…SITD wasn’t the first to take notice, but we smelled this a mile away.

A federal safety investigation of the Toyota Prius that was involved in a dramatic incident on a California highway last week found a particular pattern of wear on the car’s brakes that raises questions about the driver’s version of the event, three people familiar with the investigation said.

On Monday James Sikes, 61 years old, called 911 and told the operator his blue 2008 Toyota Prius had sped up to more than 90 miles per hour on its own on Interstate 8 near San Diego. He eventually brought the vehicle to a stop after a California Highway patrolman pulled alongside Mr. Sikes and offered help.

During and after the incident, Mr. Sikes said he was using heavy pressure on his brake pedal at high speeds.

But the investigation of the vehicle, carried out jointly by safety officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Toyota engineers, didn’t find signs the brakes had been applied at full force at high speeds over a sustained period of time, the three people familiar with the investigation said.

Multiple sites (ex. Fox News, courtesy Bill C.) are reporting Mr. Sikes is in financial trouble and my have simply been looking to get out of his obligations on the Toyota Prius.

As we noted earlier, the unintended consequences of a new Obama administration regulation will be worse than the “crisis” it was intended to solve:

Several airlines, including Fort Worth-based American and Houston-based Continental, say they will cancel flights rather than risk paying stiff penalties for delaying passengers on the runway…Under new federal guidelines that take effect next month, airlines can be fined up to $27,500 per passenger if a plane is stuck on the tarmac for longer than three hours.

With the new fines, a delayed MD-80 could cost American Airlines close to $4 million, and a fine for a full 757 could cost more than $5 million.

So to avoid the huge hit – which doesn’t discriminate between reasons for plans taking off late – airlines will cancel flights that show even the slightest chance of getting delayed on the ground:

“It’s unavoidable that more flights will be canceled to avoid fines,” said American Airlines spokesman Steve Schlachter. “It’s one of the unintended consequences of a bill that has no flexibility.”

A spokesman for the U.S. Transportation Department said airlines can avoid fines by doing a better job of scheduling flights and crews.

“Carriers have it within their power to schedule their flights more realistically, to have spare aircraft and crews available to avoid cancellations” and to rebook passengers when there are cancellations, said Bill Mosley, a department spokesman.

Which is something that could only come from a government bureaucrat (or a libertal tax hike advocate).  Weather and its affect on other airports is the main reason for delays; flights are scheduled months in advance (or so Orbitz tells me; check it yourself).  And at a time when competition, regulation, taxes and fuel costs are already trimming airline margins to the bone, “spare planes and crews” are things that only government can realistically afford.  And remember – today, as we noted in my previous post on the subject one flight in 10,000 is currently more than three hours late in taking off.  Many times more than that will be cancelled, now.

Toyota’s unintended acceleration issue may be real, or it may be a combination of factors which probably include opportunism, a litigious society, and the fact that some people have big feet.

Who knows – it’s probably all of the above. One thing I do know is that if I were behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius (I know, I know, just try to imagine it if you can) and the accelerator seemed to be stuck, the first thing I would do is…

…call 911?

“I pushed the gas pedal to pass a car, and it just did something kind of funny … and it just stuck there,” he said at a news conference outside a Highway Patrol office. “As I was going, I was trying the brakes … and it just kept speeding up.”

[Jim] Sikes said he called 911 for help, and dispatchers talked him through instructions on how he might be able to stop the car. But nothing worked.

…or so he says.

Mr. Sikes, with all due respect, are you trying to tell us that you couldn’t put the car in Neutral, or Park, or turn off the ignition? …but you could pick up your phone and dial 911?

Calling 911 in this situation affords the citizen a calm, cool professional, at the ready to tell you what you already should know, but it also affords said citizen the opportunity to convert what should have been a thirty-second emergency (assuming it was real) into a matter of public record and with a little added drama, a spectacle. On a slow news day, you might find video of your melodrama on every channel and across the interweb.

Bing!

Alerted by emergency dispatchers, a California Highway Patrol officer was able to catch up to Sikes’ Prius and used the patrol car’s public address system to instruct Sikes to apply the brakes and the emergency brake at the same time.

The trooper said after the incident that he could smell the Prius’s brakes burning, even at that high speed.

I smell something too, but it’s not burning brakes.

…this is almost hardly parody…:

Ford Unveils New Car For Cash-Strapped Buyers: The 1993 Taurus

Via KRod at SRS

…and so too should be the plan to spend billions, that we don’t have by the way, on a high-speed link to Chicago.

According to the plan, freight and passenger rail 20-year capital costs could range from $6.2 billion, with nearly two-thirds of that provided by federal, state and local government. The Twin Cities-Chicago line is expected to top $1 billion alone.

