I found this (see photo of Discover Central Corridor Coupon Book) littering my sidewalk. Yes littering. It was not placed in the mailbox (which I realize is a federal crime since it was not delivered by the USPS), it was tossed randomly onto my sidewalk like a newspaper, except it isn’t a newspaper, I didn’t subscribe, and hence it is littering. Wikipedia: “Litter consists of waste products such as containers, papers, and wrappers which have been disposed of without consent.”
Now I realize this is an attempt to market the businesses on the now quite disrupted University Avenue Corridor, which is to be avoided at all costs by motorists with alternatives due to the construction of the Central Corridor Green Line. Things have not been helped by the poor signal timing. And I realize helping shoppers shop here is “a good thing”. They should deliver it in the mail with all of the other junk I receive instead of creating a new pile of junk, thereby minimizing the number of waste streams I must process.
We now have three names for this corridor: University Avenue, Central Corridor, and Green Line. Promoting the jargonish “Central Corridor” was a mistake, given the already existing and separate Central Avenue which Minneapolis wants to make a streetcar line and the recent Metropolitan Council decision to call it the Green Line. (There were worse names, Puce comes to mind, but there were also better, such as Maroon (my vote), to tie it conceptually better to the University of Minnesota (whose school colors are Maroon and Gold) where it stops thrice. The U of Mn is the University for which University Avenue is named, and which would make it both easy to navigate on a map, but also give Minnesota’s largest transit system (still to be renamed) a more notable identity across cities, at least among transit geeks and travelers. Every city has a Green Line and a Red Line, we could have been the only North American city with a Maroon Line (apparently Nottingham has a Maroon Line bus). I suppose the logic was, we would have been the largest city in North America without a “Green Line”, and since we can only follow, not lead, we needed one.)
It was nice to give BRT lines in the Twin Cities colors, while the flailing Northstar was implicitly demoted with a mere name and number, not a full-fledged color (which would have been misleading given its lack of midday or frequent service). I always thought Hiawatha LRT (now the abstract Blue Line, presumably because it will interline with Bottineau at some point) would be Yellow to match the livery.
However this color scheme will make it more difficult to offer services from St. Paul to Maple Grove, or from Bloomington to Eden Prairie, either of which might turn out to be useful. One could easily imagine offering alternating services so people who were time flexible could avoid a needless 3 to 6 minute transfer in downtown MPLS. Shall we soon see the Aquamarine line and Turquoise line for these other combinations of Blue and Green?