One Of The Definitions Of Insanity…

…is, reportedly, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

If at first you build a $500 Million train and it comes in closer to $700M, so you build a “$1.4 Billion” train that comes in over $2 Billion, so you build a $2 Bllion dollar train that’s going to be well over $3 billion if they finish it at all…

…then why the heck not estimate an extension to an existing useless crack den of a train for $2.9-$3.2 Billion and shoot for $4.5B by the time you’re done?

For Want Of A Strongly-Worded Sign

SCENE 1: It is Constantinople, 1453. The Ottoman forces under SULEIMAN THE GREAT have breached the inner wall of defenses, on their way toward changing the city’s name to Istanbul. SULEIMAN and GENERAL KARAKÜL are standing in the breach, as troops stream past, on their way to loot, rape and pillage.

KARAKÜL: “Go forth and seize what you will, and burn the rest, for you have earned it!

SULEIMAN: (Looking at a sign, in Greek, just inside the wall). Uh, just a moment. The sign says “No raping, looting, pillaging or burning”.

KARAKÜL: Ooops. Good catch, your excellency. (Yelling to troops) Check that. No looting, raping or pillaging!


SCENE 2: Nürnberg, Germany, 1934. The leaders of the recently-empaneled German “Emergency Cabinet” led by Adolf HITLER, are walking from a meeting to a small vegetarian cafe for lunch, discussing their plans now that they’ve achieved complete control of Germany.

HITLER: So, we’ve agreed. The campaign for Lebensraum and the final solution to the “Jewish Problem” must proceed in parallel…”

RUDOLPH HESS: Uh, Mein Führer, before we go too far on that, check that out.

(HESS points at a multicolored sign on the wall next to the cafe.

HITLER: “In this haus, we believe that science is real, that nobody is illegal, that Jews are Human…”

MARTIN BORMAN: D’oh.

HITLER: That changes everything. Maybe we should just work something about with the Poles about Danzig…


SCENE 3: Minneapolis. It’s 1AM on a Saturday morning. Inge SVENSSON and Guiseppe MORELLI, two young hoodlums with arms laden with bottles of cheap vodka and drug syringes, are walking onto the Green Line platform at Stadium Village.

MORELLI: Damn. I need a fix.

SVENSSON: Me too. And I feel like groping some chick.

MORELLI: Groping, my a**. I need to get some.

(A Green Line train with few passengers pulls up to the stop)

SVENSSON: I like how you think my good man. But first, I gotta take a dump.

MORELLI: Don’t be a pig and do it here. Do it on the train. And hurry – my back teeth are floating. Also, I gotta get high.

SVENSSON: Oh, s**t. Wait. Read this:

(Both men scrutinize the sign).

MORELLI: No pooping, peeing, drinking or drug use?

SVENSSON: Dammit. Now we gotta find a restaurant.

MORELLI: The Metro cares about that stuff now? Who knew?

And SCENE

Let Them Eat Paint

Overdoses.

Public solicitation and delivery of prostitution.

Open drug dealing.

Gang activity. Robberies. Muggings. Assaults

No, I’m not talking about the House DFL Caucus offices. I’m talking about the big Metro Transit stations in Minneapolis.

And what’s the remedy?

According to Metro Transit and its big government stakeholders: murals.

Metro Transit is turning to murals in an effort to make its bus and light-rail stations more welcoming.

The latest installation is at the I-35W and Lake Street Transit Station in south Minneapolis, a busy hub that’s been plagued by graffiti and where two people were wounded in a shooting this spring. Police data also show there have been two robberies near the station this year.

Local artist Kada Goalen spent six weeks and 90 gallons of paint transforming gray and beige concrete walls and pillars into a vibrant spectacle featuring giant songbirds against a backdrop of color.

Let’s cut to the chase: what this is is not a serious attempt to make Transit less onerous at best, dangerous at worst.

It’s yet another transfer of money from taxpayers to the favored clients of the political class.