The plan was ordered last year by the state Legislature, well before a scramble erupted in many states to push their own high-speed rail plans. That was triggered by the infusion of $8 billion in federal stimulus money specifically earmarked for such rail lines nationwide.

Ah yes, the ubiquitous stimulus “dollars.” A misnomer if ever there was one, as they should be called the stimuless “debt.” There are no dollars, and wasting money on what will amount to be a string of empty tin cans traveling the tundra at high speed will stimulate nothing but the sugar-plum dreams of liberals spending other people’s money to build their little fairy tale world.

We can count on the Gov to lay down across the tracks and stop this nonsense, right?

Gov. Tim Pawlenty, previously not a big advocate of high- speed rail, endorsed the Twin Cities-Chicago route last spring.

[sound of scratching record]

Not so much.

Funny thing is, we already have a high-speed link to Chicago.

Its called an airport.

…where by the way, we just spent a mountain of cash on to add another runway

I’ve seen flights as cheap as $25 to Chicago this year.

The Minnesotan that can’t afford a flight has no business in Chicago.

The Chicagoan that can’t…I’d just as soon he stay down there.

On its third week in operation, a North Star line train crapped out during rush hour.

They went to Plan B:

Metro Transit sent two buses to Target Field in Minneapolis to pick up the 120 passengers aboard the 2:05 p.m. train, which never left the station, and take them to the five suburban stations along the Northstar line. The buses left about 3 p.m. and took 90 minutes to reach Big Lake, compared with the train’s normal 51 minutes, said Bob Gibbons, spokesman for Metro Transit, which owns the train.

An extra forty minutes?  Not counting the time it took for the buses to show up?

Ouch.  I wonder how that set with this woman, from the opening a few weeks back?

Kate Pound of St. Paul, was one of them and had one of the more complicated commutes. She rode her bicycle to a bus stop, transferred from the bus to a light-rail train and then to Northstar at Target Field. She departed the Big Lake station via a Northstar Link bus to her job as a geology teacher at St. Cloud State University.

“It’s great, it’s cheaper, I’m doing the right thing in terms of my carbon footprint,” she said. “But what if I’m late and miss my connection in Big Lake? As long as I don’t get stuck, this is the way to go.”

“As long as I don’t get stuck”.

Remember – there’s one outbound train in the morning, and one inbound train at night.

Come to think of it, I wonder how all those Rube Goldberg-like bike/bus/bus/rail/bus commutes are faring with the blizzard we have going on?

Yesterday was the first day for the “Northstar” commuter rail service.

Now, commuter rail is one of those areas where I break with some of my conservative friends – with a big, red asterisk.  Unlike Light Rail, which is a pretty universal money pit, Commuter Rail – heavy cars using existing right of way and rails – is relatively inexpensive.  The forty mile Northstar cost less than half of what the seven mile Ventura Trolley did, and is currently coming around a quarter of the ludicrous, city-destroying Central Corridor’s price tag at the moment.  Had the Met Council opted to buy used rolling stock (cars and locomotives) and build its stations on the cheap, and had gas prices remained high and pumped up the ridership, the Northstar could have hypothetically been revenue-neutral and self-supporting in relatively short order.  Which, for a government program, ain’t chicken feed…

…provided you get all those “ifs” out of the way.  The Met bought new rolling stock (enh) and as always used the stations as an excuse to subsidize local artists, and the price came in a good third higher than it might have.

Still, for those who are trying for whatever reason to recalibrate their lives around the shiny new toy, madness awaits:

Trains were on time — the first one arrived three minutes early — but the first day was not entirely free of glitches. At Target Field, the doors of the 7:10 a.m. train didn’t open for a few minutes, so its more than 300 passengers were stuck inside. Once they made their way upstairs to the Hiawatha station, light rail wasn’t there to greet them because of a mechanical problem. A replacement Hiawatha train left the station at 7:25.

During the afternoon rush, there were some frantic dashes for closing doors, some doorway stumbles and even a few people who missed trains and had to wait for the next one. Only one person missed the final train, arriving at Target Field two minutes late on a connecting light-rail transit train.

Metro Transit has a way of letting you down; I can’t count the number of times, back when I did a lot more transit, that buses would run late or sometimes not at all, or schedules would be inaccurate, or bus stops would be incorrectly marked; for that matter, in one year I had two buses break down on me in mid-trip.  Carrying a bike with you in one of the bike racks, I came to realize, is a bit like having a lifeboat on a ship.

Susan Sullivan of Andover hopes not. “When I got to the Government Center, it was 10 minutes later than my bus ever got me there,” she wrote in an e-mail. “And I will be paying $2 more each day for the ‘privilege’ of riding this.”

