Category: Planes Trains and Automobiles
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For The Peasants
During the Soviet era, while Soviet “citizens” crowded onto dilapidated streetcars and rattletrap buses, and waited in endless lines for food, shoes, or pretty much all of life’s essentials, and dreamed about getting their own apartment, maybe, and daydreamed about owning one of the Soviet-era cars that were both biodegradable and cost several years’ salary…
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That’s One Way To Speed Up The “Green Line”
The “Green Line” – nee the “Central Corridor”, aka “The current Met Council’s $1.4 Billion monument to its own wisdom” – has, exactly as predicted in conservative circles, turned out to be a very, very slow variety of “rapid transit”. In its first four months in service, it’s clocked the trip between the downtowns at…
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University Avenue: The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Businesses along University Avenue – the ones lucky enough to survive the light rail construction process – are getting tax notices for “streetscape improvements“. [Insurance salesman and Uni avenue businessman Doug] Nguyen was surprised to discover Thursday that he’s being assessed $3,200 by the city of St. Paul for light-rail related street work — “above-standard…
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Comparing Butchers Bills
In five months of testing an operation, the “green line” has racked up five train versus auto accidents, two injured pedestrians… … And now, a fatality – a woman wearing headphones apparently walked in front of a train near the U of M. For comparison sake, light rail has been operating in the Twin Cities (counting…
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Pick Your Poison
The Star/Tribune last week ran a piece noting and lamenting the fact that as many as 50 trains carrying oil from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields cross Minnesota – every week. And I remembered – when I was a kid growing up in rural North Dakota, we used to get over 20 trains a day…
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An Unexpected Disappointing Tragedy
A guided missile shoots down a Malaysian jetliner carrying over 200 people including almost 2 dozen Americans, is apparently shot down over a proxy war zone. The President observes the “tragedy” briefly, and then goes back on script to demand Republicans build more airports. It’s tiresome to keep repeating “if it’d been any Republican, can…
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Days Of Future Pissed
The Saint Paul City Council voted 6-0 to start studying a 200+-million-dollar streetcar line connecting some Godforsaken part of East Seventh to some misbegotten part of West Seventh, via downtown. Councilman Bostrom abstained, noting that for the price of the line – basically a bus that runs on tracks – the city could resurface every…
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How To Do Transit
If you read my blog or listen to my show, you know I’m a huge fan of Kevin Williamson, writer at National Review and author of The End Is Near (And It’s Going To Be Awesome). One of his book’s (and body of work’s) central theses is that politics is the worst possible way to…
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Today’s News, Seven Years Ago
The Central Corridor Light Rail – named the “Green Line” because it would have been cheaper to build it out of stacks of dollar bills – is a failure, according David Markle, of transit-blog “Streets.mn”. I’ll urge you to read the entire piece, which is excellent and fairly exhaustive. The reasons boil down to these:…
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That’s Two
The “Green Line” is up to two accidents in the two weeks since it’s opened (six if you count the two months of testing). Incredibly, there have been no serious injuries and fatalities – yet.
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The Inevitable “Green Line” Post Titled “Train In Vain”
Like about 45,000 other Twin Citians, I went out to take my first ride (and last free ride, unless I “jump the turnstiles” like, let’s be honest, about half of all the riders will be doing from now on anyway) on the “Green Line” on Saturday evening. Here’s my story.
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That’s 1
The “Blue Line” – the Ventura Trolley, built down a right of way that either been cleared of obstsructions in the sixties, or built high above it – went several months before taking out its first vehicular rival. The Green Line – drilled down the middle of one of the busiest streets in the Metro? It…
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Counting
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Five crashes result from mixing trains with cars in the same space. So far. You seem surprised. This is not a bug, it’s a feature. The system is working as designed, to drive vehicle traffic off the streets. Soon black market cars will steal away every chance they can,…
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If Planning On Driving In Saint Paul On Saturday
It’s two days until the opening of the “Green Line” – and the Met Council’s toy choo choo has already been involved in four accidents. That’s far ahead of the pace of the Ventura Trolley. I’ve driven down University alongside the trains; it’s more than a little bit disconcerting. And, if you’re not really really…
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Live As We Live, But Not Near Us
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Eric Roper is a reporter for the Star Tribune. He lives in Minneapolis but has no car. How does he do itand is his solution right for all of us, as the Minneapolis City Council seems to believe? Items to consider: The reporter is single, he lives on a bus line,…
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Hail The Pony!
It’s the 50th anniversary of the Ford Mustang – one of automotive history’s great successes. A few years ago, during a live NARN broadcast, James Lileks and I discussed how, if the “green car” movement ever, ever wanted to catch on with mainstream America, it needed to build an electric or hybrid version of one…
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On A Rattlesnake Light Rail ‘cross The Hiawatha Desert
SCENE: It’s 1985. Mitch BERG – just out of college, hair waving in the breeze and his elbow resting on the sill of his open driver’s side window – barrels down North Dakota Highway 200 at 85 miles per hour in his 1973 Chevy Monte Carlo. Over the deafening racket of his small-block 350 engine (whose…
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When Out And About
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: Trains start running on the University Avenue Blight Rail this week. Watch out when crossing University. Joe Doakes I thought I’d noticed the signal lights along the track working that last few times I drove along the street. By the way – I can’t imagine anything much more miserable than…
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Train In Vain
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: The Green Line of the Blight Rail will open on June 14. Okay, so what’s the betting on it actually starting that day, versus the usual government delays? Should SITD have a pool? Joe Doakes Good question. I say it’s like the opening of the Ventura Trolley; there’ll be a train…
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Re-Volt
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: This opening paragraph is all you need to know about why government industrial subsidies rarely work. Joe Doakes And how we have to keep learning – or narrowly failing, it’d seem, to learn – the lesson every thirty years or so.
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Not Your Dad’s Craigslist Ad
Guy sells his ’96 Nissan Maxima via Craigslist… …via an ad so creative, Nissan bought the car.
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300 Million Hostages
No news here; the Sequester, like every “school layoff” in every city that isn’t Detroit, is basically the same as everyone’s old alcoholic significant other threatening to kill themselves; an abusive, co-dependent way of browbeating and bullying people into giving in. The “cuts” – really a whiz-in-the-wind reduction of an increase – are designed…
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Wouldn’t It Be Nice…
…on a crummy icy snowy windy freezing-rainy morning like this, where streets where you live are like icy streets, and where streets in Saint Paul are like icy Andean goat paths… …to be able to jet to work on a network of light rail trains?
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Citizens: You Are Roadkill
Anh Trinh has been running Anh’s Beauty Salon, way down by University and Dale, for a couple of decades now. Her business was one of the flood of Asian businesses that reclaimed University from blight and complete free-fall starting in about the eighties… …and who are being displaced by the misguided “Train From Nowhere To…