Their Best Interests

A friend of the blog emails:

North Minneapolis residents have voiced concern frequently about the Blue Line extension, which is supposed to “benefit them” per the elites who would never be caught dead on public transit, but in actuality will likely drive residents out to some new location so the elites have a new hipster playground.

A developer for the area says, “I think it’s horribly sad and unfortunate for the community to take out a performing office building.”

I offer him to check out University Avenue following the Green Line project. While that project didn’t demolish any buildings immediately, it has gradually over the past almost 10 years emptied the street. Whether the Blue Line extension demolishes the building that houses KMOJ right now or not, I would guess the area will be gutted within a decade anyway.

Of course, to the Met Council, “lessons learned” are of no more importance than “public feedback”.

Remembering The CFL

No – not the Canadian Football League. That still exists, believe it or not.

No – does a nyone out there remember the “compact fluorescent light”, or CFL?It seems like just yesterday when the green mafia wheedled the government into mandating the replacement of the incandescent bulb with the CFL – a miniature fluorescent tube that screws into a light socket and resembles the “poop“ emoji.

People resisted them. They were much more expensive than incandescent bulbs, the light (being a fluorescent tube), gave people, headaches, and they were hazardous to dispose of in landfills.

It wasn’t long after that the free market came up with the “LED bulb“ – an adaptation of “light emitting diode“ technology that had been around for decades. it used very little power, it created a much more pleasant brand of light, and it wasn’t toxic waste.

The federal mandate was apparently forgotten. As has been, near as I can tell, the compact fluorescent.

I’m reminded of that when I see how clumsy and ill thought out the governments, current mandate Ridge, the electric vehicle“ is, compared with a potentially much more palatable option, the hydrogen powered car.

Government may have learned something from the CFL fiasco, of course; and that “something“ is most likely not “listen to the free market“. As the Covid lockdowns show us, “strong arming the media and big tech into helping jam acquiescence down” also works.

Seven Year Plan

Minneapolis has big plans for transit, and Minneapolitans are part of them, whether they like it or not.

June 24, 2023 – 2:00 PM

In seven years, Minneapolis transportation planners want 60% of trips in the city taken on public transit, or made by biking, walking or rolling.

The effort to achieve that ambitious goal, which is laid out in the city’s Transportation Action Plan, began this month as the city partnered with marketing agency Vision Flourish to kick off the mode-shift campaign called “As You Go Minneapolis.”

“We want to shift people’s behavior and thinking about how to move about the city,” said Amy Barnstorff, a transportation planner in the city’s Public Works Department.

No word on how they plan to enforce compliance with this diktat.

It was about this time fifteen years ago that I was in the middle of my 11-month experiment at doing without a car.

Among my conclusions from that experiment:

I want to laugh when I see some of the lefties – especially the transit-oriented leftybloggers – yapping about running their lives on transit.  I notice that not a single one of them seems to have kids; children are the big clinker in the “transit-oriented lifestyle”.  If you have to get kids to an after-school event, it’s a major expedition; if you have to take one to urgent care, it’s either miserable (hauling sick kids on the bus is a rotten feeling, although I never had to do it) or expensive (cabs in the Twin Cities are nothing to write home about). 

Just to run down the hunch, I checked out the transit planner featured in the article.

And sure enough, she punched all the expected tickets; her and her significant other apparently have a dog, but no children.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who can walk that particular walk without having a car for a backup.

Someone prove me wrong.

It’s Transit Memorial Day


Today is the 18th anniversary of the opening of the Metro Transit Blue Line – the beginning, or re-beginning, of light rail transit in the Twin Cities.

So on this anniversary, let us remember the people who gave their lives – unwillingly and in most cases unwittingly – to further Minnesota’s political class’s obsession with feeling like a Big City.

It was a relatively quiet year on the rail lines – if you leave out crime at the train stations and on board the trains, of course. But the trains didn’t run over anyone new.

Still:

That’s 30 dead, so far. 30 lives snuffed out so that the Met Council, the various governments, and other people who love to play with the dials and levers of government can feel like they’re “running” a big city with all the trimmings. 

Let’s take a moment today to remember these innocent victims of government narcissism and megalomania.

