Shot in the Dark

A Kind Of Hush

Haven’t heard much about the southwest light rail line, have we?

There’s a reason for that. It’s hosed. Hosed perhaps beyond reasonable repair.And nobody in officialdom wants to talk about it – at least, not before the midterms:

The $2 billion Southwest Light Rail Transit Line the most expensive public works project ever undertaken in Minnesota. Besides that, it also holds the potential to be the state’s biggest boondoggle, a potential political scandal in the making in the midst of the 2022 election.

Fox 9 News reports the Met Council, the agency overseeing the project, has essentially clammed up, refusing to provide key construction updates on cost and completion date.

They don’t even have any idea when they will have any idea how bad it’s going to be:

An updated timeline and cost projection, once expected towards the end of 2021, will now come “sometime in 2022,” Trevor Roy, a project spokesman, told FOX 9. Met Council officials have long acknowledged that the rail line will exceed its original $2 billion budget and estimated 2023 opening. They are now changing tactics to renegotiate the project schedule after criticism from an outside evaluator.

Call me a cynic, but I think there’s a reason this story is coming out in January of an election year; so the media can say “we covered it! We’re not actually PR water carriers for the DFL!

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Mitch Berg

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12 responses to “A Kind Of Hush”

  1. jdm Avatar
    jdm

    I’m still waiting for the justification of this boondoggle – the whole light rail boondoggle, for that matter. As opposed to maintaining the roads better and buying buses.

    I mean, most people in any modern American metro area drive from their home in one suburb to their work in another suburb and go shopping in a third suburb. They drive around the “city”. The inner metro representatives forced the light rail on the ridiculous notion that most people drive to Mpls/St Paul to work and shop.

    And now that the inner metro governments have decided to make working and shopping in the “city” an intimidating and deadly experience, businesses are moving out. Reducing any of the original justification even more.

    But yet, for a just few billion more and a few more years, they got this.

  2. Mammuthus Primigenesis Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenesis

    In a sensible world, covid would have killed all new mass transit projects, for reasons that I hope are obvious.

  3. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    From my daily/weekly driving around the south metro, I can tell you that construction on the overpasses and stations, have been shut down since November. It’s not solely due to weather.

  4. stevew Avatar
    stevew

    The Met Council should be abolished. Perhaps remade with elected members responsible to their constituents; or perhaps removed from existence entirely. It’s hard to think of a more modern example of taxation without representation.

  5. Mr. D Avatar
    Mr. D

    They still have construction at Bren Road, but not much happening right now. I don’t think anyone wants it now.

  6. Night Writer Avatar
    Night Writer

    Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan. With as many pimps involved in this process, though, it was always going to be hard to identify the father.

    One thing that was identified early on, repeated often, and essentially ignored every time was the environmental impact and the impossibility of getting two rail lines through a narrow space. The answer was always, essentially, “We’re the Met Council, hear us roar!” About a billion dollars ago, IIRC, Trump tried to block any more federal funds going to the Minnesota Nice version of The Big Dig.

  7. bosshoss429 Avatar
    bosshoss429

    Mr. D.
    Yea, the project has stopped in both Eden Prairie and St. Louis Park. The SLP portion has had the traffic flow on Excelsior Blvd. screwed up for over a year, with no end in sight.

  8. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    SWLRL – destined to become an exhibit at the Museaum of Failure, which will eventually encompass the entire failed MSP metroplex.

  9. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    It strikes me that two billion bucks would pay for a lot of police officers in the cities that could put the kibosh on crime there and make people actually want to drive downtown again. Just sayin’.

    It also strikes me that the route of the new death train is not going to be easy for railcars–lots of sharp turns that early railroad men wisely avoided. A much better option would be to use “trains” that have only one carriage and rubber wheels, i.e. a bus.

  10. Mammuthus Primigenesis Avatar
    Mammuthus Primigenesis

    I wonder where the demand for projects like this originates.
    People are are always saying the government should do this or do that, but I have literally never in my life heard an ordinary human being say “my life would be so much better if the government would build a light rail system.”

  11. stevew Avatar
    stevew

    MP, the demand for light rail projects comes from politicians who understand that busses offer insufficient opportunity for graft.

  12. J. Ewing Avatar
    J. Ewing

    Here is a simple suggestion: We should finance this thing by selling “seat licenses,” the unlimited use of this choo-choo for 20 years or so. It must be sold for the full, unsubsidized per-seat cost and, unless enough people buy one, the project dies.

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