Waiting for the numbers – with interest, but not blind anticipation – seems a reasonable course. As for the consequences of doing nothing, Mr. Pappas is right on target.

As both citizen-user of transit services, public, private and automotive, and as a former planning commissioner, two things seem immediately obvious in this transit context. First, that we desperately need alternatives to the automobile, which has locked us into a development pattern that’s a catastrophe-in-waiting; and second, that Republicans, as Steve suggests, essentially want to return to 1962 – the year I graduated from high school – by cutting public / mass transit wherever they can, in order to continue promoting automobile ownership and even more lanes of concrete and asphalt as some sort of birthright.

Fuel prices are already proving them wrong, but so many of them live in a nostalgia-based universe that reality has yet to have much of an effect. Eventually, there’ll be no escaping the diminishing supply of oil, but prudent public policy would have alternatives already in place by the time that happens. Alas, there’s little evidence of that in St. Paul at the moment.

Regarding the first comment: it's worth setting the record straight on Angeleno transit. The system in place in much of L.A. puts ours to shame, with three (soon to be four) light rail lines, two subway lines, two dedicated bus transitways, and a network of bus rapid transit, all on top of a fairly robust network of local bus service.

The city has not fully built a network worthy of its size and density, but it has more aggressively planned that network than we have here in MSP. (A bit tangential to the main point of this great article, but L.A. deserves recognition for its great work in the last few decades on rebuilding its transit system.)

@ William Pappas

"Providing alternatives to car ownership completely changes the development options and immediately densities urban growth."

True, but investing in transit does not automatically provide an alternative to car ownership or assure denser development.

The DC Metro is a great example of how transit investment can accelerate increased sprawl. We need a rail system (our city was developed based on one), but we should be careful that our transit investments bear fruit. In S. Minneapolis we do not seem to be making very thoughtful investment decisions.

Two observations:

1) Systems like light rail, which require sinificant non-movable investment, are more likely to encourage the private investment that creates neighborhoods where people can forgo cars, but only when coupled with appropriate land use controls.

2) Los Angeles is an interesting case study – a city built almost completely on auto modality, where transit now offers a faster way to get around, even if you need to walk home after work to get the car to go shopping. That’s because freeway speeds of 5 mph are common at rush hour in LA, a constraint that does not exist in Minneapolis.

If you want to understand why some systems reduce auto use you need to think about personal constraints, not just density.

I question how the bus station in the middle of 35W (at 46th Street) is going to reduce car ownership or use in S. Minneapolis. You cannot get off the bus there and perform any typical daily shopping functions. You can ride the bus downtown, and save on parking costs, but users will get off the bus and hop in their cars to get groceries, dry-cleaning – the daily shopping tasks that constrain their ability to go car-free for a day.

There is no parking lot at that node, and the nearby streetcar era shopping node is is not close enough to make the transit location part of a pedestrian node. If the City rezones the area around the stop for commercial development and multifamily housing, then it might work, but I doubt anyone will consider it desirable to eliminate the attractive single family neighborhood on either side of 35W at that location.

In my view, a failure of planning, unless you consider making the surrounding residential neighborhood streets into a free Park-And-Ride lot for suburban downtown workers a success.

The question is not how long it takes you from your front door to your desk at work (and return). The question is how long does it take you from your front door to work (and return) with a trip to the grocery store thrown in. We have neighborhoods in Minneapolis where LRT would be quicker for both questions (because you could hop off the train and perform your shopping on your walk home). Unfortunately the planned SW line avoids the most promising of those Uptown neighborhoods.

If the SW route used the Greenway route hundreds of housing units built along the Greenway would become viable carless homes. Whittier would be one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Minneapolis. Instead, the Kenilworth Route will provide parking cost savings for downtown workers, but not reduce the number of cars owned and used by Minneapolis residents.

If the Whole Foods – B&N node was more pedestrian, that could have been a node where housing with reduced car ownership was possible.

It is a shame Minneapolis planners failed to appreciate the urban significance of bringing that rout in along the Greenway. If built, the SW route will be good for the suburbs, but irrelevant for Minneapolis neighborhoods.

I totally agree with Steven Prince's post.

It seems that in the Twin Cities, transit planners have asked the question, "How can we get people to work and back most efficiently?"

In contrast, transit planners in Portland seem to have asked the question, "How can we make it easy to live without a car?"

When I first moved back here, I "inherited" a car, but I still tried to get around by transit as much as possible, as I had in Portland for ten years.

My first reality check came when I tried to attend a gathering at the corner of two major streets and discovered that there was no transit route to a relatively nearby area that didn't require going downtown and back out.

If I were transit czarina, I would first revise the bus system so that every arterial street, whether north-south or east-west, had bus service seven days a week with buses (small ones, if necessary) running every 15 minutes or more often.

People would be more willing to take transit if they knew that missing one bus didn't mean having to stand around outside for another half hour or hour.

Since no one is about to name me transit czarina, I wish we could take away the Metro Transit members' car keys for three months in winter and let them experience life without a car for themselves.

They would come out with a different view of the question.

I'm not so sure about this borrowing scheme for several reasons.

