Today is the 18th anniversary of the opening of the Metro Transit Blue Line – the beginning (or re-beginning) of light rail transit in the Twin Cities.
So on this anniversary, let us remember the people who gave their lives – unwillingly and in most cases unwittingly – to further Minnesota’s political class’s obsession with feeling like a Big City.
- The Blue Line has mowed down 15 so far – eight pedestrians, three bikers, a man in a wheelchair, and three people in cars. There was also a stabbing death this past winter on the Blue Line, and two more murders at stations along the line. That’s an average of just one death per year.
- The Green Line has harvested ten victims in eight years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. The most recent was less than two weeks ago – a bicyclist killed at an intersection that this blog spotlighted, almost presciently, eight years ago. A shooting last month on the Central Avenue platform claimed another, although that wasn’t directly transit-related.
- The Northstar line has five fatalities so far.
That’s 30 dead, so far. 30 lives sacrificed so that the Met Council, the various governments, and other people who love to play with the dials and levers of government can feel like they’re “running” a big city with all the trimmings.
Let’s take a moment today to remember these innocent victims of government narcissism and megalomania.
We should shut the trains down, if it save just one life.
I remember doing the calculation once, and it turned out that the Hiawatha Death Train has a kill rate pretty similar in terms of deaths per billion passenger miles as passenger cars. But that said, trains do not deal with drunken drivers, distracted drivers, tired drivers, and they’re supposed to have a much lower death rate than cars–and in fact, they do everywhere that trains don’t go through bar districts at grade level.
And really, that last bit is the inexcusable part. As I believe I commented well over a decade ago, “Lessee…you’re putting 50 ton vehicles on bearing surfaces (rails) going through busy streets with a lot of bars. What could possibly go wrong?”
Blood is running in the streets.
Not to mention the many businesses it killed on University Ave. And planners haven’t learned (or maybe it’s willful ignorance). A Black, middle class neighborhood in North Minneapolis is fighting putting the Blue Line extension down the middle of Lyndale in their neighborhood-a street already narrowed with bike lanes they didn’t want and widened sidewalks they didn’t ask for. They question the safety of a light rail there-for pedestrians and for themselves. They wonder if emergency vehicles can make it through on that street if light rail was there. They ask why the extension can’t be on Washington Avenue. The answer they’re given is that Washington Ave is too industrial and there aren’t any destinations for the light rail there. One North Minneapolis neighbor responds that no, it’s because you want to destroy another Black community. There never seems to be any real thought put into planning of these things, so who knows. It is possible it’s only by accident that they keep destroying Black communities.
My grandfather worked for the city of Minneapolis as a bus mechanic. He had started out, though, as a streetcar mechanic. He showed me pictures of what it was like. The street cars weren’t those jazzy San Francisco things, they looked like 1930s era transit busses with a lot of equipage on top. And there were lots and lots of wires above city streets. They were kind of ugly and beat up looking.
He told me the city got rid of them around the time of WW2 because people thought the wires were ugly, they had a lot of accidents, and most of all because they were icy cold inside in the winter.
I guess we know better these days.
Compared with metro or rail systems, bus networks can ramp up service—serving more people or new and under serviced areas—rapidly and without much additional infrastructure.