Shot in the Dark

Focus

“GOP cuts transit!” screams the agenda media and the DFL (pardon the nearly-inevitable redundancy).

Well, no.  The GOP is cutting local funding for the Central Corridor, the misbegotten, badly-designed boondoggle that has already started destroying business in Saint Paul:

The bill would prohibit spending $69 million in a special transit fund on light rail, commuter rail and bus rapid transit, which uses dedicated lanes. The money comes from a quarter-cent sales tax imposed on five metro counties for rail and bus rapid transit.

The initiative, which passed the House Transportation Policy and Finance Committee on a mostly partisan vote and was sent to the Ways and Means Committee, underscores the division between some GOP legislators, long critical of rail transit, and DFLers who support such services in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

It seems fairly elementary – when you’re in the middle of a crushing recession and trying to figure out ways not to spend in deficit, you try to find ways to spend less money on nonessentials.

Instead of the $69 million being used over the next two years on rail or bus rapid transit, it would replace $51 million cut from general fund money for regular bus operations.

And a rail line that will gut the business sector in a part of the city that has little enough of one, to build a rail line that will accelerate economic retardation, sounds like a good place to start.

The DFL rhetoric machine has gone from 0-60 on this one; claiming that the bill will raise fares to $4 and kill 500 jobs (and studiously avoiding the bit about replacing the funding with the money slated to be wasted on the Central Corridor).

Look – I don’t oppose rail just to oppose rail.  It’s possible some sort of rail or Bus Rapid Transit line could make economic sense.

But the Central Corridor isn’t it.  It won’t ever be it.  By design, it can not be it.  Kill it.

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Mitch Berg

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5 responses to “Focus”

  1. Kermit Avatar
    Kermit

    I do oppose rail just to oppose rail. It’s moronic to turn to 19th century transportation technology to address 21st century transportation needs. The idiots on the left who love trains do so because they hate cars. Cars represent freedom. If they could force everyone (except the elite rulers) to shuffle into mass transit, it would be a supreme victory for the Collectivists.

  2. Loren Avatar
    Loren

    Build the rail line parallel to the existing BNSF, CP Rail tracks that run through Energy Park. OR lease the bulk of lines from BNSF and CP Rail, with just stations and sidings being built to service the passenger operations.

    Buses can meet the rail traffic and move passengers north and south, then to connect to east-west local bus routes. You would only want 2 or 3 stations between the 2 downtowns anyway, so that you could actually achieve some speed between the downtowns.

  3. bubbasan Avatar
    bubbasan

    Loren, the trouble with that is that rail tends to be, for obvious reasons, isolated from areas that ought to be served by transit. Plus, guess what happens if you rent lines from freight railroads? Bread and butter–the big freight train at 20mph–pushes the transit route to the sidings.

    Stop the train, build a lane, run those inefficient buses.

    (25 passenger-miles per gallon of diesel, just a bit better than you’d get with a Powerstroke F250)

  4. Kermit Avatar
    Kermit

    Loren, the vision is an urban utopia where Percy walks out of his Minneapolis condo at 7:30, hops the train, jumps off at Snelling to get his double decaf latte and no-fat brioche then jumps the next train and gets to his job at the DNR by 9:00.
    Progress, man. Progress.

  5. Troy Avatar
    Troy

    Yay for “inflexible to the point of uselessness” transportation infrastructure.

    Buses routes can be changed to places that free people want to, and do, go.

    Trains are chains, tethers that keep the poor people who need subsidized transport from straying too far from the tracks.

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