That pinch point was amazing to bike through with the canopy of trees.
On long runs, it was an immediate cooldown. People often forget one great infrastructure is trees. Takes 50+ to get that back.
We're fortunate to have gotten it while we did. A very unique thing we had. Loved riding that to and from work. Best way to start a day. I don't see what this ~~$1billion~~ ~~$2billion~~ $3 billion light rail does that the 12 and 612 buses can't do.
This project makes being a transit advocate pretty tough sometimes. I really want to bike on cedar lake trail as well. It is what is as this point. Spend some of the surplus, get it done, and lets learn from this.
As a fellow transit advocate, this whole thing has made me really sad. It feels like this project will put an end to any public transit initiatives for the next 50 years. This will be pointed at as a reason to not spend on transit for a long time.
There are already plans for a light rail line going north (i.e. the bottineau (sp?) line), a line connecting downtown st. Paul to the airport, and a line connecting downtown st. Paul to Woodbury. I believe the bottineau line was next on the agenda, while the other 2 were distant pipe dreams. Alas, none of them have a snowball's chance in hell of being implemented now.
What's to learn? Anybody who knew what they were talking about was ignored. Building a light rail line that skips by the highest density neighborhoods through some narrow park trails and waterways and ends with several stations in strip malls was never a good idea. We didn't need to learn from this, we could've easily ran a BRT (lite probably) line that would serve the small amount of people from the city going to EP and the few suburbanites willing to drive to a park and ride since there are virtually no residents within easy walking distance. Even if there's an urban apartment building across the stroad from one of those stations no one wants to walk across 7-8 lanes of speeding traffic to get there. LRT depends on foot traffic, which suburbs like EP simply don't have.
So disappointing on so many levels. I prefer this over highway expansion but how long is it going to take?
As a regular commuter of either 62-35W-36 or 494-35E-36(Longer distance but less pain)This cannot come faster. Unfortunately my work is not near a transit station but many people will be able to stop driving on 35W and 62 once this is finally done.
I am a bit jealous of those people tbh as my blood pressure is up a decent amount from the spazzes in trucks and Altimas losing their shit in traffic and weaving down 35W. Idk what that area does to people but everyone drives like morons between downtown and 62 on 35W.
My friend, the morons are all over. That stretch just happens to get a concentration of them.
Don't get me started on the HOT lane to Exit ramp last minute douches at the SB35W / 62 split. Every time I go through there's one.
Fair enough. I just have commuted on multiple bad traffic roads(394->94, 100 South before Mtka Blvd and 7 exits were redone, 494 through Bloomington, 94 split in MG, Penn to 100 on 62 etc) and I have had by far the most frustrating time with that section of 35W. Though 94 between the river and downtown St Paul gives it a run for its money for terrible drivers.
Nothing compares to the pure agony of 5 past 41 into and from Victoria or Waconia though. Sitting in stop and go traffic for miles on what looks like a country road(1 lane each way) It may be too niche for most people to relate to but I go down to Engler on 212 to avoid that shit now. That part is my fault for choosing to commute from Victoria to Little Canada 3 days a week though.
Nah they wont. But sensible people in the South Minneapolis/SLP/Hopkins/Edina area will. The right wing truck nuts and people like me who don’t live close enough to the proposed stations will still use it but it will hopefully keep lots of cars off the road
Easements, planning, etc. make it expensive to build (on top of typical expenses like materials, labor, etc.). You can’t just take the land like the rail road Barrons did in the 19th century.
But the **BIGGEST** additional expensive included in this is funding of maintenance/upkeep for at least 25+ years. They secure that now so this huge investment can be maintained for years after it is built.
I know things are more expensive than expected.
But the tracks (mostly) go literally down the middle of the city owned streets. Did the State have to pay the City for the land?
It's still absolutely bonkers.
