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 stops. This stretch of University Avenue looks good, and I don’t know if I ever expected to say that.
We’re on tap to spend over a billion dollars (to put in a train that will solve virtually none of University Avenue’s problems, and exacerbate some new ones.
Can you imagine how nice the street would look if we spent ten billion on it? Fifty billion? We could gold-plate the whole street.
Mr. Riordan’s remark illustrates the “progressive” fixation with focusing not only on outcomes, but the fairly shallow “progressive’s” focus on fairly shallow views of those outcomes.
University Avenue desperately needed reconstruction, and while the loss of on-street parking has inconvenienced some businesses, the additional foot traffic from light rail will more than make up for these spots—which, by the way, were constantly underused.
Really?
Where – outside of Twins and Vikings games and pub-crawling twenty somethings – has any “foot traffic” erupted on the Hiawatha line?
Are the people who travel University – local shoppers and people who work in the area – prone to climbing on the train and meandering about for the fun of it?
Or does Mr. Frost expect Uni to become a destination for casual wandering?
Current residents and current businesses on the corridor will benefit, of course,but new businesses and residents are quickly arriving.
Let’s place a little bet here – for bragging rights, anyway (I never gamble money); in five years, the “current businesses” within two blocks of the stops will largely be gone, replaced by Caribou and Patagonia and Dunn Brothers stores. And the “current businesses” outside those radii will be on life support or long gone, from the lack of either parking or foot traffic.
And five years beyond that? Most of those gentrified businesses around the rail stops will be pretty much stagnant – because like the “festival mall” craze of the eighties, and unlike “Field of Dreams”, when you build it, unless there’s a good reason, they will not come. And there is just no reason for a rail line down University Avenue.
We have enumerated the mobility, environmental, and economic benefits of light rail many times at MN2020, but as the progress moves to other doorsteps, we are looking at another good reason for Central Corridor: a reconstructed, aesthetically appealing avenue. One which just so happens, mind you, to now contain multimodal infrastructure, safer crosswalks, and better lighting. Now that’s progress.
Heh.
Yep. It’s progress. And progressivism.
Because Mr. Frost has just described a bunch of outcomes, and means to an end that is nowhere evident in the Met Council’s planning for this rail line. Aesthetics are nice; multimodal transportation is one of those things urban planners yawp about…
…and they’re all being implemented for a project that has no rational reason to exist. VIrtually nobody who needs to go between the downtowns is going to take the train. Virtually nobody who lives in the neighborhood and wants to shop at a store on Uni wants to schlep their bags from the infrequently-spaced stops to wherever they live (or a half mile to a store that’s not practically on top of a stop; the light rail trains, designed to blaze down mile-long stretches of right of way at 55mph between stops, are woefully overbuilt for chugging down the street in the middle of an urban area and stopping ever half mile (the line should have been a trolley, if you just have to have a train on this route at all; the “light rail” should have been built through the rail yards south of Como, which would have been faster and cost a lot less).
And – as we’ll discuss early next week – the cost of all this aesthetic rah-rah is astronomical. As in, much worse than they’ve told you.
More later.
Look, I got an idea.
Instead of scattering all of these shops and restaurants all over the place and building a train to go between them, why not just put them all in a big building with a parking lot out front? They could call them “strip malls”. They could even have pedestrian-scale fighting or whatever.
I’ll take your bet, Mitch. In 5 years, there will not be one single Caribou, Patagonia or Dunn Brothers within two blocks of any light rail stop on University Avenue between Rice Street and Cleveland Avenue.
I’m confident in my bet because there are no frou-frou coffee shops in that stretch now, not for lack of multi-modal transport, but because the economic class of people living there can’t afford $5 coffee. They don’t shop at Wicks-N-Stiks. They eat at White Castle, KFC and the ninety Asian restaurants in the neighborhood. They shop at Wal-Mart and for nice things, Target.
Instead, the buildings around the light rail stops will look like the one at Dale and University does now: nail salon, cell phone shops and government-supported non-profits on ground floor, low income apartments above. Only more run down from hard use and little maintenance.
Nate,
I don’t disagree – that’s my ten-year scenario.
But there’s a few signs that some merchants are drinking the koolaid. The video store at Hamline has been replaced by a NoodleCo and some other mid-market kinds of places. Not exactly Wicks and Sticks, but closer.
Just saying – the city will do *something* to try to gentrify the areas around the stops. There may even be a few cosmetic signs of it. They won’to last – because Uni is, in fact, home to the audience you describe.
Mitch, look on the bright side of CC. It’s driving people into the “Happy Burbs”, where the nutjobs quickly regain their sanity & the GOP gets more voters.
It’s kinda like flying in & out of DC. When people fly in, they apparently experience a dramatic brain drain (based on what happens in Congress & 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.). That brain drain apperently reverses itself on people’s flights out of Dulles or Reagan, based on their sensible statements when back in their districts.
There is nothing so comforting as an “aesthetically pleasing bus stop” when you are freezing your ass ass off on a -10 morning waiting for your aesthetically pleasing bus. Damn, I love the Brave New World.
Tracks, paved roads, pedestrian-scale streetlights. So, um, did Frost actually see any people?
I predict some major traffic jams on the North/South streets crossing University. I observed foreshadowing of this when I made the mistake of driving from Happy Suburbia into St Paul during construction. The bottleneck on Snelling was out of this world. I found a new way to get there on 35E. It’s longer, but less aggravating. Probably spewing more CO2 along the way. Happy global warming, 20/20!
Golfdoc, all you have to do is see how messed up traffic is on Hiawatha and multiply by about a factor of 5 for Uni. There are a lot more cross streets on Uni. The light rail really messed up Hiawatha, and while they have have changed the traffic light programming many times, it remains messed up.
“So, um, did Frost actually see any people?”
Hopefully not. They really screw up a Utopian fantasy.
“the loss of on-street parking has inconvenienced some businesses”
Ha! It must be so much easier to ignore the real problems you cause for real people when you characterize them as “inconveniences”.
I am thinking these “train progressives” are really just steam punks, with their irrational want for cutting edge 19th century tech and an overweening emphasis on, and value for, the aesthetic.
When I was poor I didn’t need pretty food, pretty shelter, or pretty transportation. I made due with what I had or could afford. I am not poor now, but I still don’t NEED pretty stuff. I buy it when I WANT to, but I do so with my own money.
An “emphasis on the aesthetic” happens, I think, when spending other peoples money makes you feel rich instead of responsible.
“cutting edge 19th century tech”
Quote of the day.