The Only Way To Win Is Not To Play

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

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

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

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

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

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

…welll:

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

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

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

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

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

Posted

April 12, 2022

Planes Trains and Automobiles

Mitch Berg

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9 responses to “The Only Way To Win Is Not To Play”

FRESCHFISCH

April 12, 2022

Under all those big buildings? I’m no civil engineer, but I presume it would be a nightmare to build and compromise the structural integrity of the buildings.

But let’s not let that get in the way of our utopian dream.
bosshoss429

April 12, 2022

FRESCH nails it.

We already have a condo that has been victimized by the brilliant jack weeds in charge of planning that debacle.

I can just imagine the Basilica crumbling away just to satisfy the oligarchs running the Met Clowncil.
Night Writer

April 12, 2022

LRT is the progressive’s design for meeting 21st century problems with a 20th century utopian vison – and 19th century technology.
stevew

April 12, 2022

Dismantle the Met Council!
Mammuthus Primigenesis

April 12, 2022

Except we are now expected to believe that covid will become endemic, like the seasonal flu, and we are being told that the best way to fight covid is to NOT use things like public transport.
What a bunch of morons.
Ian

April 12, 2022

but I presume it would be a nightmare to build and compromise the structural integrity of the buildings.

But let’s not let that get in the way of our utopian dream.

Pesky laws of physics!

I see Lindeke has a PhD in Geography. He might know also know something about engineering, but from reading his column, it isn’t evident.
nerdbert

April 12, 2022

I remember when we got light rail in South Florida. It was promised to raise real estate values and improve our ability to get to commute.

Reality was that nobody took it. Imagine going from light rail and walking or waiting for the bus in a south Florida summer.

I take that back: some people did take it. Mainly from the ‘hood in Miami up to the more affluent areas, where they’d jump off, steal cars, and generally engage in mayhem.

So yeah, property values dropped like a stone near the LRT, crime rose, and it turned into a huge boondoggle that kept sucking down money like no tomorrow. And I took it exactly once in 5 years, and regretted doing that.
bikebubba

April 12, 2022

Wow. Really, where we don’t already have rail, we need to consider the fact that a bus that carries 40 people weighs 15-20 tons, but a railcar that carries 50 to 60 people weighs 50 tons. That, and you cannot easily get around a stopped railcar in the way you can around a stopped car or bus. Hence expensive switches and side tracks. Also important is that public transit does not have the good sense to stop moving when it is empty like a car does.

All of your exorbitant expenses flow from those realities, along with the reality that only government would fund this–and that raises the level of spending to a new level.
bosshoss429

April 12, 2022

The whole house of cards that is the Met Clowncil is starting to collapse. Every bus and every rail car, get washed every night, using almost 300,000 gallons of water, yet the choo choo trains are the solution to gloBULL warming?!