And then there are those for whom ideology swerves into irrationality:

The sole outbound morning train to Big Lake had 44 customers when it headed northwest at 6:05 a.m. Kate Pound of St. Paul, was one of them and had one of the more complicated commutes. She rode her bicycle to a bus stop, transferred from the bus to a light-rail train and then to Northstar at Target Field. She departed the Big Lake station via a Northstar Link bus to her job as a geology teacher at St. Cloud State University.

“It’s great, it’s cheaper, I’m doing the right thing in terms of my carbon footprint,” she said. “But what if I’m late and miss my connection in Big Lake? As long as I don’t get stuck, this is the way to go.”

Well, no, Ms. Pound – moving to Saint Cloud would be the “right thing in terms of your carbon footprint”.  What you’re doing is salving your precious environmentalist ego, while continuing to live the high-density urban life you no doubt came to love while attending Macalester.  If I were to guess, anyway.

Anyway – if you’re taking the train, enjoy.  It’s a less-dumb option than the Ventura Trolley, and vastly less criminally stupid than the Central Corridor is going to be.

Start the death-watch on the Midway’s long, hard-fought revival; pre-construction work for the “Central Corridor” began today:

Crews have started spray-painting and chalking symbols and numbers on streets and utility poles to guide workers when they start ripping up pavement as early as next month.

Real construction — laying the rails and building the stations — won’t start until next summer at the earliest.

So long, Midway based around a relatively vibrant University Avenue.  So long, Frogtown, saved once-upon-a-time by the raw, naked capitalism of a couple generations worth of plucky immigrants.  It’s been nice knowing the both of you.

It’s for the children! 

It’s for the children! 

It’s for the children! 

It’s for the children! 

It’s for the children…

In a classic New Yorker cartoon, a couple of math professors are seen pondering a chalkboard. The right third of the chalkboard is covered with an impossibly complex equation. So is the left third. In the center, the other halves are joined together by a large logic cloud labelled “Insert Miracle Here”.

Even without Minnesota Public Radio’s threatened lawsuit for relief from the Central Corridor light rail line’s potential vibration and noise affects on their studio and production operations, the project’s “plan” seems highly dependent on inserted miracles.

On Tuesday, we talked about the subtleties of acoustic engineering. Today’s subject is the brawn and muscle of civil engineering, as well as the pointillistic wonkery of urban planning.

———-

The Central Corridor is intended to start in downtown Minneapolis’ Warehouse District, on the same tracks as the Ventura Trolley, rumbling down Fifth Street to the Metrodome area. There, it’ll split off from the Hiawatha, and rumble through the West Bank U of M campus to the Washington Avenue bridge, which a recent study showed would need massive remodeling to support the additional weight, and whose top, pedestrian deck has had lanes closed due to structural problems.

After the bridge, the train will roll up Washington through the heart of the East Bank campus – a stretch of street that will need to be rebuilt as a transit plaza, making car traffic through the heart of the U a sisyphean nightmare.

The train will exit the east end of the U on Washington, then turn up University. It’ll chug up the long hill through Prospect Park, cresting the hill near KSTP as it enters Saint Paul.

There’ll be stops every half-mile as the train rolls through the west Midway, a neighborhood that is part warehouse district and part business incubator (but which the long-range plans have slotted to turn into a high-density virtual third downtown of condos and mixed-use businesses).

The neighborhood becomes less tony, and the stops become more widely spaced than the trees, as the line moves into the heart of the Midway; the hardscrabble gray thirties-era small-business and housing blocks east of Prior. It’ll make a stop at Snelling – the Midway’s main street. And so will everything around the train; the intersection is already one of the busiest and most dangerous in the Twin Cities. Designed in the early horseless-carriage era, there are those that advocate levelling most of the buildings around the intersection – Midway Books, American Bank, parts of the thriving Midway Center – and building a traffic cloverleaf or half-cloverleaf, sacrificing some of the businesses that have led the Midway’s revival. For a train.

The train will demand more sacrifice as it glides east through the Midway’s tatty last mile and into Frogtown. Frogtown was a north-Minneapolis like catch-phrase for urban decay when I first drove down it, in October of 1985. While most of it will never get into Architectural Digest, the strip along Uni has undergone a revival as successive waves of Vietnamese and H’mong immigrants started new businesses along the street. It’s not always pretty, but it’s an industrious stretch of Uni, a monument to the spirit of the new Americans, and of the resilience and rugged beauty of capitalism. The construction process will gut these businesses like fish.

It’ll whish past the Capitol, and whip a noisy, creaking right down Robert Street.

And it’s there that the fun begins.

