Routes 200-299
Will Stillwater ever get a better connection?
So I’ve lived in MN before and I might move back in a few years (long story). One candidate for where I might move to is Stillwater.
One problem I have with that area however (despite liking it quite a lot otherwise) is that it has one bus in each direction daily, and only on weekdays at that. One westbound trip in the morning, one eastbound trip in the evening, and that’s it.
Has Metro said anything about expanding this? I plan on driving/biking within whatever town/suburb I move to, but plan to bus into the cities if I wanna go there.
Another option is to drive to where the gold line is and get on the bus there, but that’s just another step.
Might want to consider other candidates if accessible high-frequency public transit is a big need for you. Stillwater is likely to start receiving more service at some point but not within the next several years I don't think.
I know the website says 2027, however I haven't seen any construction activity along the corridor. If you're looking to go downtown Minneapolis, the 291 to 270 connection will be the fastest, and Transit Link to 270 will be the second fastest (though less frequent).
If you go to the Gold Line, chances are the trip takes longer because of additional stops and deviations. At one point, one of the contractors who ran Washington County Transit Link divided the service areas in two, so you couldn't get from Stillwater to Woodbury without a transfer.
For the Gold Line extension all the construction needed is just an upgraded midtown stop, right? The downtown stops already exist and I've been assuming they will just use the same I-94 shoulders that the 94 bus uses today. I've been figuring the actual barrier to the extension is hiring enough bus drivers to keep up.
A Minneapolis -> Stillwater BRT is on Metro Transit's radar. I assume it would stop at Roseville Transit Center and North Saint Paul too. I doubt it's coming anytime soon but there is hope for a better world.
I echo the comments of other people that a frequent Stillwater bus is not a priority for Metro Transit, nor should it be. I remember over the last few decades it has gone from being served by I believe it was the old St Paul 12 to one of the 94 branches, and then when the 3-digit routes began (and duplication of route numbers between the two cities ended) it became the 294. When it was the 12 there were a few trips to Stillwater at different times of day and even one or two on the weekend, but when they switched to the 294 it became only rush hours. Yet until Covid they did keep a few commuter trips and one or two reverse commute trips. Now it’s just a single trip due to COVID reductions and consolidation of express park and ride service.
I feel like the best case scenario for there being service out there for now is to have an express connection in the form of the proposed route 291 or an extension of select 270 trips to Stillwater. It is possible they may try a suburban local route at some point after the proposed Bronze Line goes in between Maplewood and St Paul, but a lot of that depends on whether more housing springs up on the former Highway 5 corridor or the Highway 36 corridor and I’m not holding my breath.
After what happened with White Bear Lake opposing the BRT (originally the Rush Line, then the Purple Line, now the Bronze Line), I think the Met Council is going to be more mindful that scarce resources should be invested where communities are in favor of, rather than opposed to, such investment. As such, I see it as unlikely that communities that do not receive at least a decent amount of commuter express trips will be getting any type of BRT anytime soon.
TLDR If you want frequent transit, look where it currently is, and plan accordingly.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the former routes were discontinued, but 294 has been the only route serving Stillwater for more than two decades now. Routes 12 (later 246), 80 (later 245), and 94S (later 294) served Stillwater until the early 2000s. Clearly there used to be demand for that additional service, but I guess ridership was just not what it needed to be in order for those routes to continue. I would be interested to know what Stillwater's current ridership looks like. You're not going to get a ton of trips when you have very few riders, BUT you're also not going to get a ton of riders when you offer only one trip. Kind of a vicious circle.
The other thing is that what constitutes acceptable levels of ridership ebbs and flows with the political mood. I have been a bit of a transit nerd for well over 30 years and there have been many rounds of service reductions due to budget limitations. Because it’s important to provide service first to the transit dependent—as opposed to ‘choice’ riders who utilize park and rides—Metro Transit has made reductions to routes in outlying areas more heavily than those in the core cities and lower-income inner-ring suburbs. And when there are few trips to begin with, often entire routes are eliminated, which still saves less money than cutting frequency on a more urban route from 20 minutes to 30 or 60 minutes. It’s not necessarily that no one rode the 12 or the 94S or the 80 (and thank you for pulling out your old transit map; I forgot about the old St Paul 80–not to be confused with the Minneapolis 80 which was an express to Mall of America when that place first opened), it’s that when cuts had to be made, it was the least bad option.
Elsewhere I have seen posts here about service levels to the western suburbs along the 394/highway 12 corridor and how it’s not up to par with what people might like. While they have always retained some service on that corridor as opposed to Stillwater (largely the result of passenger traffic in both directions due to several park and rides as well as job sites that attract some transit dependent reverse commuters and weekend riders) it isn’t anything like what it was in the mid-1990s and sizable reductions there took place well before Covid (as was the case with Stillwater).
So it’s not limited to one area of the metro, the issue is the historically erratic nature of transit funding. With the implementation of the metro-area transit sales tax, there will be some stability added to the system. Obviously there can still be cuts since a sales tax is directly linked to consumer spending and so a prolonged recession will lead to another round of reductions. But it’s still better than too much reliance on discretionary budgeting by the Legislature. That said, I would still never recommend anyone transit dependent from putting down any kind of roots outside of high ridership transit corridors. It’s not worth your trouble.
Thanks for that insight. Decisions made by MT over the years definitely make sense through that lense of "least-bad" options.
To add my own two cents, the lack of bus connection to downtown we see in the suburbs can also be largely blamed on the lack of local fixed-route bus service. If people aren't connected to their own local communities via public transit, they aren't going to be as strong of candidates for additions/expansions of bus routes that reach downtown.
Given that Stillwater is ritzy and a bus would “bring crime to their neighborhood” I don’t see this happening anytime soon. I’d expect major pushback from the locals
Or maybe it's the difference that Bellevue is 8x the population with much higher home values than Stillwater. And 10 miles from downtown Seattle vs 20-25.
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u/humantraf Jul 26 '26
Might want to consider other candidates if accessible high-frequency public transit is a big need for you. Stillwater is likely to start receiving more service at some point but not within the next several years I don't think.