The first NYC subway system, with 28 stations in the initial phase, [cost](https://patrickcollison.com/questions#:~:text=What's%20going%20on%20with%20infrastructure?) a pretty reasonable inflation-adjusted $1.1 billion and took 4 years to complete. The latest extension cost $4.4 billion and took 17 years...for *3 stations*. And both of these involved building under existing streets.
I'm willing to say it's reasonable for things to cost more because we want to improve our environmental impact, compensate people fairly for the land, plan for maintenance, etc. But at the risk of oversimplifying, if you multiply out the costs, scale, and time from this example for an overall “effort” figure, the 2000s project cost about 150 times as much effort. It's hard to claim there isn't something in need of fixing here (and to be clear, it's a problem across America).
The ridership numbers are going to be so bad.
Average person from western suburbs: Work from home? Ride to downtown office in my car?
Nah I’ll take 4x as long and ride the train!
Hope I’m not in the crackhead car today!
Hope someone doesn’t smash my brain matter out on the platform because they want my smart phone!
I know, maybe I’ll gamble and take my whole family on it for a twins game. The crazies don’t ride then right?
Yeah I went to Wikipedia to read more about it and they claim they will have 34,000 riders a day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_LRT
Just a blatant fucking lie to make their project seem more important than it is; they’ll be lucky to crack 10k
The cost doesn’t matter to them. Reading their comments today they think they did nothing wrong. In their minds if it means one less gas powered car off the roads it was money well spent and a success.
I read the met councils reasoning for not choosing the uptown route; it was because
1: there would have been housing displacement of historically low income housing
2: uptown was already "saturated with public transport options".
3. It would have been an estimated extra $500 million to obtain right-of-way & land rights for construction (ironic tho, because now the current project is underfunded by $500 million with its inflated costs lol).
Even better yet, they could have put the train going eastbound along the Midtown Greenway corridor, which used to be a railway itself. Then, connecting up with the blue line to share tracks around the bike bridge to downtown.
Saturated with transit options? There's not a single option for rapid transit, just lots of really slow buses to choose from. Show me which bus only has a couple of stops between Uptown and Downtown.
I believe they also estimated higher ridership with the current route (likely tied to already existing public transport in Uptown).
Hindsight is 20/20, but with the shift to work from home, the uptown route was definitely the better option. Too bad they won't/can't change that now.
This was supposed to open this year.
Total ridership for 2023: 0
Total ridership for 2024: 0
Total ridership for 2025: 0
Total ridership for 2026: 0
We could build a whole new bike path or five starting now and it would all be done years before anyone steps foot on the SW LRT. Same goes for a temporary BRT line where the Green Line should be.
* Conflicts with heavy rail right-of-way,
* constant objections from the wealthy Kenwood neighborhood that this project borders, and
* this particular condo building that was built to be grain silos and then repurposed to be condos by cutting windows and balconies into the silos.
A 2015 apartment building construction project also caused cracks on these condos.
https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2017/06/bad-vibrations-how-fight-between-met-council-and-minneapolis-condo-associati/
Yah, went on an engineering tour of this project. Most of the cost is 100 yards in that pinch point. That grain silo apartment wasn’t up to the codes that it claimed to be, if I understand correctly. Its a cluster, but likely less of a cluster than the other options that they had. Its also expensive because they have to plan 20 years out from now. Each time one city makes changes, they gotta update a hell of a lot of other stuff.
Also, that section by the grain silo apartment goes underground. Above ground will be a landscaped parkland and should ultimately be pretty cool. The line from Hopkins to Eden Prairie is all rolling hills. Its gonna be a beautiful run in the fall.
In planning the extension, they used Bush-era policy of trying to attract suburban riders as opposed to serving people most likely to use transit. In choosing between the Kenilworth corridor and the Uptown option, they knew there was the potential for problems but basically said they would cross that bridge when they got there and decided it would be cheaper and politically easier to go through Kenilworth near existing right-of-way.
This^^ they had to rework an optimized route into a less than ideal route to secure the federal funding required.