Once the train gets downtown, the intention for it to roll down Robert to the frontage road, then jog west to Cedar,where it’ll turn south and roll into downtown, including its fateful whoosh past the Taj Ma Kling.

Four blocks later, it’ll turn left – in the slow, creaking gradual way of “light rail” trains – onto Fourth Street. Unlike the smaller, slower, less “sexy” trolleys that might have been a better choice, has a pretty wide turning circle – wide enough that the line is going to have to demolish most of a block, between Fourth and Fifth, Cedar and Minnesota, to make the turn.

To be fair, the final six blocks to the Union Depot terminal are fairly problem-free.

So count up all the parts of the route that’ll need to be completely rebuilt. Count up all the parts of the route that are not currently rail routes (the technical term is “right of way”) that will need to be turned into right of way by a combination of buying and eminent-domain arm-twisting, which in the middle of a busy metro area is a process that is about as expensive as paving roads with ten dollar bills. Count up all the long stretches of busy street that will need to be shut down, torn up, widened, narrowed and rerouted.  Bear in mind that the Hiawatha Line is no guide on this; most of its right of way, the dismal straight shot down Hiawatha, was cleared for transit as early as the sixties.
Count up all the “insert miracle here” moments.

It’s called “transit planning”.

And solving the “miracles” is both mundane and hideously expensive.

———-

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we dipped a toe into the nuanced, subtle science of acoustic engineering, around which most of MPR’s complaints currently revolve; the overt noise and more-subtle acoustic rumbling of the trains past the front door of MPR’s Taj Ma Kling.

MPR has a suggestion – which swerves to engineering’s opposite extreme. They want the downtown leg of the Central Corridor re-routed:

Has MPR explored every possible way to make LRT work on Cedar Street? Has the City of Saint Paul?MPR has done everything possible to work cooperatively with the CCPO to identify and address our concerns. We have offered to work together with them to find an alternative route for these final blocks of the plan.MPR has spent years working with the CCPO to get accurate information about the project, how close the tracks would be to our building and the actual impact of the trains. That information has not been available until the last few months. Additionally, MPR has worked closely with the historic, 100-year-old Central Presbyterian and Saint Louis, King of France churches on how they can remain viable institutions faced with similar noise, vibration and access issues related to the project.

(Cheap Irony Alert: Central Presbyterian, MPR’s neighbor to the north, is where I learned to play the bagpipes.  For many years the church hosted the bagpipe band’s weekly practices. Now they’re complaining about noise. I digress).

The alternate routes they suggest on the website include Minnesota (in blue, below) and Robert (in green):

There are, of course, problems with both routes. Let’s start with engineering; we’ll work our way back out to urban planning.

One problem with “light rail” as opposed to trolleys and streetcars is that they are long in relation to their width. Which means, among other things, that they don’t turn corners well. The planned light rail line can not turn within any of the existing downtown streets. The currently-planned turn from Cedar onto Fourth Street will require tearing down the old Premiere Bank building at Fifth and Cedar (across from the Pioneer Press building) and basically turning most of the block from Cedar to Minnesota into a rail right of way. It’s not just tearing down buildings; there are utilities to move, infrastructure to relocate…
Which is fine; that’s part of any work in the big city.

But what about the other two routes – Minnesota and Robert?

We know that there’s a vacant bank at Fifth and Cedar. What about Minnesota and/or Robert?

To turn on Minnesota would involve going through the USBank Building (recently remodeled at exquisite expense) and/or the First Bank building (the classic moderne skyscraper with the big red flashing “1” on the roof).

In exchange for losing one of Saint Paul’s major landmarks, the Central Corridor will…:

• Still need to make the two turns by the Capitol – onto the frontage road and back south into downtown. Turns are expensive, slow, and eat up tons of space (as we’ve seen).
• Move the vibration to the other side of MPR’s block.
• Constrict Minnesota, a busy northbound one-way street, shunting traffic onto surrounding blocks.
• Leave the already-vacant space that is slated to be torn down to make way for the currently-planned route…still vacant.
• Do nothing to solve the urban-planning issue we’ll talk about below.

So how about Robert Street (yellow in the picture above)? Making that turn will require tearing down either the Endicott or the Pioneer Buildings, or both. These historic buildings, built in the late 1800s and classic examples of the architecture of the era, are two of downtown’s historic treasures, two of the last remnants of the city’s pre-Urban-Renewal past. In exchange for this, we get:

• A straighter route down from the capitol – faster and incrementally less expensive.
• However, it’ll clog the center of Robert Street, downtown’s only major two-way north-south street.
• Again, it’ll do nothing – even less than Minnesota – to fix the urban planning challenge below.

