The Light Rail on New Year's Eve Day
One of my New Year's resolutions is to post more to this blog. However, keeping this resolution requires both 1) that B and I do blogworthy things in and around Minnefabulous, and 2) that I actually take the time to post about our adventures. In the past few weeks we have been good about #1 but I am still behind on number #2.
Case in point: New Year's Eve Day. Rather than making big New Year's Eve plans, B and I decided to have a very full New Year's Eve Day. We took the light rail downtown and from about 3pm to 10pm we just wandered, popping in to various bars and restaurants for a bite, a drink, or to watch some football. And I brought my camera.
I starting out by taking a lot of pictures of the light rail station near our house. The entire light rail system in Minneapolis is only a couple of years old. Right now there is only 1 line, running from downtown south to the Mall of America and the airport (and in between, it stops by us). But it has been very big success, with much higher-than-expected ridership, and the two cities are considering adding a second line that would would run east to downtown St. Paul.
Anyway, since our first ride on the light rail, we have been very impressed with how nice and well-designed the system is. Okay, onto the pictures.
This is a shot of the light rail station by our house, Franklin Avenue Station (that's Franklin Avenue underneath it):
And here's a shot of the station close up. As you can see, Berna is being very chipper about waiting in the cold for a train :-):
The light rail costs about $1.50 to ride, give or take .25 depending on whether it's a peak hour or not. However, no one has ever taken our tickets. The system seems to be that usually they do not collect tickets, but now and then they do, and if you don't have one it is a $100 fine. Now, because we are good citizens and want to support the light rail, we always buy tickets. But the gambler in me wonders if not paying, and risking the $100 fine now and then, might be a more sensible way to go, from a strictly dollars-and-cents perspective. But I digress.
They've got nice machines to take your dollars and quarters. They have computer-screen displays and can even break a $20. I would've taken a picture but instead I ended up taking a picture of this pleasant surprise:
I guess it's part of a don't-drink-and-drive-on-New-Year's thing. That's nice.
At this point you might be thinking this is kind of a silly post. I mean, lots of cities have train stations -- what's the big deal? Well, here is one of the Minnefabulous features of these light rail stations:
Yup, push for heat. Many of the bus stations in the Twin Cities have this too. Sure, we're having an incredibly mild winter this year, but this is just a little reminder that winters out here are generally not like the winters B and I grew up with.
The actual heating unit was hard to get a good photo of:
The other Minnefabulous thing about the light rail stations are these:
The bottom line reads "Small Kindness, Weather Permitting #29." There are 4 benches at the Franklin Street Station. Each one has a heating unit and one of these. You press the button, and it plays an audio track: either a song or an NPR-style monologue, sometimes a funny one, and every station has different ones. But the audio tracks are always about Minneapolis. It's a really nice touch that really captures the Minneapolis vibe: Midwestern sensibility and civic-mindedness coupled with a certain artsiness.
After about 10 minutes (the trains come every 15 on Saturday afternoons), the train arrived:
I am not yet bold enough with my camera to photograph groups of strangers in tight spaces, so I have no photos of the inside of the train, but I did snap a shot of the downtown train station:
Okay, I'll stop here and put Part 2 of New year's Eve Day in a separate post.
Case in point: New Year's Eve Day. Rather than making big New Year's Eve plans, B and I decided to have a very full New Year's Eve Day. We took the light rail downtown and from about 3pm to 10pm we just wandered, popping in to various bars and restaurants for a bite, a drink, or to watch some football. And I brought my camera.
I starting out by taking a lot of pictures of the light rail station near our house. The entire light rail system in Minneapolis is only a couple of years old. Right now there is only 1 line, running from downtown south to the Mall of America and the airport (and in between, it stops by us). But it has been very big success, with much higher-than-expected ridership, and the two cities are considering adding a second line that would would run east to downtown St. Paul.
Anyway, since our first ride on the light rail, we have been very impressed with how nice and well-designed the system is. Okay, onto the pictures.
This is a shot of the light rail station by our house, Franklin Avenue Station (that's Franklin Avenue underneath it):
And here's a shot of the station close up. As you can see, Berna is being very chipper about waiting in the cold for a train :-):
The light rail costs about $1.50 to ride, give or take .25 depending on whether it's a peak hour or not. However, no one has ever taken our tickets. The system seems to be that usually they do not collect tickets, but now and then they do, and if you don't have one it is a $100 fine. Now, because we are good citizens and want to support the light rail, we always buy tickets. But the gambler in me wonders if not paying, and risking the $100 fine now and then, might be a more sensible way to go, from a strictly dollars-and-cents perspective. But I digress.
They've got nice machines to take your dollars and quarters. They have computer-screen displays and can even break a $20. I would've taken a picture but instead I ended up taking a picture of this pleasant surprise:
I guess it's part of a don't-drink-and-drive-on-New-Year's thing. That's nice.
At this point you might be thinking this is kind of a silly post. I mean, lots of cities have train stations -- what's the big deal? Well, here is one of the Minnefabulous features of these light rail stations:
Yup, push for heat. Many of the bus stations in the Twin Cities have this too. Sure, we're having an incredibly mild winter this year, but this is just a little reminder that winters out here are generally not like the winters B and I grew up with.
The actual heating unit was hard to get a good photo of:
The other Minnefabulous thing about the light rail stations are these:
The bottom line reads "Small Kindness, Weather Permitting #29." There are 4 benches at the Franklin Street Station. Each one has a heating unit and one of these. You press the button, and it plays an audio track: either a song or an NPR-style monologue, sometimes a funny one, and every station has different ones. But the audio tracks are always about Minneapolis. It's a really nice touch that really captures the Minneapolis vibe: Midwestern sensibility and civic-mindedness coupled with a certain artsiness.
After about 10 minutes (the trains come every 15 on Saturday afternoons), the train arrived:
I am not yet bold enough with my camera to photograph groups of strangers in tight spaces, so I have no photos of the inside of the train, but I did snap a shot of the downtown train station:
Okay, I'll stop here and put Part 2 of New year's Eve Day in a separate post.
posted by James at 11:10 AM
1 Comments:
I like the design of the downtown station - a nice wavey line roof and behind it those pillars of differing heights with lights on top. Very artsy....
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