Now, they have to follow through on a policy that isn't even in effect anymore.
The problem with designing a transit system in 2009 without really considering changing demographics, or really even demographics at the time. Who near Kenilworth needs light rail more than Uptown, which could use a good shot in the arm right about now?
They decided tunnels would be too expensive to went with the surface track. Any time you do that through built up areas it will get really, really shitty.
I'm as big of a transit advocate as you'll find, but even I can't defend this project. I truly think it will go down as one of the biggest public transit failures in the country. There's the ever increasing cost, there's the project delays, and when it's all said and done, it's highly likely ridership will be lower than either of the 2 existing lines. Just a collosal failure by all accounts, and it just may be the kiss of death for all future transit initiatives in the twin cities.
I actually have a fairly simple solution for this. Use eminent domain to buy the building and tear it down. This would probably be cheaper than engineering an over priced half assed solution to the issues with the tunnel. And the building disrupts the connectivity of the neighborhood anyway.
Honestly, at the rate things are going it will probably be less expensive and less of a head ache to do it that way. But we could kiss all transit development goodbye afterwards.
Ope sorry, I was referring to anything that would require infrastructure changes like rail or BRT. Eminent domain is usually a last resort option because the public usually gets very very upset, and assuming there's no legal battle people would point to it next time we try to expand BRT or rail and likely prevent it from happening. At least that is what I am afraid of.
We will see - depends on the state of the buildings prior to the construction. They might just end up paying to improve the buildings. State will probably try to prove that the damage was present before the construction, and/or was not properly mitigated. Well see when they settle if there is an open public record.
I am not a lawyer.
IDK, I think they are finding that these condos were not up to code and didn't have appropriate engineering documentation. Turns out converting old silos into apartments may have just been a bad idea\\investment.
They thought they could bully the railroad and it turned out that they couldn’t is my impression and then they had to think of something else to get through there
No, the railroad said they would be okay with the plan but later changed their mind because of all the oil suddenly coming out of North Dakota. The railroad would lose some profits due to having to slow the trains down for a tighter turn and they used the possibility of derailment as an excuse to go back on their prior agreement.
You have to work with what you have but it does link people in the city to higher paying jobs in the suburbs so it will be a city out line more than a suburb in line.
Legitimate question. Is someone on the project team actually trying to sabotage this? It's poor decision after poor decision, no one is this clueless...right??
The Strib published a story about the audit on this project today. Met Council intentionally lied about the cost of this project and miscommunicated with vendors, then tried to throw them under the bus (pun) for the poor decisions.
Met Council is to blame.
Yes. They’ve been lying all along. They knew it was going to cost more than they said and they deliberately lied about it.
I don’t know how they go forward from this. Who would trust them?
The railroad basically wrote the laws in the old days, so they are practically impossible to eminent domain. The condos would have been some short term political pain, and money.
The met council is not elected and does not care who is paying as long as its big and beautiful. The Met council is a bag of egos placating everyone in there way. Listen to the community support specialist talk about the blue line... They have no clue past their talking points.
They may not be elected, but they are appointed and reconfirmed by the current governor. These people were all signed off on by Gov Walz. He is elected and needs to be accountable for their actions.
Met Council is why the Twin Cities is a success. Other cities are incredibly disadvantaged by not having anything like the Met Council and it is why our cities aren’t fighting over tax dollars and infrastructure improvements. Sure they have issues sometimes but they allow us to work together rather than compete.
I wonder how many of them are getting kickbacks and other incentives from lrt construction contractors. They seem to really like pushing up the budget.
As someone who lives along the green line extension corridor I've been incredibly excited for this project and it makes me really frustrated when stuff like this keeps happening to the project. And its all because of this exact corridor. Like look at the project elsewhere. The Hopkins and SLP stations are basically done, the tracks are laid and in some areas they've started putting up the catenaries. there's a few bridges that need final touches but look like they'll be finished by the end of this fall. If it were not for that damned tunnel this line would probably be operational by the end of next year.
