Today is the 20th 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:

• The Blue Line has mowed down 20 so far – including a pedestrian and a cyclist on back to back days just a few weeks ago. That’s an average of almost one death per year.
• The Green Line has harvested 13 victims in 11 years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. Over the past year, the line clamed a pedestrian this past March. There was also a murder on a Green Line trade last November, right after Thanksgiving.
• The Northstar line has five fatalities so far. The last was in 2019 – which, to be fair, was about the last time anyone rode the Northstar.

That’s 31 dead, so far. 31 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.

Katie Porter, former congresswoman from Orange County, is onto something – and, presumably, smoking some of the same ditch weed the DFLers who funded the Southwest Light Rail were into:

San Francisco to Oakland is 12 miles.  Even driving an SUV and paying Californnia’s absurd gas prices, that’s half the price of the train. 

And if you’re commuting for work?  $12.65 a day is $63.25 a week, which is about $3162 a year.   You’d have to be paying some pretty ridiculous parking fees to make that worthwhile.

Which may be true in Oakland (?), and the parking fees in Minneapolis and especially San Francisco will definitely wreck you.  Eden Prairie, less so.

But when you drive, you don’t as much opportunity to get mugged, or step on a syringe.

Or have your kids see hookers plying their trade:

So I guess transit get the “W”!

An audit of the Southwest Light Rail project – which is years late, and running at well over double the original projected cost, and (this is my longtime prediction) will end up over $3 Billion when it finally lurches to completion, got a hearing at the Legislature earlier this week. 

A years-long audit of the construction of the embattled Southwest Light Rail line has concluded the Metropolitan Council had issues with “non-compliance” and a lack of “internal controls” managing the mega project, which is now expected to cost taxpayers $2.86 billion.

The presentation by the Office of the Legislative Auditor also gave frustrated lawmakers another opportunity to tee off on Met Council Chair Charlie Zelle. 

“You can’t blame it on anyone else, blame it on the consultant, you are the decision maker,” said Sen. Mark Koran (R-North Branch) at the hearing on Monday morning.

The audit highlighted huge discrepancies in estimating the costs of hundreds of change orders on the project, including one for the construction of a barrier along the Kenilworth Corridor, which drove up the price of the project by more than $40 million.

How about we just start the next audit now, to save time?

There’s a move afoot to kill off the Northstar Commuter Rail line…

Well, no. There’s a move to finish the job that a misbegotten concept, government bloat and Covid started:

In 2023, it cost taxpayers over $11.5 million to operate, but the line only generated about $325,000 in fare revenue, according to a new study. 

As ridership has dwindled, the Northstar line’s future has become uncertain.  

Before the pandemic, the service carried between 2,200 and 3,000 riders on weekdays. However, during the pandemic, ridership plummeted by nearly 98%, dropping to just 60 weekday riders in April 2020. Today, the line still struggles to attract passengers, with only a couple hundred people using the service.

 

The funny – as in “weird”, not “ha ha” for the most part – thing is, commuter rail was the kind of rail service that should have had some shot at making sense; they use (or are supposed to use)  existing right of way, can use fairly minimal stations, and don’t have to tear up streets or utilities like the light rail lines through the city, and can be designed and purposed to address actual transportation needs across larger metropolitan areas.  

And yet they botched it.

And the bureaucracy’s defense – “practice makes perfect”?  Well…

Let’s see:

• The Blue Line (2005) went in without much of a hitch (provided you leave out the 30+ year delay between the clearing of the right of way and the actual building of the line)
• The Northstar (2009) had all kinds of bureaucratic and legal glitches over right-of-way, and of course the customary over-engineering.   Its problems are noted herein.
• The Green LIne (2014) went 50% over budget, and was a huge waste even at that; “light rail” is designed to be hypothetically efficient with stops every mile, so it can run at 50-60MPH over clear rights of way.  Trolleys are designed to go stop to stop down crowded streets.   The Met Council decided to make a stupid compromise – run a big train down a crowded street; sort of like.using a Corvette to pull a beer wagon.  
• The Southwest Light Rail is way over double budget and several years behind schedule, with little sign of being ready much before the end of the decade.

So I don’t think practice is doing is much good. 

“Mitch, why are you so ambivalent about self-driving cars?”

Because I work with software engineers, and I know how screamingly unreliable and charmlessly quirky anything to do with software is until the technology has years or decades to mature?

Which is annoying enough when you’re trying to make a grocery list or listen to a song.  

Getting into a metal box and clipping along at 30-60MPH? 

Hard pass. 

