Shot in the Dark

Category: Planes Trains and Automobiles

  • Railway To Financial Hell

    The latest numbers – from the Met Council website – show that the Northstar Line is an even bigger cash suck than we’d predicted it’d be. Ridership is off sharply.  Operating subsidies are up; each ride on the Northstar line costs the taxpayer over $20.  That’s per ticket. A source at the Capitol who’s been working…

  • Why Do DFLers Hate Those University-Avenue Businesses?

    This came from the MPR 4th CD debate last Wednesday, courtesy of the MNCDConservative blog. Independence Party candidate Steve Carlson is talking about “infrastructure”. Listen to Betty McCollum’s supporters at the end (eyewitnesses say it was, in fact, McCollum’s people doing the booing): They’re booing Carlson for attacking the Central Corridor; to hell with the…

  • Commentary From The Transport-American Communities

    A reader emails: Driving home from [outstate] today. Going east by Monticello I saw a rig with a big picture of Obama on the rear of his trailer. Below it the caption read “Does this Ass make my Truck look Big?” I just about lost control of the car with convulsive laughter. I don’t suspect…

  • A Cold Fresno

    Just for a fun Friday diversion, go through this article. Substitute all references to “the coast” to “Minneapolis and Saint Paul” Change all references to “The interior” to “The Iron Range” Change the high-speed rail references to “Minneapolis to Duluth or Rochester” or whatever the current pipe dream is. Change the other California references to…

  • The Potemkin Tour

    Joe Doakes wrote to alert me to Saint Paul’s city government springing into action: I realize [St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman is] a busy guy, too busy to personally visit every Mom and Pop operation he’s putting out of business; still, you’d think he could have found his way down there before this. It’s been…

  • I Got A 73 Monte With A Worn Out 350, Rusty Heads And A Three On The Tree…

    I was at the Car-Craft Summer Nationals over the weekend, doing what has evolved into one of my favorite live broadcasts of the NARN broadcast year. There were a lot of fun cars.  If you grew up in North Dakota in the seventies and eighties, the Nova was the semi-official state muscle car: It was…

  • The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

    Twin Cities urban planners seem to think that if they just make driving a car inconvenient and headache-prone enough, drivers will throw in the towel, get a job downtown, and start riding the bus. Which seems to be the main impetus behind this initiative – turning Charles Street (which runs parallel to light-rail-construction-addled University, two…

  • The Two Least Reassuring Things I’ve Read All Week

    Needles found in turkey sandwiches on Delta flights from Amsterdam. Not-very-reassuring thing #1: “TSA continues to closely monitor the review of the incidents as well as the security protocols being conducted by the air carrier and the airport authority,” spokesman David Castelveter said. And not-so-reassuring thing #2: “Delta requires all its in-flight caterers to adhere…

  • Lipstick On An 800 Pound Hog

    After spending the last few years doing its best to kill off businesses on University Avenue, the Met Council is embarking on yet another effort to get people to go to places most of them never went in the first place, and can’t get to now because of all the light rail construction. Joe Doakes…

  • More Eggs For The DFL Omelet

    What have we been telling you as long as this blog has existed? The businesses along University Avenue that the Central Corridor doesn’t starve out of existence now, during the construction phase, it will either price out of existence in the few areas – around the stops in the less-blighted areas – that get gentrified,…

  • Killing The Competition

    I read yesterday that the Met Council is going to start whacking bus lines along the Central Corridor, to make sure that the infernal train is the only option the rider has. I was going to write about it – but Joe Doakes of Como Park beat me to it: Since we’re already building the…

  • Just So We’re Clear On Things

    Joe Doakes from Como Park – who has been getting used to driving down Como and Hoyt rather than University, just like the rest of us lately – writes: A federal court judge has ordered the light rail agencies to do this study – twice – and two years later they’re finally going to START…

  • More Eggs!