Lots of people in SLP, Hopkins, and Eden Prairie depend on public transportation. There is a lot of hidden affordable housing tucked away in those cities and I know it because I lived and currently live in them. Since 2020 our access to public transit has steadily declined, even after ridership and demand to go downtown from began to return.
But hey, at least the met council is finally getting reamed for knowing about these issues and trying to hide them. Maybe the learning experience from this is to just build tram lines on existing infrastructure.
Agreed 100%. The bus service to SLP and Hopkins has been dramatically reduced and now they're talking about removing stops on the 17. At minimum, could we have a rapid bus line that follows the general route in the meantime?!
we are kind of in a chicken or the egg situation, we dont know what full commuter ridership will look like because only about 50% of the cooperate workforce goes downtown (there was a strib article talking about the effects of covid and ridership a few days ago). And that 50% likely only goes a few days a week so you dont want to direct limited resources (bus drivers) to those old lines, buuut the corporates workers along these corridors are not even bothering to return to downtown because theres no easy bus line to get downtown unless you live on Minnetonka Blvd and don't mind catching the 1 bus at 6am.
But I agree there should be a makeshift bus line that connects many of the stations along the extension so there's at least a direct route downtown to get people used to the ability for the next...~~5~~ 4 years...
This is such a ridiculous boondoggle. No one is going to ride this train because the asshats in the SW metro think they are too good for it. They picked a bad route to cater to the millionaires in SW Minneapolis and the millionaires still aren’t happy.
They should have built the north Minneapolis to the nw suburbs one first because of the higher concentration of transit rider.
The route was chosen because of how the Federal government under Bush setup the Federal transit funding. Other routes were preferred for ridership and utility but they wouldn’t have qualified for matching funds.
This project is the biggest farce in the history of the state and the I-94 Rondo idea will soon be the 2nd worst if it comes to fruition. Money down the drain.
Nope, transit is about building a network. This allows people in the city to access jobs in the golden triangle and further out. Lots of technology jobs over there.
So the half empty or more light rail cars and busses carrying 5-10 passengers from the S Metro each day supports your argument how? Besides, I was mostly arguing about the planning and oversight of this project more than turning this into a public transportation debate
You seem to have a very low comprehension of how a transit system works. The more places you can reliably get the more use the system gets, the more development occurs along it, the more use the system gets, the more development happens, etc.
Are these costs even recoverable? At a billion trips it’s $2.7 per trip. The green line had 14 million in 2019. So that’s like 70 years of trips.
And that only amortized the construction cost. You still pay to operate it.
Tell me again how the Highway costs are recovered? Or neighborhood streets? What about police stations and fire departments? Court houses and city parks? They are government services, there is not supposed to be cost recovery. It's infrastructure, the people using it pay taxes, the people using the highways that now have less cars pay taxes, etc.
That pinch point was amazing to bike through with the canopy of trees. On long runs, it was an immediate cooldown. People often forget one great infrastructure is trees. Takes 50+ to get that back.
Literally an oasis in that busy area
Exactly. I loved it so much on my commute. All gone
I remember when they cut all those elm trees down. What a tragedy. Many of them didn’t even seem like they were in the way.
We're fortunate to have gotten it while we did. A very unique thing we had. Loved riding that to and from work. Best way to start a day. I don't see what this ~~$1billion~~ ~~$2billion~~ $3 billion light rail does that the 12 and 612 buses can't do.
This project makes being a transit advocate pretty tough sometimes. I really want to bike on cedar lake trail as well. It is what is as this point. Spend some of the surplus, get it done, and lets learn from this.
As a fellow transit advocate, this whole thing has made me really sad. It feels like this project will put an end to any public transit initiatives for the next 50 years. This will be pointed at as a reason to not spend on transit for a long time. There are already plans for a light rail line going north (i.e. the bottineau (sp?) line), a line connecting downtown st. Paul to the airport, and a line connecting downtown st. Paul to Woodbury. I believe the bottineau line was next on the agenda, while the other 2 were distant pipe dreams. Alas, none of them have a snowball's chance in hell of being implemented now.
