Detoured Nicollet Mall buses moving to Hennepin Avenue

More changes are in store for downtown Minneapolis bus riders.

Starting Nov. 7, all routes that were forced off Nicollet Mall when a massive reconstruction project began will be moved to Hennepin Avenue.

Since midsummer, a half-dozen routes have been diverted to unwieldy detours on 2nd, 3rd and Marquette avenues S.

Ever since, ridership on those routes (10, 11, 17, 18, 25, 59 and 568) has been "off significantly," General Manager Brian Lamb said in a report to the Metropolitan Council earlier this month.

Moving the detoured buses to Hennepin should reduce confusion and allow riders to take advantage of bus shelters that have lights and heat and new, more informative signs — amenities that are not readily available along the detour.

The buses will return to Nicollet Mall when the $50 million makeover is complete in 2017.

The move to Hennepin also addresses another routing change that would have to be made next spring when the city begins a construction project on 3rd Avenue S.

Downtown is not the only place that bus ridership has taken a hit. For the year, ridership on Metro Transit buses is down 9 percent compared with 2014. The losses have occurred on urban, local and express routes.

"What we are seeing is that we're losing customers across the board," Lamb said.

Some of that is because gas prices are way down. And more people hopped on light-rail trains than ever before.

In September, nearly 1.25 million rides were taken on the Green Line, which was a high-water mark for the light-rail line between downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul. Ridership on the Blue Line, which runs between downtown Minneapolis and the Mall of America in Bloomington, is up 8 percent over 2014, the transit agency said.

Ridership on the Northstar commuter rail line is steady, but still has not recovered from the ridership plunge last fall when trains often ran late due to track maintenance problems and a backlog of freight trains that share the tracks. In January, the agency offered fare refunds if trains arrived at the station 11 minutes late. Some riders returned, but "we have not been able to grow much beyond that point," Lamb said.