Electric Vehicle (EV) owners are not especially satisfied customers:

The consulting firm surveyed consumers in multiple countries: the U.S., China, Germany, Norway, Australia, France, Italy, Japan and Brazil. Between all of those countries, 29% of electric car owners want to return to driving internal combustion cars, with 46% of surveyed American electric car owners wanting to do so.

This surprised the consulting firm, cutting against received wisdom about people’s switch to electric.

But what’s not to like about a vehicle that costs more per unit of performance than a gas car, is the subject of arbitrary mandates notwithstanding the fact that the power grid can’t handle them, and is completely unsuitable for the type of long-distance driving that many Americans between the Mississippi River and the Sierra Madre do fairly routinely?

Among the owners surveyed who are planning to switch back, 35% cited the lack of charging infrastructure, 34% said the costs were too high, 32% said planning long driving trips was too difficult, 24% said they could not currently charge at home, 21% said worrying about charging was too stressful and 13% said they did not enjoy how the cars felt while driving.

Only 9% of drivers across all countries surveyed said that current charging infrastructure was sufficient to meet their needs. While some electric car drivers want to switch back, 38% of internal combustion car drivers surveyed said they are considering buying a battery-powered or plug-in hybrid electric car as their next vehicle.

I know when I was considering renting a car for a significant drive, I looked at the charging network and ended up opting for a hybrid.

I guess I forgot to mention the trip was in Norway – the most EV-friendly country in the world. And while you could find charging stations up in the mountains of rural Trøndelag, it looked like I’d be sitting and charging a loooong time to get where I needed to go. I went with a hybrid – and I loved it (when gas is $9 a gallon, regenerative braking is a fine thing).

And as I predicted 15 years ago, I’m counting the hours until the market overrides the government mandates and chooses hydrogen.

UPDATED 6/24 – I miscounted.

Today is the 19th 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:

• The Blue Line has mowed down 15 so far – eight pedestrians, three bikers, a man in a wheelchair, and three people in cars. There was also a stabbing death in the winter of 2021 on the Blue Line, and three more murders at stations along the line. That’s an average of almost one death per year.
• The Green Line has harvested 11 victims in ten years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. The most recent, a bicyclist, was just last May 29.
• The Northstar line has five fatalities so far. The last was in 2019 – which, to be fair, was about the last time anyone rode the Northstar.

That’s 31 dead, so far. 31 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.

Metro Transit and the Strib have put out a “climate conscious newcomers guide to using Metro Transit”.

It’s tempting to snark “they figure out who the real problem is”:

Familiarize yourself with Metro Transit’s code of conduct, a lengthy and often-ignored rule book that mandates such things as keeping non-service animals in carriers, one seat per rider (no manspreading!), and no eating on board.

Those darn Manspreaders! [1].

But later on, they note:

Let’s talk about crime and nuisance behavior aboard transit, particularly the Blue and Green light-rail lines. This usually involves drug use, smoking, harassing, creepy, gross or criminal behavior. Metro Transit says it’s putting more police, private security and “transit rider assistance program” agents on buses and trains. Frequent transit users say they’re noticing these people, but it’s too early to say whether it’s helping.

Oooh, they drive a hard bargain.

I think I’ll help the environment more by staying home.

And not taking a dump on a bus seat while in a drunken stupor.

[1] For whatever reason, I hold anyone who unironically puts “Man-” in front of a verb to create a derogatory term in sneering contempt.

…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?

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

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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:

• The Blue Line has mowed down 15 so far – eight pedestrians, three bikers, a man in a wheelchair, and three people in cars. There was also a stabbing death in the winter of 2021 on the Blue Line, and three more murders at stations along the line. That’s an average of almost one death per year.
• The Green Line has harvested ten victims in nine years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. The most recent was last July 4. A shooting last month on the Central Avenue platform claimed another, although that wasn’t directly transit-related.
• The Northstar line has five fatalities so far. The last was in 2019 – which, to be fair, was about the last time anyone rode the Northstar.

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.

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.

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?

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• The Blue Line has mowed down 15 so far – eight pedestrians, three bikers, a man in a wheelchair, and three people in cars. There was also a stabbing death this past winter on the Blue Line, and two more murders at stations along the line. That’s an average of just one death per year.
• The Green Line has harvested ten victims in eight years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. The most recent was less than two weeks ago – a bicyclist killed at an intersection that this blog spotlighted, almost presciently, eight years ago. A shooting last month on the Central Avenue platform claimed another, although that wasn’t directly transit-related.
• The Northstar line has five fatalities so far.

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.

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.

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.