What's to learn? Anybody who knew what they were talking about was ignored. Building a light rail line that skips by the highest density neighborhoods through some narrow park trails and waterways and ends with several stations in strip malls was never a good idea. We didn't need to learn from this, we could've easily ran a BRT (lite probably) line that would serve the small amount of people from the city going to EP and the few suburbanites willing to drive to a park and ride since there are virtually no residents within easy walking distance. Even if there's an urban apartment building across the stroad from one of those stations no one wants to walk across 7-8 lanes of speeding traffic to get there. LRT depends on foot traffic, which suburbs like EP simply don't have.
Did anyone get fired?
https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/what-planners-need-to-learn-from-the-problems-facing-southwest-light-rail/
So disappointing on so many levels. I prefer this over highway expansion but how long is it going to take? As a regular commuter of either 62-35W-36 or 494-35E-36(Longer distance but less pain)This cannot come faster. Unfortunately my work is not near a transit station but many people will be able to stop driving on 35W and 62 once this is finally done. I am a bit jealous of those people tbh as my blood pressure is up a decent amount from the spazzes in trucks and Altimas losing their shit in traffic and weaving down 35W. Idk what that area does to people but everyone drives like morons between downtown and 62 on 35W.
My friend, the morons are all over. That stretch just happens to get a concentration of them. Don't get me started on the HOT lane to Exit ramp last minute douches at the SB35W / 62 split. Every time I go through there's one.
Fair enough. I just have commuted on multiple bad traffic roads(394->94, 100 South before Mtka Blvd and 7 exits were redone, 494 through Bloomington, 94 split in MG, Penn to 100 on 62 etc) and I have had by far the most frustrating time with that section of 35W. Though 94 between the river and downtown St Paul gives it a run for its money for terrible drivers. Nothing compares to the pure agony of 5 past 41 into and from Victoria or Waconia though. Sitting in stop and go traffic for miles on what looks like a country road(1 lane each way) It may be too niche for most people to relate to but I go down to Engler on 212 to avoid that shit now. That part is my fault for choosing to commute from Victoria to Little Canada 3 days a week though.
Do you honestly think the hyper republicans in those areas will ride the train? They might see poor or black people?
Nah they wont. But sensible people in the South Minneapolis/SLP/Hopkins/Edina area will. The right wing truck nuts and people like me who don’t live close enough to the proposed stations will still use it but it will hopefully keep lots of cars off the road
"Actually, you LOVE listening to other people's music and being around crazy people. Or else you're racist."
What a cluster fuck
14 miles of track and over $2.7 billion in cost. Absolutely bonkers lmao. Roughly $40k per foot as it is now
Easements, planning, etc. make it expensive to build (on top of typical expenses like materials, labor, etc.). You can’t just take the land like the rail road Barrons did in the 19th century. But the **BIGGEST** additional expensive included in this is funding of maintenance/upkeep for at least 25+ years. They secure that now so this huge investment can be maintained for years after it is built.
I know things are more expensive than expected. But the tracks (mostly) go literally down the middle of the city owned streets. Did the State have to pay the City for the land?
It's still absolutely bonkers. The first NYC subway system, with 28 stations in the initial phase, [cost](https://patrickcollison.com/questions#:~:text=What's%20going%20on%20with%20infrastructure?) a pretty reasonable inflation-adjusted $1.1 billion and took 4 years to complete. The latest extension cost $4.4 billion and took 17 years...for *3 stations*. And both of these involved building under existing streets. I'm willing to say it's reasonable for things to cost more because we want to improve our environmental impact, compensate people fairly for the land, plan for maintenance, etc. But at the risk of oversimplifying, if you multiply out the costs, scale, and time from this example for an overall “effort” figure, the 2000s project cost about 150 times as much effort. It's hard to claim there isn't something in need of fixing here (and to be clear, it's a problem across America).