This doesn’t consider the less-visible challenges of either of these routes – the utilities that’ll need to be relocated, business that’ll need to be compensated and so on.

But let’s say that either of those sets of challenges are manageable. We know that MPR says they’d like either of these solutions. What about Saint Paul?

———-

As I noted on Tuesday, one of Saint Paul’s biggest hurdles as a city is dealing with the detritus of a number of government initiatives from the 1950’s. Urban Renewal’s list of crimes against Saint Paul is a long one:  the gutting of the Rondo, Midway and Dayton’s Bluff for I94, the devastation of the West End and North End for 35E are merely the most obvious.

Downtown Saint Paul’s specific Urban Renewal outbreak was called the “Capitol City” plan, a detailed vision written in the mid-late fifties for downtown that involved gutting most of the city’s old buildings Seventh south to Kellogg, from Wabasha all the way to Wabasha. The better part of twenty square blocks fell to the wrecking ball over the following thirty years. In place of the old, brick and mortar buildings, we got dismal monstrosities like the Alliance, USBank and Securian buildings; we got the airplane-hangar-like Dayton’s (now Macy’s). Worst of all, we got twenty square blocks of downtown where, if you were on foot or in your car, there was no there there. For block after block in downtown Saint Paul, there’s no reason to stop, get out of your car, shop, have a drink, eat, spend, date, live. It’s not an accident that the two parts of downtown that show any signs of life at all – the part of Uppertown west of Wabasha, from the Xcel Center up to Mickey’s Dining Car, and Lowertown’s old warehouse district, now mostly residential lofts and condos and slowly developing into an interesting neighborhood in its own right – are the parts that escaped the ravages of urban “renewal”.

And the worst part? Cedar.

From Seventh – just south of MPR’s studios – all the way to the river, Cedar is a desolate canyon. From the Wells Fargo Tower and Town Square – failed commercial and office developments – to the back side of Macy’s, there is not a single storefront on the street. Not one amenity to humanity. The only sign of life, really, is the little transit center, tucked next to Ecolab’s loading dock down by Fifth Street. Noplace to stop and grab a cup of coffee (unless you know there’s a skyway level food court, safely out of sight a floor above); no signs of any life that isn’t desperately trying to get elsewhere and fast (especially when the cold north wind sweeps down the dismal cement canyon). It’s a depressing cement gash in the heart of downtown.

At worst, bringing a train down the street will do no harm.

At best, redeveloping the street around the pedestrian traffic that the train should bring will give downtown something it desperately needs: a human-habitable link between the modestly-bustling Uppertown with its Pazzalunas and Chipotles and Fuji-yas, and the signs of human life breaking out in Lowertown.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I don’t support government social engineering to change urban geography; Urban “renewal” should have taught us our lesson. However, if we’re committed to a project anyway, why not use it to help repair the damage of the last round of social engineering?

Moving the line to Minnesota is…:

• a throwaway: There’s no there there. Minnesota Street has few jobs, no retail destinations – it’s just something to get through, transit-wise. Indeed, transit stations are the strip’s only notable feature. It provides the city no useful payback for all the damage it’ll sustain.
• a net loss to the city: Tearing down the buildings that’d need to go to make the turn would serve only to leave another vacant, desolate block in a downtown that has too many as it is.
• a side-track, so to speak: Running the line down Minnesota does nothing to re-integrate downtown into a useful, habitable place.

So how about Robert? Leaving aside the engineering benefit of straightening the line, the route would have the same drawbacks as Minnesota, along with tearing down even more historic building stock and doing even less to fix downtown’s urban geography.

———-

As I noted on Wednesday, I think MPR has a case against the Central Corridor for the damage that the line could cause its operation at Seventh and Cedar. The costs of rerouting the lines as they suggest (I think it’s fair to say) would seem to so vastly outweigh the benefit to MPR as to be completely impractical.

So why even suggest it?

More Monday.

…will continue tomorrow with Part III.  MPR wants some serious changes in the Central Corridor’s route; some of their suggestions make sense.  Others…well, they’re about as useful, sensible and thought-out as “On The Media” with Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone.

More tomorrow.

Minnesota Public Radio wants the Central Corridor to reconsider its route – currently slated to roll down Cedar Avenue, a north-south street (more or less, like all Saint Paul streets) that runs the full length of the “Taj Ma Kling”, MPR’s immense, bleeding-edge studio complex filling the entire block from Seventh to Exchange in downtown Saint Paul.

The next two installments focus on engineering – indeed, two different extremes of engineering – and two different sides of downtown Saint Paul. Today focuses on the north end of downtown, and on acoustic engineering, one of the most subtle and nuanced engineering fields this side of biotech. Tomorrow, we’ll turn to civil engineering, the big, brawny, bricks-and-mortar variety on the opposite extreme (and the south side of the neighborhood).