Learning From Failure?

A friend of the blog emails:

The tides seem to be changing

I remember when a similar editorial was written about downtown Minneapolis and the man who wrote it was basically canceled. And the Star Tribune took it down.
It’s interesting to note how the writer says, “I don’t raise these opinions in certain rooms, because I am deeply enmeshed in the progressive ecosystem of belief, and have adapted to those spaces for much of my life.”

Glad he finally feels brave enough to raise these concerns. Hope we can get some real enforcement nationwide on Fentanyl use, crime, etc. 

Hope springs eternal, I suppose. But that would involve admitting there’s a problem – and what the causes of those problems actually are.

Baby steps, maybe.

Metaphor Alert

A billion dollar train with nobody on it runs a stop signal and rams a car that had the right of way pinning it between it and another LRT train.

Is there a more perfect bunch of parallels for government in the Twin Cities these days?

Sartre Was So Close

“Hell is other people”, said the French existentialist philosopher.

Close, but no cigar.

Hell is, however, most things “public”.

Like the behavior in public waiting rooms on public transit lines by certain members of the public.

Metro Transit is shutting down the indoor waiting area at the Hennepin Avenue transit station due to what I’m going to start referring to as Southside Cardio: Drug Abuse, Prostitution and Street Crime”. :

“Over the last couple of years, these places have become more and more of a problem for us,” [MTC spokesman Drew] Kerr said. “There aren’t a lot of locations like this that are open right now for the public to just be and to stay warm. And that’s not what they’re intended for.”

Metro Transit officials said in an announcement Tuesday the closure of the Uptown station is also due to property damage and litter. The space will be reopened later in the year when contracted security officers are in place at the station and five other locations. Those stations include the Vertical Circulation Building/Central Station in downtown St. Paul, the Blue Line Lake Street/Midtown and Franklin Avenue stations, the Chicago-Lake Transit Center and the Brooklyn Center Transit Center.

The building near the Central Station in St. Paul already closed in December after a double homicide…”The amount of open drug use is the largest thing right now. Homelessness, as well. And we’re not social workers,” Timlin said.

Across the transit system, crime rose by 54 percent between 2021 and 2022. Metro Transit officials said last year, about a quarter of the calls for service were at the six stations where they’re bringing in security.

The crime will move to the neighborhoods, of course.

Urban Progressive Privilege: Alone

To: Lieutenant Governor Flanagan,
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: Glad You’ve Discovered Light Rail Crime!

Of all the people who’ve been beaten, robbed and murdered on Twin Cities light rail platforms, it’s good to know you’ve paid attention to one of them, finally:

But clearly, you do not ride the light rail. I suspect you hitch a ride to the office with the state patrol, just like the governor. I’m gonna guess you haven’t ridden a train since long before you became Lieutenant Governor.

Just a quick tip from someone who rode the Vomit Comet (aka “Green Line”) day and night for a year and a half; when you’re out there on that platform, late at night, in the city you and the DFL created, you are absolutely, completely alone. Nothing there but you and God. None of your ex post facto happy talk is of the faintest bit of protection against The DFL’s Minneapolis.

To my credit, I figured it would be a victim like this, that got you to finally pay attention to street crime.

Sort of.

That is all.

Body Count

Two people murdered at downtown Saint Paul’s Central Avenue transit station on Monday night:

Officers responded about 8:30 p.m. to the corner of Fifth and Cedar streets, where they found two people suffering from apparent gunshot wounds in the stairway/elevator structure that connects the skyway to the Green Line Central Station light rail stop, according to Metro Transit Police spokesman Drew Kerr.

Both of the wounded people were taken to a nearby hospital, but they both later died, Kerr said.

Another man was murdered on the same station’s platform last spring.

The “Transit Memorial Day” post next June is going to be a doozy.

Buried

Releasing a story the Friday before the Labor Day weekend?

Wow. This must be a real disaster:

The southwest light rail, the biggest civil engineering project in state history, is shaping up to be an epic disaster.