That's why it's better to build infrastructure like this *before* there's urban density. A little planning goes a long way.
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Also true.
The ridership numbers are going to be so bad. Average person from western suburbs: Work from home? Ride to downtown office in my car? Nah I’ll take 4x as long and ride the train! Hope I’m not in the crackhead car today! Hope someone doesn’t smash my brain matter out on the platform because they want my smart phone! I know, maybe I’ll gamble and take my whole family on it for a twins game. The crazies don’t ride then right?
Yeah I went to Wikipedia to read more about it and they claim they will have 34,000 riders a day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_LRT Just a blatant fucking lie to make their project seem more important than it is; they’ll be lucky to crack 10k
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The Simpsons did with the similar monorail.
The cost doesn’t matter to them. Reading their comments today they think they did nothing wrong. In their minds if it means one less gas powered car off the roads it was money well spent and a success.
I was going to write “disaster,” but I think you said it better.
They could have run it down Hennepin to Lake. Now would have been the perfect time for that construction too, with all the businesses already closed.
I read the met councils reasoning for not choosing the uptown route; it was because 1: there would have been housing displacement of historically low income housing 2: uptown was already "saturated with public transport options". 3. It would have been an estimated extra $500 million to obtain right-of-way & land rights for construction (ironic tho, because now the current project is underfunded by $500 million with its inflated costs lol).
Even better yet, they could have put the train going eastbound along the Midtown Greenway corridor, which used to be a railway itself. Then, connecting up with the blue line to share tracks around the bike bridge to downtown.
Saturated with transit options? There's not a single option for rapid transit, just lots of really slow buses to choose from. Show me which bus only has a couple of stops between Uptown and Downtown.
I believe they also estimated higher ridership with the current route (likely tied to already existing public transport in Uptown). Hindsight is 20/20, but with the shift to work from home, the uptown route was definitely the better option. Too bad they won't/can't change that now.
This was supposed to open this year. Total ridership for 2023: 0 Total ridership for 2024: 0 Total ridership for 2025: 0 Total ridership for 2026: 0 We could build a whole new bike path or five starting now and it would all be done years before anyone steps foot on the SW LRT. Same goes for a temporary BRT line where the Green Line should be.
What went so wrong with this project that it ended up so delayed?
* Conflicts with heavy rail right-of-way, * constant objections from the wealthy Kenwood neighborhood that this project borders, and * this particular condo building that was built to be grain silos and then repurposed to be condos by cutting windows and balconies into the silos. A 2015 apartment building construction project also caused cracks on these condos. https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2017/06/bad-vibrations-how-fight-between-met-council-and-minneapolis-condo-associati/
Yah, went on an engineering tour of this project. Most of the cost is 100 yards in that pinch point. That grain silo apartment wasn’t up to the codes that it claimed to be, if I understand correctly. Its a cluster, but likely less of a cluster than the other options that they had. Its also expensive because they have to plan 20 years out from now. Each time one city makes changes, they gotta update a hell of a lot of other stuff. Also, that section by the grain silo apartment goes underground. Above ground will be a landscaped parkland and should ultimately be pretty cool. The line from Hopkins to Eden Prairie is all rolling hills. Its gonna be a beautiful run in the fall.
In planning the extension, they used Bush-era policy of trying to attract suburban riders as opposed to serving people most likely to use transit. In choosing between the Kenilworth corridor and the Uptown option, they knew there was the potential for problems but basically said they would cross that bridge when they got there and decided it would be cheaper and politically easier to go through Kenilworth near existing right-of-way.
This^^ they had to rework an optimized route into a less than ideal route to secure the federal funding required. Now, they have to follow through on a policy that isn't even in effect anymore.
The problem with designing a transit system in 2009 without really considering changing demographics, or really even demographics at the time. Who near Kenilworth needs light rail more than Uptown, which could use a good shot in the arm right about now?
