{"id":3894,"date":"2008-12-30T08:00:05","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T13:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3894"},"modified":"2009-12-18T12:29:55","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T17:29:55","slug":"mpr-not-on-my-street-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3894","title":{"rendered":"MPR: Not On My Street! (Part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s gotten a lot of press lately: Minnesota Public Radio seems set to take the Central Corridor &#8211; the new light rail line set to connect the two downtowns via the U of M, University Avenue and the Capitol area &#8211; to court over the disruption the high-frequency noise and low-frequency vibration could cause their recording and production operations.<\/p>\n<p>MPR <a href=\"http:\/\/minnesota.publicradio.org\/about\/mpr\/central_corridor\/\" target=\"_blank\">posts its case here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>On the one hand, it&#8217;s easy &#8211; or, to put it in the possibly-more-apt pseudo-latin, &#8220;facile&#8221; &#8211; to ascribe the whole thing to the &#8220;limousine liberalism&#8221; of Bill Kling, Garrison Keillor and MPR&#8217;s well-heeled clientele; &#8220;silent acquiescence to big-government initiatives for ye, but not for we&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, you will scour their website in vain for any mention of opposition to the Central Corridor over&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the horrible effect the Central Corridor have on traffic and noise in the Midway,<\/li>\n<li>the crushing economic impact it&#8217;ll have on the Southeast Asian business community in Frogtown, which has been a huge, if low-key, triumph of the free market in Saint Paul in the time since I&#8217;ve lived here,<\/li>\n<li>the cost of refitting the Washington Avenue Bridge at the U of M to carry the added weight of the LRT line,<\/li>\n<li>the overarching fact that with its stops every mile (rather than every few blocks) and fast rolling stock designed to stop only at large, purpose-built stops (just like the Hiawatha Line), the LRT will supplant the <em>50 Express<\/em> bus, rather than the slow, clunky, traffic-clogging 16 line between the downtowns &#8211; meaning that it&#8217;ll not only barely scratch traffic, and that&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;as such, it will serve primarily inter-Twin-City rather than local travel, and so might have been vastly better-served by a trolley line or other more utilitarian but less-&#8220;sexy&#8221; installation.<\/li>\n<li>It will require immense expense to solve a number of civil engineering challenges in downtown Saint Paul&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230;or other such plebeian concerns. Indeed, it seems to be all about their studios. Which may be legally appropriate but, given their support for all the <em>other <\/em>aspects of the Central Corridor, ethically obtuse.<\/p>\n<p>That being said, I&#8217;ll try to stay away from some of the stereotypical (albeit sometimes fully appropriate) class-baiting that some of MPR&#8217;s conservative critics have employed in criticizing the network&#8217;s response to the LRT line.<\/p>\n<p>I said &#8220;try&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow: Sound Engineering, Unsound Planning.<\/p>\n<p>Thursday: Civil Engineering, Uncivil Project.<\/p>\n<p>Friday:\u00a0 Ethics, Politics and other difficult stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s gotten a lot of press lately: Minnesota Public Radio seems set to take the Central Corridor &#8211; the new light rail line set to connect the two downtowns via the U of M, University Avenue and the Capitol area &#8211; to court over the disruption the high-frequency noise and low-frequency vibration could cause their [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trains-and-automobiles","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3894","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=3894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7313,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3894\/revisions\/7313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}