Beloved childhood memory: taking the street car to school on really cold days when I was in kindergarten and first grade; also, riding with my big brother on the smoking platform.
Okay, I like the concept of light rail. I've also observed what light rail did to obstruct traffic flow in south Mpls. I shudder to think of what it will do to St. Paul. How long will it take to go north/south across University on main arteries like Snelling, Hamline, Lexington, etc. once those trains are up and running? Too bad the Twin Cities didn't build subways back when you could hire Swedes to dig for a dollar a day. No offense meant to any other Swedes out there.

it's called I-94. still plenty of room between the noise walls. I think they can pack a too-too twain in there, few utilities to move, no land to buy, no whine and riot about displacing cars/pedestrians/gangbangers/whatever.

that will get their Central Corridor light rail costs back down to size, except for the little matter of the Washington Avenue bridge being undersized, understrength, and... well, sorry, but it's true... such a MINNESOTA kind of bridge.

no Hamms, no flowing waters of Hiawatha in winter, not enough show for dogsled races or hushed tones on the weather channel ("can you BELIEVE this snowfall report from Minneapolis? cheeze, and they can't measure the low temp, either. are we keeping state political prisoners there?")

but forever more, we will be The State Whose Bridges Just Fall.

I was wondering about expensive eye glasses? In court I see people wearing those really expensive (so I'm told $800 - $1000) librarian type goggles. They might be accused of no insurance or bad checks and ask to pay the fine over time, but they have those glasses.

Another billion dollars flushed down the light rail rat hole. And that's just the construction. Every year of operating the things it would be cheaper to buy the passengers a car than to continue the subsidy.

If light rail were "all that" the market would have provided it here already.

Here's a wild eyed proposal. Offer to sell the airspace over the highways to private companies for the purpose of operating mass transit without subsidy for profit.

all those skyways, don't'cha know, then.

People ride it, and it's popular. It's also a long-term investment. Hardly a "rat hole". It relieves some congenstion now, but more importantly allows us to add capacity in the future without building additional freeways.

You also seem to forget that the market is risk-averse -- there isn't a company out there that would take a billion dollar gamble like that. The market is a great driver, but it's not the ultimate solution to all of mankinds woes. Yes Virginia, there is a role for government.

Take a tip from Chiba, Japan...

http://www.subways.net/japan/chibacity.htm

Buying cars for everyone would completely defeat the purpose. Light Rail will reduce conjestion on University and I-94.

Too bad Minneapolis missed out on rapid transit earlier. In 1972 a Subway/Rapid Transit plan was shot down, as well as the late 70s transit studies. In 1980 the Minnesota Legislature banned state money from funding a light rail plan. In 1985 the ban was lifted. There were various studies from Hennepin, Ramsey, Anoka, and Dakota counties. Most of these studies ended before 1995. In the mid-to-late 1990s a new Hiawatha study emerged, and construction began in 2001.

Central will be one of the most vital links in the metro if a true light rail system is built. A system will require decent funding.

I am an LRT advocate, or was until the Hiawatha Line completely destroyed traffic flow on Hiawatha Ave. Why is this the case? Because the planners didn't put cross arms in position to stop traffic on cross streets from pulling onto the tracks while waiting to cross Hiawatha Ave. Therefore, every time a train approaches, Hiawatha Ave. traffic must be stopped to allow any moron(s) who pulled onto the tracks to clear. Completely unacceptable and moronic planning. Welcome to Minnesota!

The answer to eliminating this problem is to go OVER the existing infrastructure. Not with an "EL" a la Chicago, but with monorail.

Monrail can cost as much as LRT to build, but in the long run it has many advantages and can be profitable, unlike most modes of public transport. The big thing is, it can be built in existing ROW, meaning it could be added in some of our busiest corridors (i.e.35W in S. Metro) TOMORROW. No need for costly ROW purchase or reconstruction, just dig holes for the track supports and viola'.

