Recently, I heard a new phrase: Hide and ride.

These are transit passengers who drive close to their light-rail station of choice, park and then hop on the train. Sometimes they park on residential streets. Other times, they park in commercial parking lots.

Aaron Isaacs, a retired Metro Transit planner and manager, tracked "hide-and-riders" along the Green Line this month for the blog, streets.mn. He and a pal traversed the Green Line's route and found clusters of cars between the Western Avenue and Prospect Park stations.

They discovered 207 suspected hide-and-riders, most of them parked near St. Paul's Hamline and Lexington Avenue stations, with 63 and 35 cars, respectively. In addition, 30 cars "that didn't seem to belong to local employers" were discovered near the Raymond Avenue station, Isaacs said.

Isaacs simply assesses the parking landscape and guesses whether cars are hide-and-rides.

"You don't know for sure," Isaacs noted. But the dozen or so cars found at a Target store overflow lot near the Hamline Avenue station"are clustered in the far corner of the lot as close to the station as possible."

Cities often end up posting parking restrictions to discourage hide-and-riders from taking up spots on residential streets. "In the morning, you could tell the cars that belonged to residents because there was frost on the car windows. The ones without the frost were the ones who didn't live there," he said.

While with Metro Transit, Isaacs tracked hide-and-riders along the Blue Line, which began service in 2004. Currently, there are free park-and-ride lots near the Mall of America, Fort Snelling and Lake Street stations, according to Metro Transit spokesman Drew Kerr. There are no such lots along the Green Line, he said, although about a third of transit riders connect to stations by bus.

Metro Transit police don't hunt for hide-and-riders, he noted. If there's an issue, building owners can contact the transit agency to resolve it.

Janet Moore • 612-673-7752