    Joe Doakes from Como Park writes: NAACP sued over the Central Corridor Light Rail project’s impact on businesses. The federal court twice ordered an analysis of lost business revenues as an adverse impact of the projects construction. The government entities instead told the court there would be “no significant impact” on businesses due to light…

  • A Remedy

    Joe Doakes from Como Park writes: Delta Airlines (which bought Northwest) is stationing older, smaller jets in Minneapolis so they can use their bigger, fancier jets elsewhere around the country. The article quotes a guy from the Metropolitan Airports Commission, a frequent flier from West Publishing, and an Economics Professor at the U of M…

  • February’s News In April

    People – including Governor Dayton – are asking questions about URS Engineering of San Francisco.  The firm is one of two under consideration as preliminary engineers of record for the proposed Southwest Light Rail line. MPR’s Jess Mador did an excellent – and fairly balanced – story on the subject this morning. Which covered a…

  • Overpolled

    Joe Doakes from Como Park writes: Got a phone call last night from a young-sounding woman who said she was calling from San Jose University doing a survey of public opinion about transportation. She started out asking about the sorry condition of streets and highways in my area (which are, indeed, sorry). After the first…

  • Rewarding Failure

    Not long before the 35W bridge collapsed, the bridge was inspected by an engineering company that gave the bridge – and its ailing gussets – a clean bill of heath. And we know how that turned out. Last week, a couple of cables on the Sabo pedestrian/bike bridge snapped, closing the bridge and, for several…

  • The Epic Fail

    I’d not run into the “GMan Case File” blog before; it’s written by a former FBI agent. And he’s got a long, long piece on the utter uselessness of the kind of “security” the : TSA does. Did I say it’s long?  It is.  I’ll just give you the conclusion: With the congressional spotlight on the…

  • Train In Vain

    Dave Osmek – the Mound City Council member who’s running for Senate this fall – has gotten an op-ed in the Strib today hitting the same notes about light rail that he hit in this space a few weeks ago (Part One and Part Two): Using the Met Council’s 2010 report, the cost of a single…

  • “Hell Is Other Commuters”

    Joe Doakes from Como Park writes: I missed this when it ran last Fall: Best line is the last line. That’s the Met Council’s Central Corridor policy to a tee. The last line: “People need to realize that public transportation isn’t just for some poor sucker to take to work,” Collier said. “He should also…

  • Our Brave New Rail-Based World

    A few years ago, on a brutally-cold winter night, I was standing at a bus stop on University Avenue at Oxford with a bag of groceries. An older – or older-looking – guy, wobbling from a day of drinking, wobbled around on the sidewalk behind me (It was 7PM, although dark as midnight in mid-January).…

  • The Light Rail Money Pit, Part II

    Dave Osmek – who’s a businessman, a city councilman in Mound, and is running for the State Senate, either to replace Gen Olson or to run against Terri Bonoff, depending on how redistricting works out – got curious about some of the Metro Transit’s numbers on how light rail’s been working out financially. Now, as…

  • The Light Rail Money Pit

    The Met Council has started making the same rumblings about building a new LIght Rail line to the southwest suburbs that they were making ten or so years ago about building one connecting the downtowns – the sort of noises that really mean “we’ve decided to do it, and we’re in the process of getting…

  • Shiny Happy Person

    Riordan Frost, writing for the MN2020 site, just loooooves the Central Corridor: After spending a semester at graduate school in Washington, DC, I returned for the holidays to find a pleasant surprise in front of MN2020: Central Corridor light rail tracks in the ground, flanked by smoothly paved roads, attractive pedestrian-scale streetlights, and aesthetically pleasing bus…

  • Not Something That The City Of Saint Paul Is Going To Put On It’s Brochure

    How many businesses along University Avenue have been driven out of existence by the Central Corridor light rail contraction? Hard to say – nobody involved in this boondoggle seems to be publicizing the counts. But enough that someone’s trying to help people scavenge the space: Starlings are birds that rest their tired wings in pre-existing…