Hwy. 65 commuter buses may roll soon

Last year, the Anoka County Highway Department finished its overhaul of Hwy. 65 in Blaine. This year, the county is working on ways to get fewer people driving on it.

With the idea of improving mass transit on the corridor, the county received a $7 million Congestion Mitigation Air Quality grant from the Federal Highway Administration. With $1.5 million in matching money, the county has issued a request for proposals for consultants to help create a plan.

At minimum, the county will make use of timed stoplights and a widened bus lane to ferry nine busloads of commuters from Blaine's northern edge into downtown Minneapolis and back. The county is eyeing a few parcels southwest of Hwy. 65 and Main Street for park-and-ride lots to hold 400 commuters' cars.

The thoroughfare remains one of the metro area's most congested, and it's clear that interest in transit extends north of Blaine, said Kate Garwood, an Anoka County transportation planner.

She said Hwy. 65 planners learned that about 10,000 vehicles enter the artery in Blaine; but about 45,000 come from beyond Bunker Lake Boulevard, north of the border into Ham Lake.

"The farther north I can go to capture traffic, the more I can mitigate traffic into Blaine," she said.

And it turns out that moving north on Hwy. 65, the chips are falling into place for an expanded transit corridor. Ham Lake has a couple acres set aside for a park-and-ride. East Bethel already has one running, at the city's ice arena. Athens Township and Isanti have plans for lots near their municipal offices, and Cambridge has 80 spaces set aside on 313th Av. NE.

The federal grant will cover operations from 2013 through 2015.

"We either prove the service is valuable and it will be funded by whatever powers there are," she said, or the county will look to another service.

But officials are up-front about their interest in a rail corridor in Hwy. 65's future. It could be that this is an initial leg of the proposed Northern Lights Express rail that could continue from a hub in Coon Rapids, through Blaine and all the way to Duluth, with stops in Cambridge, Hinckley and other cities along the way. The Northstar commuter rail service started out as a commuter bus, Garwood noted, and the same could happen here.

"What's the worst thing that's going to happen? They'll tell us no," she said. "We need to do this for all the right reasons before we put the buses on the road," she said. "I want to spend this money right."

Garwood said she has received encouragement and support from Anoka County Commissioner Dan Erhart, who also was an early enthusiastic backer of the Northstar Line.

"There are a whole host of reasons that public transportation is going to work for us now and particularly in the future. ... We need to plan for people living here 20 years, 30, 40 years from now."