DMC picks sites for Rochester transit villages'.

Byline: William Morris

Whatever you do, don't call the endpoints of Rochester's proposed bus rapid transit circulator park-and-ride garages.

The Destination Medical Center Corp. board voted Tuesday to approve two sites to anchor the four-mile route, running east to west on Second Street, then south on Broadway or Third Avenue. The endpoints, at a Mayo-owned parking lot south of Cascade Lake and the Olmsted County-owned Graham Park, will indeed offer a lot of parking for downtown-bound commuters: Early concept plans envision more than 3,000 structured parking stalls at each node.

But the corporation, which is overseeing the $5.5 billion, 20-year redevelopment of downtown Rochester around Mayo Clinic, has more ambitious goals to create new "transit villages" on each site with major new retail and housing developments, what board member Nick Campion calls a "city within a city."

"It's probably been one of the most difficult PR things we've had: 'How is this not just a park-and-ride?'" said Campion, also a City Council member, at Tuesday's meeting. "The parking is really big, but if we don't have the commercial and the residential to get that critical mass at the site, the parking is going to be a really remote parking ramp. And that will be a failure, I think, of the concept of the village."

Tuesday's vote advances a project Destination Medical Center has been working on for years, an upgrade to the city's transit infrastructure. Vehicle traffic into the downtown area is expected to grow from 165,000 trips per day in 2010 to 268,000 in 2040. Patrick Seeb, director of economic development and placemaking for the district, said the proposed circulator is an effort to control the congestion and expense of new parking garages that will otherwise fall on the downtown district.

"It will particularly address people who are driving into the city for their jobs or places of business, so that they can park a bit more remotely rather than trying to get into the downtown," Seeb said in an interview. "What we're trying to reduce is the number of people who drive into the downtown, park their car and leave it all day long, so we're not using valuable real estate for car storage."

The circulator, which likely would likely operate under the same Rochester Public Transit authority that currently runs the city's bus network, would also serve residents living near the hubs and intervening stations. That includes the hundreds of residents officials envision...