———-

MPR states its case for noise impact to its broadcast complex, located on Cedar between Seventh and Exchange Streets:

How would LRT affect MPR’s broadcast quality?MPR’s first responsibility is to our listeners and members. We provide programming to nearly 800,000 listeners on our regional network and nearly 16 million listeners nationally. We attract the best classical and popular musicians in the country to our recording studios.The LRT creates low frequency vibration, higher frequency noise from its horns and bells, electromagnetic interference, and radio frequency interference. Each of these can negatively affect the ability of our equipment to operate properly.

All of this is true; while people observing the Hiawatha light rail comment at how relativelly quiet it is, trains of any size do create low-frequency rumbling, the result of energy being transferred via tons of metal rolling over metal rails anchored in the ground; unless you specifically plan against it (at immense cost) this energy will get transmitted through the ground. Isolating a building from that kind of low-freqency sound is very difficult, and is something that needs to be done from the foundation on up; it’s not something that you can take care of by nailing extra carpeting over your walls.

And if sound is your business, that’s a serious problem:

Any inability to operate our radio and recording studios because of vibration or noise will significantly compromise our ability to provide high quality programming and other services to our listeners. As determined by our noise tests, our producers will not be able to do their work in the MPR building.

The part of me that grew up in AM radio (in a studio near a very heavy rail line, by the way) and is not an audiphile (indeed, who loves the nearly lost art of mixing music to sound good on tinny car speakers) says “sack up, MPR producers. It’s only radio”. And for much of their programming, that might be an adequate response.

But FM radio is a lot more technologically upmarket than the business I grew up in, and classical music – especially the production side – is an audiophile’s business.

But leave all of that aside for a moment – because whatever you think or believe about MPR’s audience demographics and politics, they were there first. MPR built the first leg of its studio – a veritable palace to my commercial-radio-trained sensibilities – almost thirty years ago. And again, whatever you think about the organization, they have made a huge investment not only in their “market”, but in the area.

Given the extremely close proximity of the train to our broadcast facility, the CCPO has been unable to provide a comparable example anywhere in the U.S. where mitigation has worked.

Imagine for a moment that a commercial recording studio – run, what the heck, by a scrappy Republican punk-rocker-at-heart like, say, yours truly – had worked and scrambled and saved and scrapped for years to build a state-of-the-art recording facility in a struggling downtown. Imagine that studio eschewed government handouts, and slowly, painstakingly built itself into a success…

…only to have the big, dumb jackboot of government, in the form of a misguided social-engineering project in the form of a useless, money-pit light rail project, dump an insurmountable handicap in its lap with its customary “like it or lump it” attitude.

How would you, the free-market conservative, respond?

Of course, Minnesota Public Radio is not that scrappy, underground Republican business. It’s taken all sorts of government handouts; to be fair and accurate, government subsidy is a relatively small part of MPR’s revenue stream (although not so small that MPR’s management doesn’t pull every political string it can to protect it from budget cutting at the state and federal levels). To be equally fair and accurate, MPR’s non-profit status gives it a leg up on its commercial competitors that is, in effect, a back-door subsidy that’d be called “corporate welfare” for any business that didn’t have “public” wedged into its name.

Still and all, MPR has been there forever, it has invested all sorts of money (theirs and ours) in their facilities, and it has, without a doubt, an immense technical, “business” and financial stake in making it possible to do business in their building.

It seems pretty clear-cut so far.

It won’t stay that way, of course. You might ask in response “But didn’t they know the light rail was coming through before they built the Taj Ma Kling?”, the eleventy-jillion dollar expansion they built between 2004 and 2006 that looms over Cedar like a Garrison Keillor temper tantrum?

Yes and no (with emphasis altered from the original and added by me):

MPR knew before it expanded that Cedar Street was the preferred route for the Central Corridor. Why didn’t MPR do more to address noise and vibration during its expansion from 2004–06? Final decisions about the route and location of the tracks were not unveiled until April 2008. In 2001 when MPR, with encouragement form the City of St Paul, chose to expand its facilities on Cedar, we were given no data (and none existed) illustrating the impact of noise and vibration. We designed the new north wing of MPR’s broadcast center to deal with every noise and vibration we could envision at the time. However, 16 of MPR’s 24 recording and broadcast studios are in the south wing, designed in 1979. MPR knew that Cedar Street was being considered for the route, but neither MPR nor the two churches knew how close the train would run to our buildings. LRT trains are proposed to be just 12 feet from the front of MPR’s St. Paul broadcast center.

