The House GOP caucus is making some encouraging noises these days; speaker of the house Kurt Daudt is putting the kibosh, for the session, on funding for the Southwest light rail pork train:
Daudt said the 16 mile light rail line is not a priority for House Republicans .
“We are not interested in moving forward on the Southwest light rail project. I think we need to get real with our priorities in Minnesota on how we spend our transportation dollars. Our plan is to spend them on roads and bridges.”
Gov. Mark Dayton said he isn’t willing to fund the Southwest Light Rail project until the Minneapolis Park Board’s objections are resolved. The park board is funding a study to determine whether a deeper, more expensive tunnel is a better option to protect city parkland than the Metropolitan Council’s plan that features a shallow tunnel.
Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, said Senate Democrats are committed to funding the project.
Dibble, who chairs the Senate Transportation Committee, released his transportation funding package today. It would rely on $800 million in new revenue through a wholesale gas tax hike, and higher license tab fees. The plan also borrows $576 million for new roads and bridges and includes a half cent sales tax in the metro area to pay for transportation projects.
It’s good to see the House GOP come out of the gate taking a serious stance on something. It’d have been nice to have seen more of this during, say, the Vikings Stadium jamdown, but better late than never.
More importantly? The GOP controls half of a third of Minnesota’s government. We get it – negotiation and compromise is going to be involved. But it’s so good to hear House GOP leadership smell the coffee, and stop leading negotiations with the “compromise”.
Every time that idiot Dibble opens his mouth, he further illustrates his total economic and social ignorance.
For comparison’s sake, the new 212 goes about the same distance and carries something like 80,000 vehicles per day and cost something like $240 million.
In contrast, I’m calculating one train of three carriages every ten minutes, sixteen hours a day, average 30% full…..total of about 7000 people using it daily (similar to who rides the bus in from Chaska today, really). So in terms of cost per person transported, we’re talking a means of transportation that is–even before you count multiple occupant vehicles and trucks–about 75 times more expensive than a road.
Once successful, hopefully the GOP will try skating on some even thinner ice.
By all means, this is a great issue to get cranky about. But its negative implications involve a far broader and bigger base than the lucky few who may make use of another toy train set.
Still, it’s a move in the right direction …