And if, after all the terrible news of this last year, they’re still doing their news dumps before the weekend when literally everyone is doing something else?

Fearless prediction: Governor Klink won’t be going to the fair this weekend.

The Mother Of All Debacles

Watching the ongoing slow dripping failure of the Southwest Light Rail line, it’s temping to remember a time when American could actually accomplish big public infrastructure projects.

Forget for a moment the breezy authoritarianism that went behind such projects as “Urban Renewal” and driving interstates through neighborhoods with less clout than their neighbors – that’s part and parcel of government “getting things done” whether your goal is to drive from Cleveland to Detroit or to stop the spread of a disease with a 99+% survival rate.

But there was a time when this country did get big projects done; the canal system, the coastal forts, the transcontinental railroad, the Panama Canal, the Tennessee Valley Authroity (again, forget the low-grade totalitarianism), the Interstate Highway System.

Those days seem to be over. America just doesn’t finish big infrastructure jobs anymore.

It’s a long read – but this piece notes the dismal record of American public infrastructure work since the beginning and failure of California’s “High Speed Rail” (HSR):

Despite its failure, the HSR project inaugurated the U.S.’s megaproject era. Once a rare type of project, by 2018 megaprojects comprised 33 percent of the value of all U.S. construction project starts. An alarming number of these have spiraled out of control for many of the same reasons that killed the California bullet train. The decade that followed the financial crisis was a kind of inflection point in the industry; this was when construction projects became noticeably worse and when the long-term implications could no longer be ignored. One of the most cited studies of the U.S.’s declining ability to build reviewed 180 transit megaprojects across the country, revealing that today, U.S. projects take longer to complete and cost nearly 50 percent more on average than those in Europe and Canada.

Having joined Kiewit in 2010, I witnessed these changes first-hand. I have since moved on, but have remained in the broader industry, including working on what are called “strategic pursuits”—the process by which companies compete for megaprojects. This experience has provided insight into the mechanics of how these projects are awarded and why they so frequently fail.

You can fill in “Southwest LIght Rail” (and some Twin Cities-y locations) at virtually any point in the piece, and it still makes sense.

It’s Transit Memorial Day


Today is the 18th anniversary of the opening of the Metro Transit Blue Line – the beginning (or re-beginning) of light rail transit in the Twin Cities.

So on this anniversary, let us remember the people who gave their lives – unwillingly and in most cases unwittingly – to further Minnesota’s political class’s obsession with feeling like a Big City.

That’s 30 dead, so far. 30 lives sacrificed so that the Met Council, the various governments, and other people who love to play with the dials and levers of government can feel like they’re “running” a big city with all the trimmings. 

Let’s take a moment today to remember these innocent victims of government narcissism and megalomania.

The Only Way To Win Is Not To Play

I come neither to praise nor “improve” the Southwest Light Rail. I come to bury it.

Bill Lindeke – “urban geographer” and transitphile – is more or less the opposite. He wrote a critique of the troubled (doomed?)( project in the MInnPost a few weeks ago – fascinating on some levels, and a complete howler on at least one other.

Fascinating: Lindeke details the NIMBY-ism that led the line to skirt around the north and west edges of Kenwood (where people are more wont to take the Mercedes or the Tesla than take the train, thankewverymuch).

Unstated: it makes the same mistake rail transit always makes in this decentralized era. Rail transit was desiged at a time when the middle class woke up in a bedroom suburb and commuted downtown to their factory or office jobs. Today, as the decentralization of jobs and the economy continues, accelerated by the pandemic, that model is as quaint and obsolete as a rabbit-ear antenna for your TV. By their very nature, and that of society, trains these days largely take people who don’t exist from places they aren’t to where they don’t need to go. Only the money being transferred from taxpayers to the transit-industrial complex is real.

Now, the Howler: Remember how driving a train down 5th, Washington and University gutted the Midway?