This brings up any number of questions.

• What Did MPR Know, And When Did They Know It: While the MPR press release is correct inasmuch as the general timeline, it’s been pretty common knowledge that the city has wanted something to rectify downtown’s biggest open sore. Cedar was once the heart of a bustling downtown. But “Urban Renewal” in the form of the mid-Fifties “Capitol City” master plan (while we’re on the subject of misguided, hamfisted government social engineering) gutted the area in the Fifties, turning Cedar in particular into a cold, ugly, windswept canyon that could scarcely divide and isolate Uppertown and Lowertown more effectively if it had barbed wire and guard dogs. Light Rail has long been seen as a means to fixing this; more on this tomorrow. MPR can hardly not have been aware of this rather key bit of urban planning.
• 12 Feet?: How significant is the “12 foot” figure that the MPR release cites? Would an extra six feet help? That would presume, naturally, that there was room to move the train – which I suspect there is not. Saint Paul is an old downtown, laid out in the 1800s; its north-south streets are relatively narrow, by big city standards. Cedar is not an especially wide street. I’m going to presume the answer is “no” on that.
• Mitigation?: Some say it’s possible to use technology to mitigate the vibration. MPR’s consultants say not so. As with so many questions in so many businesses, pick your consultant.

So how did we – MPR, the City, the Central Corridor Planning office, everyone – end up in this mess? Again – I’ve taken out MPR’s emphasis and added my own:

Why didn’t The Met Council consider the potential damage to MPR earlier? We don’t know. The Federal Transportation Administration guidelines clearly require special consideration for recording and broadcast studios, concert halls, theaters and other sound sensitive areas. The federal guidelines also state: “…before mitigation measures are considered, the project sponsor should first evaluate alternative locations/alignments to determine whether it is feasible to avoid severe impacts altogether.” The required study of the impact on recording studios and historic structures was never done.

Which is of a piece with the serial negligence that’s accompanied every step of this project; the Washington Avenue Bridge isn’t strong enough, the U of M can’t absorb a train running up Washington through the middle of its campus, traffic at University and Snelling will be snarled enough to make a Mumbai rush hour look like a Saturday afternoon in Fargo, and businesses up and down University will be gutted.

What’s another flubbed study among friends?

Tomorrow – more about MPR’s suggested changes.

UPDATE: Welcome, Politics in Minnesota and Save WCAL readers. Please check out part III of the series. Part IV follows on Monday.

It’s gotten a lot of press lately: Minnesota Public Radio seems set to take the Central Corridor – the new light rail line set to connect the two downtowns via the U of M, University Avenue and the Capitol area – to court over the disruption the high-frequency noise and low-frequency vibration could cause their recording and production operations.

MPR posts its case here.

On the one hand, it’s easy – or, to put it in the possibly-more-apt pseudo-latin, “facile” – to ascribe the whole thing to the “limousine liberalism” of Bill Kling, Garrison Keillor and MPR’s well-heeled clientele; “silent acquiescence to big-government initiatives for ye, but not for we”. 

On the other hand, you will scour their website in vain for any mention of opposition to the Central Corridor over…

• the horrible effect the Central Corridor have on traffic and noise in the Midway,
• the crushing economic impact it’ll have on the Southeast Asian business community in Frogtown, which has been a huge, if low-key, triumph of the free market in Saint Paul in the time since I’ve lived here,
• the cost of refitting the Washington Avenue Bridge at the U of M to carry the added weight of the LRT line,
• the overarching fact that with its stops every mile (rather than every few blocks) and fast rolling stock designed to stop only at large, purpose-built stops (just like the Hiawatha Line), the LRT will supplant the 50 Express bus, rather than the slow, clunky, traffic-clogging 16 line between the downtowns – meaning that it’ll not only barely scratch traffic, and that…
• …as such, it will serve primarily inter-Twin-City rather than local travel, and so might have been vastly better-served by a trolley line or other more utilitarian but less-“sexy” installation.
• It will require immense expense to solve a number of civil engineering challenges in downtown Saint Paul…

…or other such plebeian concerns. Indeed, it seems to be all about their studios. Which may be legally appropriate but, given their support for all the other aspects of the Central Corridor, ethically obtuse.

That being said, I’ll try to stay away from some of the stereotypical (albeit sometimes fully appropriate) class-baiting that some of MPR’s conservative critics have employed in criticizing the network’s response to the LRT line.

I said “try”.

Tomorrow: Sound Engineering, Unsound Planning.

Thursday: Civil Engineering, Uncivil Project.

Friday:  Ethics, Politics and other difficult stuff.

For those of you who always wondered “what if they could just swoop in and rip Washington Avenue out of the ground and toss it into space?”