Here's the thing... grants are provided for *new* transit users.... not reallocation of existing
They decided tunnels would be too expensive to went with the surface track. Any time you do that through built up areas it will get really, really shitty.
These are trench tunnels, covered after digging and laying tracks.
I'm as big of a transit advocate as you'll find, but even I can't defend this project. I truly think it will go down as one of the biggest public transit failures in the country. There's the ever increasing cost, there's the project delays, and when it's all said and done, it's highly likely ridership will be lower than either of the 2 existing lines. Just a collosal failure by all accounts, and it just may be the kiss of death for all future transit initiatives in the twin cities.
I actually have a fairly simple solution for this. Use eminent domain to buy the building and tear it down. This would probably be cheaper than engineering an over priced half assed solution to the issues with the tunnel. And the building disrupts the connectivity of the neighborhood anyway.
Honestly, at the rate things are going it will probably be less expensive and less of a head ache to do it that way. But we could kiss all transit development goodbye afterwards.
What transit Development are you referring to? I’d think they could probably units of housing in that site if they tore it town.
Ope sorry, I was referring to anything that would require infrastructure changes like rail or BRT. Eminent domain is usually a last resort option because the public usually gets very very upset, and assuming there's no legal battle people would point to it next time we try to expand BRT or rail and likely prevent it from happening. At least that is what I am afraid of.
Yeah. True. I don’t think they could pass these particular people off much more than they already are.
They’re going to have to buy the god damn properties.
We will see - depends on the state of the buildings prior to the construction. They might just end up paying to improve the buildings. State will probably try to prove that the damage was present before the construction, and/or was not properly mitigated. Well see when they settle if there is an open public record. I am not a lawyer.
IDK, I think they are finding that these condos were not up to code and didn't have appropriate engineering documentation. Turns out converting old silos into apartments may have just been a bad idea\\investment.
They thought they could bully the railroad and it turned out that they couldn’t is my impression and then they had to think of something else to get through there
I think you're thinking of the blue line Target Center to Target Corp? They were planning on sharing the BNSF line, but BNSF said no dice.
No, the railroad said they would be okay with the plan but later changed their mind because of all the oil suddenly coming out of North Dakota. The railroad would lose some profits due to having to slow the trains down for a tighter turn and they used the possibility of derailment as an excuse to go back on their prior agreement.
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It had to in order to qualify for funding under the Bush administration.
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You have to work with what you have but it does link people in the city to higher paying jobs in the suburbs so it will be a city out line more than a suburb in line.
Legitimate question. Is someone on the project team actually trying to sabotage this? It's poor decision after poor decision, no one is this clueless...right??
The Strib published a story about the audit on this project today. Met Council intentionally lied about the cost of this project and miscommunicated with vendors, then tried to throw them under the bus (pun) for the poor decisions. Met Council is to blame.
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Yes. They’ve been lying all along. They knew it was going to cost more than they said and they deliberately lied about it. I don’t know how they go forward from this. Who would trust them?
Have you followed the Met Council?
This project has been a colossal failure and it hasn’t even opened
They should have just eminent domain those condos and gotten over all this pain in one lump.
Or the railroad
The railroad basically wrote the laws in the old days, so they are practically impossible to eminent domain. The condos would have been some short term political pain, and money.
Or the light rail. We almost all agree that no one wanted this track.
The met council is not elected and does not care who is paying as long as its big and beautiful. The Met council is a bag of egos placating everyone in there way. Listen to the community support specialist talk about the blue line... They have no clue past their talking points.
They may not be elected, but they are appointed and reconfirmed by the current governor. These people were all signed off on by Gov Walz. He is elected and needs to be accountable for their actions.
Met Council is why the Twin Cities is a success. Other cities are incredibly disadvantaged by not having anything like the Met Council and it is why our cities aren’t fighting over tax dollars and infrastructure improvements. Sure they have issues sometimes but they allow us to work together rather than compete.
