Welcome to My Transit Blog

Hi! My name is John Charles Wilson and I founded the Minneapolis Transit Blog in imitation of the Seattle Transit Blog. (I hope they consider it flattering!)

Today is the 52nd Anniversary of the Metropolitan Transit Commission takeover of Twin City Lines. Officially the money ($6.1 million) changed hands at 5 PM on the 18th, and buses under MTC auspices started running at midnight, the beginning of the 19th of September, 1970.

Coincidentally, that was also the day the Mary Tyler Moore Show premiered, and the intro shows a green Twin City Lines bus going down the Nicollet Mall. That is just so iconic!

Culture and transit have both changed a lot in the last 52 years, as one should guess. Of course, it can be slightly surprising as I can remember the 1970s, but when you consider that today is as far after 1970 as World War I was before it. The Mary Tyler Moore Show that I just mentioned was considered feminist in its time, but the behavior of the characters would be considered male chauvinist by today’s standards. In 1970 help wanted ads in the newspaper (Remember those, LOL?) actually still listed jobs as “male” or “female”. And of course, what might have been considered a “progressive” attitude towards minorities in 1970 would be considered rip-roaring racist today.

Why am I mentioning this stuff? In part it’s to atone for a big mistake I made in my transit advocacy from about 1980 to 2013. I used to advocate a return to the routes, fares, and schedules in effect before the MTC took over Twin City Lines. I even advocated a “sacred street grid” when I ran for Mayor of Minneapolis in 2009 and 2013, in order to restore streets which had been bus routes but are now blocked by buildings, like 7th Street in downtown Saint Paul (destroyed for the failure that was Town Square), and Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis (destroyed for a Kmart). Of course, I’m still for reopening Nicollet, but it’s not out of an absurd sense of nostalgia. I now acknowledge that 1970 was probably the worst era for public transit in the entire United States and should not be a model to emulate. The private bus companies, like Twin City Lines, were dwindling down to nothing due to economic factors, and government transit agencies had to step in to ensure there would even be transit.

Anyway, I am running this blog as a labour of love for now. I reserve the right to monetize this blog in the future.

Welcome to the Minneapolis Transit Blog!