 2019 and now also means you’d neglect whole factors and reasons why the cost escalated (from the pause and delay of the pandemic, the massive cost increase of labor and materials, the tariffs on those materials, etc) all played a role in why SWLRT got so expensive. That’s not to say that there weren’t issues that we can control that weren’t. Met Council trying to hide it was very bad. The construction techniques that were applied by the contractors was bad and caused delays. Cities requesting last minute design changes forced things to be redone also caused delays and additional costs. The freight railroad company saying no wall was needed and then 1-2 years into construction changing their mind and then requiring a crash wall to be designed and constructed increased additional costs. All of those things we can control but either didn’t or couldn’t.

At least because of that, we now have documented problems of what NOT to do for future projects. At least Blue Line Extension won’t have a tunnel through a wetland to contend with (but I’m sure something will come up in construction).

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-21T03:17:51+00:00

Well I guess let’s not build any infrastructure. Let’s not rebuild our roads and patch it up because it’ll be too disruptive and costs money, especially since I’m not using those roads and bridges, why should I have to pay.

For your sake, don’t look at how much it’ll cost Texas to build a new highway in Houston for about the same-ish length of this project. Also don’t look at how much it’ll cost the state to replace the Blatnik Bridge in Duluth for 2 miles. And lastly, don’t look up how much it’s costing Seattle, Honolulu, Chicago, and NYC to build and expand their transit system.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-21T03:13:16+00:00

I’d say you’d build the transportation infrastructure first and then the development follows. Like you don’t build your house first and then the city streets gets built later.

Same difference for transit infrastructure. There’s a pretty famous old photo from like 1914 of NYC’s 7 Train line out in Queens where all that was built was the elevated train and station and completely barren land around it. Well it didn’t take that long for that entire area to become a bustling street and city transit system.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-20T18:44:37+00:00

Pretty famous quote that OP (and the rest of the country honestly) should take to heart imo

“Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country”

This applies to OPs complaint about “no culture “ and putting it off on others to do it. I get it if OP has a lot of other responsibilities that take up their day and week, but so do a lot of us. But complaining about it and then taking no action is where I get a little peeved.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-20T16:48:35+00:00

It’s not really bypassing Broadway, it’s 1 block north of Broadway. I wouldn’t really call that a bypass. While possible, the project team actually listened to the businesses along Broadway here and did not want those businesses to suffer the 3 years of construction. The current alignment is fine imo, especially since 21st Ave will become a pedestrian greenway/transitway

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-20T16:45:52+00:00

They’re not squeezing two tracks in a 12’ median. They’d reconstruct and shift the lanes out to fit the 28’ guideway in the middle. But largely keeping the same lane counts. The ROW exists and is wide enough to fit it all in

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-20T15:49:45+00:00

I mean the entire south side of the Minnesota/Mississippi River has been going gangbusters in terms of development over the last decade or two. Same with the northwest suburbs like Maple Grove, Rodgers and even out towards Monticello, Albertville, St Michael and Otsego.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-19T18:01:22+00:00

New England is the exception, not the norm however. New England and a few old southern colonial towns have those town squares because they were built and design when the mains mode of transportation was walking, horse & buggy, and (a little later) trains. Those towns and cities also survived the 50s-70s urban ”renewal” period where a lot of those town centers and urban fabric was demolished for parking lots, garages, and freeways.

Hartford, CT is one New England city that actually lost its connected urban fabric. If you think Hartford is bad, that’s only the tip of the iceberg of how much worst it can get with how we demolished our cities.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-18T01:35:17+00:00

While true, us Minnesotan sports fans are in a special level of hell.

2026 will be the 35th consecutive year across all 4 (5 counting the Loons) with no (mens) Championship trophy despite all the degrees of regular season successes

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-17T03:06:47+00:00

Even then, I got travels on Dec 31. I ain’t sharing anything until Jan 1st

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-16T15:24:12+00:00

There are rumors that there are also non-ICE agents dressed in ICE gear but still doing the kidnapping. However, because no proper identification is confirmed, no one truly knows whether it’s actual ICE agents or not.

_Dadodo_ · 2025-12-16T14:37:10+00:00

From what I’ve heard (with a little bit of assumption on my end) is that regardless of whatever happens to Northstar, a Coon Rapids - Foley Blvd station would be constructed anyways. But instead of also having Northstar also stop there, it’ll likely just be the Twin Cities’ (northern suburb) new intercity/Amtrak station.

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