Lindeke apparently doesn’t. His plans for Hennepin Avenue are…

…welll:

In the case of Southwest Light Rail, the best alternative — a tunnel underneath Hennepin Avenue, interlining with the Green Line downtown — was never studied as an option. Instead, early on in the process, planners studied an at-grade route down Hennepin Avenue that would have been disruptive to the existing urban fabric. Then, as the routing decision came to a head, planners analyzed a tunnel down Nicollet Avenue that would have been impossible to connect seamlessly downtown. Nobody ever studied a Hennepin Avenue tunnel that represented the best combination of speed, density and efficient use of infrastructure.

The Midway may never completely recover from the building of the Vomit Comet straight down the middle of its main street, University Avenue.

Can you imagine what years of excavation, tunnel construction, the associated utility and infrastructure rerouting and, let’s be honest, the inevitable planning blunders would do the Uptown?

Above and beyond the fact that tunnels cost at least 10 times as much as at-grade rail – likely raising the cost of the entire route from (I predict)( $3 Billion to (assuming couple of miles of subway) $7-8 billion (before the inevitable Met Council incompetence and government inflation kick in)?

Don’t praise it. Bury it. Not literally. Figuratively.

A slow boat to (or from) China

I didn’t intend to make this “China Week”, it just sorta worked out that way as things caught my eye 🙂 That said, this interesting article from Prospect highlighted something that has probably flown under the radar as we go about our daily lives and wonder why our favorite Acme Widget isn’t on the shelf at Wal-mart this week.

Standardized intermodal shipping containers have revolutionized the worldwide transport of cargo. When a container can be shipped to a port, then lifted off the ship by crane and placed directly on a rail car, then transported to another hub and lifted off the train and placed directly onto a truck trailer, all without unloading that container, costs are greatly reduced.



Guess who manufactures the lion’s share of those containers, though?

Three large Chinese companies—CIMC, Dong Fang, and CXIC—produce approximately 82 percent of all containers, according to the report. Combined with some smaller firms, China makes over 95 percent of these containers, and the only other ones produced are for specific regional markets or in nonstandard sizes.

So essentially all standard-sized containers used in global shipping, roughly 44 million boxes, were manufactured in China, as well as around 86 percent of all intermodal chassis. China’s state-owned container manufacturers benefit from large government subsidies and other benefits. And in seemingly coordinated fashion, they slowed production of new containers when demand initially rose during the pandemic, leading to prices nearly doubling from early 2020 to today.

China took control of container manufacturing in the 1990s, stealing market share from South Korea, according to FreightWaves. A coalition known as the China Container Industry Association, or CCIA, directs most of the activity, and it’s dominated by CIMC, the world’s largest container manufacturer, producing about 40 percent of the world’s containers.

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The Tesla, my friend, is blowing in the wind…

Leftism is all about harnessing the power of pixie dust and expeller pressed unicorn horn oil. I wish the laws of economics and of nature to be different, therefore they are. One way magical thinking manifests itself is the sun-dappled dream that we can get rid of fossil fuels, switch to electric vehicles, the changeover will be painless, and we won’t notice any change in our standard of living.

An electric car is, well, electric, and electric is easy because I can just plug in my Vitamix blender at home to make my artisanal kale smoothie and it just turns on and couldn’t be simpler. So having an electric car will be just as easy!

Michael Lind has a good article in Tablet outlining the difficulties in putting an electric car in every garage. Never mind how we’re going to “cleanly” produce all the electricity these vehicles would consume. Electric vehicles, and especially the batteries that power them, require the kinds of natural resources that don’t grow on trees.

But according to experts on global mineral production who belong to SoS Minerals, in a letter delivered to the British Committee on Climate Change:

The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050 and all sales to be purely battery electric [in the UK] by 2035. To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and 12% of the world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of European industry. …

Challenges of using ‘green energy’ to power electric cars: If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years’ worth of total global copper supply and 10 years’ worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the windfarms.

There is not enough cobalt, neodymium, or lithium being mined and refined in the entire world today for Britain to meet its green transition goals in the next generation. And Britain has only 67 million people. The United States has 330 million. The world has nearly 8 billion. Do the math.