We’re gonna find out!:

The University of Minnesota Board of Regents has approved a key agreement on the Central Corridor light rail project…The project includes $11 million for a transit and pedestrian mall on Washington Ave. The costs will be included in the budget submitted to the federal government.

I expect they’ll find people sitting in traffic around the East Bank so long they’ll actually form settlements up and down Huron Avenue.

I support mass transit options that can be teased into some kind of economic sense.

Which means I oppose almost all of them.  In almost all cases, mass transit is like big box schools; they serve their main purpose badly, but they are superb monuments to the governments that built them.
Now, the Metro’s two big “commuter rail” projects, the Northstar and the Red Rocks lines, could be exceptions.  They are very, very different from the Ventura Trolley and the proposed Central Corridor lines in that

1. they use existing tracks (to say nothing of right-of-way), the same ones that all the freight trains use today.  Other than stations, a few extra switches and sidings, they can be very cheap to build.
2. The rolling stock – the cars and engines – can be relatively cheap.  Indeed, it’s possible to buy used engines and cars from other commuter rail systems, refurbish them, and get them on the road for a fraction of the cost of buying new.

Via those factors – and given decent ridership – it’s actually possible, in theory, to make a commuter rail line self-supporting.

Now, the Taxpayers’ League once made a case against the Northstar; the lynchpin of which being that the line’s ridership was going to be much lower than estimated.  The study took place, of course, back when gas was still below $2 a gallon; suburbanization and exurbanization shows no signs of slowing.  I don’t know any updated numbers, but I’d suspect they’d be worth a second look.

But it’s the other part – the tendence to “monumantalism” – that will continue to cause problems.  And the Strib feeds the monkey without killing it:

Moments after Thomas Barrett, the U.S. deputy secretary of transportation, signed an agreement Tuesday committing $156.8 million in federal funding toward the $320 million Northstar line, Sen. Amy Klobuchar said what others have hoped for a decade:

“I want it to go to St. Cloud,” she said from Washington in a taped message that was played to an audience that included Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Congressman Keith Ellison, state legislators, and officials from the three counties involved, Anoka, Hennepin and Sherburne.

Getting a “Klobuchar Wing” tacked onto a monument is good “Free” campaign publicity.

Watch for more pols to find way$ to tack their name$ onto this project, jacking the co$t$ waaay higher than they need to be.

I’ve long advocated introducing toll roads to Minnesota, especially the metro area, as a substitute for generalized taxes to support road construction.

Mentioning this around DFLers, of course, draws offense; to the DFL’s statist senses, all public goods are a public duty, with “public” meaning “the whole public” (or at least that part not favored by tax breaks from the DFL-strangled legislature).

And as the standardbearer of all DFL folk “wisdom”, the Strib can’t help but vent for it, even when basically agreeing with the concept:

Tolls cannot substitute for government’s broad responsibility to raise the taxes needed to build and care for basic transportation.

Um – why? 

I mean, if it were determined that tolls could somehow replace gas and other taxes, why wouldn’t we reassess this “responsibility?”

The Strib does, in fact, support the experimental addition of a toll lane to 35W in the South Metro…:

But tolls used specifically to relieve congestion and support transit on certain crowded roadways might be worth trying. Thus we applaud Minnesota’s application last week for federal money to refashion Interstate Hwy. 35W between Burnsville and downtown Minneapolis to include a toll lane for single drivers that would, in turn, help finance bus rapid transit service.

…but, naturally, all libertarian sense has been stripped from the proposal: 

The idea is to free up more space in regular lanes, draw more commuters to transit and coax others to alternate routes or times. A similar experiment in Stockholm raised bus ridership and reduced congestion by 20 percent.

Indeed, tolls (like so much of the “Transit” mania gripping the local center-left) are to be tools, used to further the powers-that-be’s frenzy of social engineering:

Toll lanes should not be seen as “solving” the metro region’s severe shortfall in transportation funding. They cannot substitute for the Central or Southwest light-rail lines [Really?  Why? – Ed]. Tolls should always be set high enough to retain transit’s competitive advantage. 

Does anyone proof-read this crap?

What “competitive advantage” does transit have?

  And care should be taken to assure that tolling doesn’t damage central business districts.

One wonders if the Strib editorial board has reviewed the ghastly toll that its’ beloved Central Corridor light rail line is going to take on the non-“central” business district in the Midway and Frogtown – a district that has been saved by small, Asian business that is going to be gutted by nearly a decade of rail construction, for a line that will detract from rather than enhance the neighborhood (it’ll be a light rail rather than trolley line).

One wonders if the Strib editorial board even understands any of this.