Monrail would also eliminate a huge problem facing the Central Line: whether to go through, around or under the "U". With monrail, you run OVER it. Problem solved. Monorail would also eliminate what is going to be a Hiawatha-revisited nightmare as LRT will destroy traffic flow on University Ave. through St. Paul.

So, why isn't monorail more prevalent? Mainly because people view it more as a Disneyland thing, as opposed to a viable transportation option. That, and monorail builders are also LRT builders. LRT makes them much more money, so they aren't going to push monrail if the City doesn't.

This is food for thought. This would be the fastest way to immediately upgrade our transit system. Any takers?

So, why isn't monorail more prevalent?

There are practical problems with things like junctions, escape routes in case of trouble, etc. The lack of monorails around the world is empirical data that it is not a panacea.

Besides, everybody has seen the real problem with monorails, as was clearly and definitively documented on The Simpsons. :-)

Monorail has no more problems than what are associated with LRT. No one is saying it is a panacea, just an improvement over LRT. As for problems, they are few compared to LRT. No derailments, no train-vehicle/pedestrian collisions(and associated costly lawsuits), computer driven, keeping them on schedule and out of human hands,etc. There are more monorail systems than you think. Do some research! As for the Simpsons reference, didn't catch that episode, so it is lost on me.

Has anyone looked at the plan? It calls for taking one traffic lane in both directions. Look at the traffic flow on University Av now. If it goes down to one lane each way it will be a disaster! And God help you if you have to make a turn across the tracks! Look at the types of vehicles on the road now..about one quarter are trucks making deliveries and such. They can never deliver on rails. The trolly will not cut traffic by any decent percentage points. So imagine almost all the traffic thats on there now and it only has one lane and it takes forever to cross the trolly tracks. Government stupidity at it finest. Oh ya..ask them how they plan to clear snow off the tracks..You'll love the answer..and don't forget the buried utilities under the street, they have to be moved and they don't unclude that price in the cost either. All this for just under a billion dollars.

There are more monorail systems than you think.

How about listing the top 10 successful monorail systems? (Amusement parks don't count.)

As a monorail proponent, you really need to see that Simpsons episode.

Please, headedwest, go to www.monorails.org. If you really want to know the facts about monorail systems worldwide, monorails.org is a good place to start your long journey from the dark side to the shining land of truth and light. Just a few thoughts - the Tokyo monorail is not only successful but profitable. Junctions are built the same way people sewers, I mean, subways are. That is the crossing lines are at differant levels. It's worked for them heathen New Yorkers for about a century.
Evacuations are accomplished by stepping out of the car unto the walkways between the rails, thence to retractable stairs. In the words of Saint Homer of the Simpsons, DOAH!!!

ars gratia pecunia

Although I-94 would be in many ways a great location for rail, there's at least one serious problem with it: Any station you build would be difficult for pedestrians to access.

The highway itself is about 100 ft wide; banks on either side make it effectively at least 150 ft wide. Let's say you run the track down the middle of I-94; that means you've got at least a 75 ft distance between parallel access roads and the train station itself. That may not sound like a lot, but I think it would be a serious pain. One of the big advantages of roadside light-rail is that it's very convenient to get on/off at a station. If you run it through a highway you eliminate that advantage. It's not a deal-killer, but it would make it a much harder sell.

You're certainly correct to point out that every public transit system requires ongoing public subsidy. However, every transportation system in existence, including passenger cars. I would like to see a cost comparison between per-mile passenger car subsidy and per-mile light rail subsidy to make a fair comparison.

Thanks for the info on elevated rail / monorail ideas. I've read that inclement weather, especially for elevated tracks, can be a real killer in terms of maintenance cost. I know Chicago has bad winters and an elevated system; what's their ongoing cost structure like for it?

Servious wrote:

"...Every year of operating the things it would be cheaper to buy the passengers a car than to continue the subsidy"

That statement is patently false. Even excluding the personal costs of owning and operating a car, the cost of operating a well designed and maintained LRT is significantly less. In fact, the Hiawatha would be *completely* paying for itself it it were completed with three car trains and extended further south of the MOA. At present, every time I pay a $2 fare I am paying > 50 cents more than the ride costs.