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Just Another Day On The Vomit Comet

Hand one to Fred Melo of the Pioneer Press – he’s done the unthnkable, for a Twin Cities mainstream media figure; actually reporting on the actual state of life on the “Vomit Comet” (AKA Green Line)..

A friend of the blog emailed re this story:

I’d rather double down on reminding people why the Green Line is so awful than be snarky. But, with all the urbanists subtweeting Fred Melo’s post about smoking/drinking on light rail, them tweeting that smoking is no big deal, not a safety issue, I kind of want to ask if smokers will be welcome again at bars/restaurants again. 

It’s a mostly smokeless smoke.

Leave Bad Enough Alone

Our cities are a little like Charlie Brown.

Every time Lucy puts the ball on the ground, Charlie remembers all the times she’s pulled the ball away. And yet, he has faith; maybe this will be the first time.

Lucy’s back:

Let’s make sure we’re clear on this – the only “fans” of this idea are the members of the non-profit/industrial complex and the consultant class, who’ll benefit handsomely from it.

As they did from light rail, and the “urban reimagining” of which it is a part.

As they did from the Saint Paul Port Authority’s grandiose, costly, failed urban utopian visionmongering.

As they did from “Urban Renewal”, which did the opposite of renew urban life, replacing old downtowns with sterile, brutalist concrete canyons (see also – Downtown Saint Paul, from Minnesota to Jackson).

A friend of the blog emailed:

I94 was built to “revitalize” middle class Black neighborhood and poor white neighborhood. Historically, it is now said to have destroyed the Rondo neighborhood businesses. 
But, people were not defeated. Black businesses persisted. Businesses by Immigrants from Asian countries also moved in. Perhaps I94 worked. It revitalized!
How dare they. So the Green Line was built to “revitalize” marginalized neighborhoods of working class Americans (of all races, ethnicities).
It kind of worked-businesses closed or left to areas that were no longer on Green Line. Many Black owned, Asian American owned, and immigrant owned businesses left.
Any hope of retail that appealed to work class neighbors was squashed by Allianz Field construction. It was further solidified once the remaining businesses were allowed to be destroyed in the 2020 riots.
Yet, our elites must believe there are still too many of the wrong people lurking around the neighborhood. We need to be further revitalized out of the community. Maybe Bill McGuire and his soccer fans are scared of us. Thus, people like Councilmember Mitra Jalali and urbanist activists propose to once again destroy what communities have built around. 

In a city destroyed, over and over, by urban planning dilettantes, this is yet another fun project for the urban wonk class, which will be paid for literally by taxpayers, and figuratively by generations of the urban miserable yet unborn.

Its An Idea

A friend and occasional commenter writes:

To the tune of Johnny Cash ‘How Highs the Water Momma?’

Let’s blow some money papa

700 Mil and climbing

It’s a billion here, a billion there

who gives a damn if people care

we’re not elected and that’s not fair

700 mil and climbing

Let’s blow some money papa

1.7 billion and climbing

The council’s broke, Walz is woke

We’ll spend enough money

To make the DFL Choke

In the end who’s going to care

1.7 bill and climbing

Almost writes itself…..That’s after just one cup of coffee

Craig (Redacted)

I haven’t recorded anything in a while. Might have to give this a shothave to give us a shot.

Given the damage popping up in that condo unit/converted grain silo, might have to come up with some lyrics adapted from “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.

The Money Pit

So the Southwest Light Rail – already estimated at an insane two billion dollars – is going to go 40% over budget, and 3-4 years late.

Cost overruns and delays have pushed the most expensive public works project in state history well above its original $2 billion budget. Last year, Met Council tapped a $200 million contingency fund from Hennepin County taxpayers, which is now mostly committed. The council has been unable to give an updated cost estimate for months.

“These changes have impacted both the time required [for Lunda McCrossan] to complete its work and the costs under the civil construction contract,” Metro Transit General Manager Wes Kooistra and project managers wrote in a memo to council members. “These changes will also delay the systems contractor, the start of revenue operations, and result in additional costs.”