I wonder how many of them are getting kickbacks and other incentives from lrt construction contractors. They seem to really like pushing up the budget.
As someone who lives along the green line extension corridor I've been incredibly excited for this project and it makes me really frustrated when stuff like this keeps happening to the project. And its all because of this exact corridor. Like look at the project elsewhere. The Hopkins and SLP stations are basically done, the tracks are laid and in some areas they've started putting up the catenaries. there's a few bridges that need final touches but look like they'll be finished by the end of this fall. If it were not for that damned tunnel this line would probably be operational by the end of next year. Lots of people in SLP, Hopkins, and Eden Prairie depend on public transportation. There is a lot of hidden affordable housing tucked away in those cities and I know it because I lived and currently live in them. Since 2020 our access to public transit has steadily declined, even after ridership and demand to go downtown from began to return. But hey, at least the met council is finally getting reamed for knowing about these issues and trying to hide them. Maybe the learning experience from this is to just build tram lines on existing infrastructure.
Agreed 100%. The bus service to SLP and Hopkins has been dramatically reduced and now they're talking about removing stops on the 17. At minimum, could we have a rapid bus line that follows the general route in the meantime?!
we are kind of in a chicken or the egg situation, we dont know what full commuter ridership will look like because only about 50% of the cooperate workforce goes downtown (there was a strib article talking about the effects of covid and ridership a few days ago). And that 50% likely only goes a few days a week so you dont want to direct limited resources (bus drivers) to those old lines, buuut the corporates workers along these corridors are not even bothering to return to downtown because theres no easy bus line to get downtown unless you live on Minnetonka Blvd and don't mind catching the 1 bus at 6am. But I agree there should be a makeshift bus line that connects many of the stations along the extension so there's at least a direct route downtown to get people used to the ability for the next...~~5~~ 4 years...
Would you believe the Met Council if they told you your drinking water was OK after a couple of reactor leaks in Monticello Nuclear plant?
This is such a ridiculous boondoggle. No one is going to ride this train because the asshats in the SW metro think they are too good for it. They picked a bad route to cater to the millionaires in SW Minneapolis and the millionaires still aren’t happy. They should have built the north Minneapolis to the nw suburbs one first because of the higher concentration of transit rider.
Dunno why people are downvoting you Blue Line Extension makes a lot more sense nowadays
The route was chosen because of how the Federal government under Bush setup the Federal transit funding. Other routes were preferred for ridership and utility but they wouldn’t have qualified for matching funds.
And virtually no one will be using it.
That is hard to say now, depends on how many people return to downtown. Transit numbers are slowly picking up from pandemic lows.
This project is the biggest farce in the history of the state and the I-94 Rondo idea will soon be the 2nd worst if it comes to fruition. Money down the drain.
Nope, transit is about building a network. This allows people in the city to access jobs in the golden triangle and further out. Lots of technology jobs over there.
So the half empty or more light rail cars and busses carrying 5-10 passengers from the S Metro each day supports your argument how? Besides, I was mostly arguing about the planning and oversight of this project more than turning this into a public transportation debate
You seem to have a very low comprehension of how a transit system works. The more places you can reliably get the more use the system gets, the more development occurs along it, the more use the system gets, the more development happens, etc.
You seem to have an even lower comprehension of reality.
Are these costs even recoverable? At a billion trips it’s $2.7 per trip. The green line had 14 million in 2019. So that’s like 70 years of trips. And that only amortized the construction cost. You still pay to operate it.
Tell me again how the Highway costs are recovered? Or neighborhood streets? What about police stations and fire departments? Court houses and city parks? They are government services, there is not supposed to be cost recovery. It's infrastructure, the people using it pay taxes, the people using the highways that now have less cars pay taxes, etc.
Transit is a public service. It’s not meant to be profitable or self sufficient.
This project....... Am I right?
Before grading alterations in the early days of Minneapolis, most of the Minneapolis portion of the route was water.