No one riding a car today pays their fair share for their auto use. The automobile is our boondoggle subsidy.

I spent ten years living in Portland, Oregon, which has built four light rail lines and a streetcar line since 1986. It is now building a fifth light rail line and extending the streetcar line. During that time, area voters have consistently elected transit advocates over transit naysayers to public office by a 2-to-1 ratio.

On the whole, I'm glad I returned to Minneapolis, but the one thing that makes me almost tearfully nostalgic for Portland is its transit system.

Not only the light rail and streetcar system, but also a frequent, extensive, and well-coordinated bus system that runs 7 days a week on all arterials allowed me to live happily and easily without a car for those ten years. I even took a Saturday morning computer class at a suburban community college campus, traveling there and back on light rail and a bus that was coordinated to meet the train.

When I gave up my car in 1993, it was considered an odd thing to do, but by the time I left, five people in my circle of friends had done the same. I know from newspaper accounts that other people were also going car-free, and that there was a significant number of teens who were content with not getting their driver's licenses.

When I moved back here and had to start driving, I noticed an immediate drop in disposable income, even though my income (from self-employment) held steady and consumer prices in Portland and Minneapolis aren't that different. A look at my records showed that I was spending $3000 a year on the car (insurance, gas, repairs and maintenance--the car was given to me by a family member), as opposed to $720 a year for a transit pass.

The anti-transit whiners on this blog are sad, sad, sad. They're reacting knee-jerk (or more likely at the behest of right-wing bloggers and talk show hosts) to something they probably have no direct experience with.

I feel sorry for people who see their cars as part of their identity. I realize that cars are currently a necessity in this poorly served metropolitan area. But that's no reason to rule out a future in which cars are less necessary or to hobble people who can't afford to or are physically unable to drive.

My previous response was eaten by the overzealous spam protector but I think this one is better anyway.

The primary disadvantage the government has is that it is not risk adverse.

If I can steal an analogy. "Suppose that your friend Sally opens a company that produces Sally's Salt-and-Sauerkraut Super Smoothies, which are fruit-and-yogurt smoothies made with (you guessed it) salt and sauerkraut. Most of us would expect that the product would bomb completely, and your friend would be sitting with unsold inventories of Sally's Salt-and-Sauerkraut Super Smoothies. To produce the Smoothies, Sally needed salt, sauerkraut, fruit, yogurt, plastic bottles, time, labor, and capital. The losses she suffers are the market's way of telling her that she has wasted salt (which might be better used to make salt-and-vinegar potato chips), she has wasted sauerkraut (which might be better used as a complement to Polish sausage), and so on."

Now, I'm sure there are people who would like Sauerkraut Smoothies just like there are people who ride LRT. But are there enough willing to pay the prices necessary to offset the cost to build and operate the business. If not, that's the market's way of saying you wasted the resources to build the business. We know the LRT incurs losses because it requires subsidies every year from the state budget.

Therefore, Yes, it is a rat hole and the resources would be better spent by private companies. They might even build a cheap, reliable mass transit system if you let them. They have before.

Paul wrote. "No one riding a car today pays their fair share for their auto use. The automobile is our boondoggle subsidy."

Simply not true. The gas tax has been subsidizing the general fund for years and the motor vehicle sales tax subsidizes the LRT line. After my more lengthy reply to the "Rat Hole" question I don't have time to dig up the figures at the moment.

Stay tuned,

Oh, Mr. Anonymous from Portland. I'm so sorry we do not subsidize your lifestyle. And I'm not against mass transit in principle. But I am against government run and subsidized businesses on principle.

