The Met Council’s next plan, after building the nearly -useless Ventura Trolley from downtown to the Airport, is to basically destroy Saint Paul.<\/p>\n
The current plan is to drive a light rail line from the current Ventura Trollley line through the University of Minnesota, then down University Avenue to downtown Saint Paul.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, Uni in Saint Paul has been, if not a spectacular success story, at least a good one over the past twenty years.\u00a0 Bit by bit, a strip – from the Minneapolis border to the Capitol – that used to be a blighted toilet has become, if not a showpiece, at least cleaned up, with actual stores in storefronts that used to be empty.\u00a0 Asian business – Vietnamese, Lao and H’mong – swarmed to the cheap storefronts between Lexington and Rice, turning what had been a blighted wasteland into a place that at least had legitmate human activity going on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Met Council would like to screw all of that up.\u00a0 And not just by spending seven years tearing up the street, and to hell with the businesses that have established themselves there.\u00a0 No, they’re going to run a light rail<\/em> line down the street.<\/p>\n For those of you who don’t know or care, “Light Rail” is like the Ventura Trolley; it’s relativeliy fast, built to stop at big stations every mile or two.\u00a0 In the great scale of rail transit options, it’s in the middle – between “heavy rail” (think the Metra in Chicago, or the Northstar Line when it starts running – big, full-size trains with passenger cars, for hauling people between larger stations) and “streetcars”, basically trolleys that stop every couple of blocks and don’t have a much bigger footprint on the street than buses (and, at least in terms of fuel used to move a passenger a mile, are much more efficient).\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, let’s assume for a moment that any <\/em>of those options makes economic sense for connecting the downtowns (it’ll take some work, but work with me here).\u00a0 Given that “light rail” only stops every couple of miles, and given that plenty of right-of-way exists in the rail-glutted area between Northeast Minneapolis, through the Midway Transfer Yards and all the way to downtown Saint Paul along the lines of tracks south of Como Avenue, wouldn’t it have made sense to either:<\/p>\n Oh, but it gets worse.<\/p>\n To accomodate both the train and <\/em>the huge volume of traffic at the intersection of Snelling and University, they’re going to need to basically turn the intersection into a superhighway, tearing down huge swathes of the now-very-successful Midway Center and business around it, and building an underpass <\/em>on Snelling.\u00a0<\/p>\n This was posted on a Saint Paul discussion group:<\/p>\n The reconstruction takes the form of a “below grade crossing.” Snelling\u00a0 goes UNDER University. To accomplish this, according to preliminary\u00a0drawings, traffic flows between Snelling and University would have to be\u00a0accommodated ** Demolition of the American Bank Building at Snelling & University. In short, the Ramsey County Commissioners’ vote is about putting a superhighway interchange right in the middle of our neighborhood. A\u00a0 modified All of this stems from a Snelling University Capacity Study (SUCS) that So let’s go over the scorecard so far; the Met Council wants to:<\/p>\n …to build a train that will be a colossal money pit, serving a tiny film of commuters that go between the downtowns (and I happen to be one of them right now), an area that has little to do with the Metro’s long-term development, and won’t even make the faintest dent on light rail’s supposed mission, reducing congestion.\u00a0<\/p>\n Where’s the good part?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Met Council’s next plan, after building the nearly -useless Ventura Trolley from downtown to the Airport, is to basically destroy Saint Paul. The current plan is to drive a light rail line from the current Ventura Trollley line through the University of Minnesota, then down University Avenue to downtown Saint Paul.\u00a0 Now, Uni in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1027\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\nresulting in:<\/p>\n
\n** Demolition of part of the Midway Shopping Center
\n** Demolition of the CVS building and structures on that side of\u00a0 Snelling in
\nthe block immediately north.<\/p>\n
\ncloverleaf that will speed motorists driving to the State Fair each\u00a0 August. That will give people driving to work from the northern suburbs an\u00a0 easier
\ncommute, at least for awhile.<\/p>\n
\nwas completed at the end of last year. You can find more about this
\n(including an executive summary and the complete study) by Googling it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n