Many of the changes are due to posh Kenwood NIMBYs who support light rail, but not in their backyards, forcing the line into a ruinously expensive tunnel. That tunnel – which should be called the “Met Council Provides Concierge Service To Posh Neighborhoods With DFL Clout” tunnel, although the plaques over the galleries would probably add another $50 Million – has been a known issue for long enough that it’s already been memory-holed from the Met Council narrative.

They don’t consider themselves NIMBYs, naturally:

“They called us NIMBYs, rich people who just wanted not to be bothered,” says Mary Pattock, former chair of the Cedar Isles Dean neighborhood board and longtime critic of the LRT routing. Echoing Rep. Hornstein, she says, “we told them the geology between the lakes was messy. We told them there was not room to build a tunnel safely. We told them you are going to run into problems you are not going to be able to solve. Now it’s all coming true.”

Of course, the fact that they’re building a tunnel to carry the train under the neighborhood is because of NIMBYism on the part of the whole, well-to-do, clout-enabled neighborhood.

“750 million over budget” is in today’s dollars, by the way. My fearless prediction: by the time the first train takes the first armed robber from Target Center to Eden Prairie, this train will have cost $3.2 Billion to build. I’m making a note to check on this in 2026. I’m feeling confident.

I’ll be talking with Senator Dave Osmek about this on the show tomorrow.

Accountability

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

An altimeter is an instrument which tells you high you are. Pilots rely on them to avoid obstructions on the ground, to maintain separation between aircraft at different altitudes, and to make smooth landings.

The traditional altimeter works on air pressure. Air pressure decreases the higher you go from the Earth. If you properly calibrate your pressure altimeter, it works fine. I flew with one for years.

Modern technology has moved on. The newest altimeters work on radar. They send a radar beam down from the airplane to reflect off the ground. They are much more precise because they’re measuring the actual distance, not the calculated distance (assuming the pressure calibration is correct).

More precise, that is, unless something interferes with the radar. “RaDAR” is actually an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging. A radar wave is a radio wave operating on a certain radio frequency. A ground transmitter operating on a nearby frequency can cause interference, making the radar altimeter malfunction. On a bright, sunny day, not a huge problem. The pilot can see the ground and estimate altitude by experience. At night or in bad weather, losing your altimeter is a terrifying problem. Anything which makes a radar altimeter malfunction is a potential disaster.

Such as, for instance, 5G cell phone frequency, which is also a radio wave. 5G was planned to roll out Wednesday but has been halted because major airlines are canceling flights for fear of it.

This isn’t a new issue. We’ve known it was coming for years. Suddenly, it’s a problem? Suddenly, major airlines are complaining about how the rollout is dangerous? Why wasn’t this worked out ages ago?

Remind me, who’s in charge of transportation issues in the United States? And who’s his boss, the man where the buck stops?

Joe Doakes

The more overwhelmed with bureaucrats our government becomes, the more amateurish it gets.

A Kind Of Hush

Haven’t heard much about the southwest light rail line, have we?

There’s a reason for that. It’s hosed. Hosed perhaps beyond reasonable repair.And nobody in officialdom wants to talk about it – at least, not before the midterms:

The $2 billion Southwest Light Rail Transit Line the most expensive public works project ever undertaken in Minnesota. Besides that, it also holds the potential to be the state’s biggest boondoggle, a potential political scandal in the making in the midst of the 2022 election.

Fox 9 News reports the Met Council, the agency overseeing the project, has essentially clammed up, refusing to provide key construction updates on cost and completion date.

They don’t even have any idea when they will have any idea how bad it’s going to be:

An updated timeline and cost projection, once expected towards the end of 2021, will now come “sometime in 2022,” Trevor Roy, a project spokesman, told FOX 9. Met Council officials have long acknowledged that the rail line will exceed its original $2 billion budget and estimated 2023 opening. They are now changing tactics to renegotiate the project schedule after criticism from an outside evaluator.

Call me a cynic, but I think there’s a reason this story is coming out in January of an election year; so the media can say “we covered it! We’re not actually PR water carriers for the DFL!