If you don't believe in tax subsidies for things you personally don't use, you are advocating an extreme economic libertarian point of view. If that's what you really want, there are some real-world examples of this view. The trouble is that they're all in the Third World, where the rich have superb privatized everything, from schools to water supplies, and the poor majority live in cardboard and tin shacks and dip their drinking water out of the nearest river.

Taxes pay for public services. If you don't want to live in the Third World, you need to pay First World taxes. You won't use all of the public services--you hope you never need the fire department--but they're there when you need them, and while you may think that you'll never need public transit--well, a friend of mine in Portland learned about it the hard way after he was wheelchair-bound for six months due to an accident.

Public transit seems to be controversial only in the U.S, where for the past 25 years, the right wing has continuously hollered, "Public bad! Private good!"

Most people who have actually lived with good transit, either in the U.S. or other countries, often wonder why we can't have such systems here. I have my own theories as to why the Twin Cities are behind not only Portland but behind Dallas, Sacramento, and Denver, but they would take too long to explain here.

If you don't believe in tax subsidies for things you personally don't use, you are advocating an extreme economic libertarian point of view. If that's what you really want, there are some real-world examples of this view. The trouble is that they're all in the Third World, where the rich have superb privatized everything, from schools to water supplies, and the poor majority live in cardboard and tin shacks and dip their drinking water out of the nearest river.

Taxes pay for public services. If you don't want to live in the Third World, you need to pay First World taxes. You won't use all of the public services--you hope you never need the fire department--but they're there when you need them, and while you may think that you'll never need public transit--well, a friend of mine in Portland learned about it the hard way after he was wheelchair-bound for six months due to an accident.

Public transit seems to be controversial only in the U.S, where for the past 25 years, the right wing has continuously hollered, "Public bad! Private good!"

Most people who have actually lived with good transit, either in the U.S. or other countries, often wonder why we can't have such systems here. I have my own theories as to why the Twin Cities are behind not only Portland but behind Dallas, Sacramento, and Denver, but they would take too long to explain here.

Mr Anonymous from Portland writes: "I realize that cars are currently a necessity" Yeah, for atleast the next 100 years.

"in this poorly served metropolitan area" in your opinion.

Here's the real reason: "But that's no reason to rule out a future in which cars are less necessary or to hobble people who can't afford to or are physically unable to drive."

Transportation is just another social program.

How many people are gonna want to walk to and from a transit stop on a -5 degree day like today?

How many people are gonna want to walk to and from a transit stop on a -5 degree day like today?

Thousands in this metropolitan area alone. They literally have no alternative. There was a time when I did it myself, back during the Reagan recession.

"in this poorly served metropolitan area" in your opinion.

It's not just MY opinion. It's the opinion of most people who have ever lived in a place with a decent public transit system.

A social program? Sure, and you say that as if it's a bad thing.

Please remember your opposition to social programs if you should ever need natural disaster relief or when you become eligible for Social Security or write your mortgage interest deduction down on your tax return. Also, if your older relatives went to college on the GI Bill or bought their first house with an FHA mortgage, tell them that they should give the money back.

Right wingers object to social programs only when they benefit poor people.

"The trouble is that they're all in the Third World, where the rich have superb privatized everything, from schools to water supplies, and the poor majority live in cardboard and tin shacks and dip their drinking water out of the nearest river."

Where do I start?

Do I start with the fact that these places are not the libertarian havens you claim but despotic hell holes? Of course, that would lead to the idea that a necessary precondition for a free market is a government capable of protecting property so people can build capital. See, I'm not so radical a libertarian.

Capital, being the means of production, is the key to a wealthy society. If a government does not protect property but instead lets warlords run amok pillaging and killing, a society will tend to be poor. This is the story in much of the third world.

Likewise, a government that confiscates property to benefit others, whether few or many, gets in the way of this capital accumulation process and renders the society relatively poorer in the process. This covers the rest of the third world.

I could, however, start with the fact that despite your red herring attempt you have not shown that mass transit could not be provided better and cheaper by private providers out to make a profit. Your friend confined to a wheelchair could have been well taken care of by a private market in mass transit. The fact that government squeezed out private providers does not mean government was necessary or that private providers would be incapable.

Also, I'm not advocating a full scale economic revolution. Despite your lampooning my argument as "Public bad! Private good!" that's not what I said. Government has a definite but limited role to play. Where it tries to run a business though, it has a fatal disadvantage. Government is not subject to market risk. Any losses which would otherwise be a signal that it is wasting resources can be papered over with tax subsidies. In the meantime it has prevented private providers from entering and providing customers with what they really want.

There are two types of libertarianism: social libertarianism, which is opposed to things like restrictions on abortion, guns, or drug use, and economic libertarianism, which treats The Market as an infallible god.

Those Third World countries are not social libertarian paradises, but they are economic libertarian paradises. Back in the 1970s, I actually saw a group of Central American countries (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and pre-Sandinista Nicaragua) run an advertising supplement in the New York Times asking for foreign investment, boasting about their lack of corporate taxes, lack of environmental and health and safety laws, and lack of mandated benefits.

I'm sure they're all great countries for the rich to live in. In fact, they're trying to get rich gringos to come down and retire, but for the poor majority, they're hellholes in the economic sense.

One tenet of the economic libertarian religion is that the only legitimate functions of government are the military, the police, and the judiciary, just the functions needed to keep business people from cheating one another and to keep the peasants in their place.

I talked to a woman who had been a missionary to Nicaragua before the Sandinista revolution. She asked the people she served why they were listening to Cuban radio broadcasts when Cubans had no political freedoms. They just laughed in her face. Their neighborhood had never been electrified, even though it was in a fairly large town; they had no water supply except a polluted river, no school, no medical facilities, and jobs that provided nothing but long hours at sub-subsistence pay.Even a Cuban living standard sounded good to them.

You talk about government "confiscation" of property getting in the way of "creating wealth." Note that you no longer hear of vast numbers of Scandinavians or Germans or Dutch or Irish emigrating to the U.S.
Nope, the immigrants are all from poor areas: Latin America, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa.

But back to transit: The government didn't "squeeze out" private providers. The private providers mostly went broke and begged to be bought out by local governments. The MTC was formed in 1970 to buy the bus lines from Carl Pohlad, who's still asking for government handouts at his advanced age. Something similar happened in Portland.

There are successful private commuter lines in Japan, but they are simply subsidiaries of long-existing companies that built rail lines back when labor was cheap, acquired all the land along the lines (when land was cheap), sold the land for housing during Japan's postwar boom, and then built department stores at the urban terminus of their rail lines. The stores and concessions that they built at every stop, along with rents on land around the stations, subsidize their rail operations.

Even Japan's now-privatized national rail system (built with public money from the 1880s to the 1990s) follows this model of subsidizing its operations with side businesses.

The one example of a successful privatized urban transit system that libertarians love to point to is the excellent bus system of Curítiba, Brazil. However, if you look at how it works, you find that it's actually a public-private hybrid. Only the actual buses are privately owned. They run on routes and schedules set by the local government, and the owners are paid by mileage rather than ridership to prevent them from abandoning less popular routes. The bus system is also supported by strict land-use laws and the banning of cars from the downtown.

If there were a private company willing to help the Twin Cities catch up with the rest of the world, I'd be delighted. If Macy's wanted to have a rail line terminate in its basement (as rail lines do in Japan) and run rail lines to all its mall locations, that would be fantastic.

A few years ago, a Republican state legislator from suburban Portland (the Oregon Republicans are mostly economic libertarians and sometimes even social libertarians) was talking up the idea of having a privatized bus system in her area. The catch? She wanted a huge state subsidy to get it started, and the proposed owner was a friend of hers. Riiight. Privatize the profit and socialize the risk.

However, my guess is that most libertarians, with their "every man is an island" philosophy, are such car worshipers that they'd never dream of trying to make money on mass transit, any more than they'd try to make money on sidewalks.