Federal highways get 80% of their funding from the federal government, while as noted Central Corridor and other New Starts projects only get 50%. So already transit is at a huge disadvantage to freeways. Now Los Angeles is basically saying they don't think they can even get 50%. Federal transportation dollars are being shifted into an EVEN MORE unbalanced system than they are now.

Borrowing against future tax receipts ties up that money for a very long time. Sure, LA may be able to build out a tremendous amount in 10 years. But what about the 20 years after that? There won't be any money free to do anything. Slowly it will come back as the loans are repaid but there will be a transit funding desert there for quite a while.

@ David

Take a look at the “Minneapolis Station Area Strategic Planning – Final Document” and the “Station Area Strategic Planning – Market Assessment” at: http://www.southwesttransitway.org/station-area-planning.html

Here’s a summary:

Royalston
This is the only stop is in North Minneapolis. Planners note no residential development opportunities associated with the stop. There is a claim that Royalston will allow nearby research and office redevelopment for employers who want access to LRT. It looks like this will be accomplished by replacing the blue collar industrial jobs in the area with white collar jobs usually associated with downtown. How is this going to help North Minneapolis? If we trade the Farmer’s market for a Viking stadium, then all potential for new jobs is off.

Penn Stop
The planning documents concede almost no one will use this stop because of topography, and there is no development potential for this site except for the tiny commercial strip on the west side of 394.

West Lake
This site has development potential, and building a stop here would encourage efforts to infill the commercial zone with greater density. This stop would also exist on the Greenway route. One important caveat, The County wants a Park-N-Ride lot at this stop.

Van White
This station isn’t even mentioned in the “Market Assessment” document. Nuff said about its economic impact. There is development potential at the Impound Lot, but we don’t need light rail to redevelop that site. The planning document is comical, claiming the Walker “could provide significant ridership” for this stop. Really? This stop does not connect to any existing or planned bus service. I got a real chuckle out of the observation that Bryn Mawr is used for youth soccer (I don’t think that’s happened for a decade).

21st Street
According to the planners this station will “provide[e] amenity for local residents to travel into downtown Minneapolis for business or pleasure.” Very convenient for home owners on the west side of Lake of the Isles, but hardly a reason to build a LRT line.

All of the stops (except West Lake, which would also be on the Greenway alignment) have serious connectivity issues – they are isolated by highways, freight rail lines, and lakes. I get that the Northside wants LRT, but the Kenilworth Line is going o increase property values downtown and in the suburbs, not the Northside

@David
I agree, this is an intra-city line for getting suburbanites into downtown. Not so sure about going the other way. I remain unconvinced the Kenilworth alignment adds any intercity advantages. Can someone point me to a U.S. LRT route built in the last 50 years that created urban nodes, vs. a line routed to serve existing urban nodes?

I agree with your comments about parking. for years LHENA was assured that supporting density along the Greenway would mean LRT along that route, instead we got condos stacked on parking, increased traffic and reduced livability.

Hennepin County wants to get suburbanites into downtown as quickly and cheaply as possible, so we get a LRT alignment that does not serve City interests. To bad those riders will not have the option to get off the train in Uptown, on Eat Street, at the Convention Center, or along the Mall. Sure such an alignment would cost more, but that is the cost of creating urban transit systems.

I do not understand your comments about a transfer at Lake Street. In addition to West Lake the Greenway route has stops at Uptown (Hennepin), Lyndale, 28th Street , Franklin, 12th Street, 8th Street, and 4th Street. It creates a LRT hub at 4th and Nicollet, a logical location downtown. The Kenilworth alignment creates a hub a the “Intermodal Station,” which is bounded by Target Field and a huge commuter lot. It will never have any significant impact on downtown development or be a true urban center.

The Greenway route adds a useful intercity system to the SW line. It would serve existing densities and reduce auto use in the City. The Kenilworth Line will have minimal impact on intercity auto use in Minneapolis.

The idea to put trolleys in the Greenway trench was proposed as a political booby prize for the decision to use the Kenilworth route and abandon the more useful Greenway/Nicollet route.

Trolleys run along streets, along the Greenway alignment between West Lake and Nicollet you can create a single at grade stop, at Hennepin. ZERO people will ride the trolley to connect with LRT to downtown. Even with 15 minute headway it would be quicker to walk downtown from Lyndale and Lake Street then to ride the trolley to the LRT.

@Steven

Good questions and points. I'll try to clarify my thoughts better.

Fundamentally, I see the SW LRT alignment as a major racial justice issue. Do we route it somewhere that already has some of the best transit service in the state or do we open up completely new opportunities for communities that have been historically disadvantaged and have no reasonable transit service to the southwest. To me, it's a no-brainer. To say that the Kenilworth alignment provides no urban advantage is to ignore 40% of the city's population.

But beside that analysis, the engineering analysis that was really convincing to me is this. Let's say we routed the LRT down the Greenway to Nicollet. Do we really think that people on the 18 bus are going to transfer at 28th St. to hop an LRT downtown? More likely, they're going to stay on the bus. Same is true for people on the 6, 12, 4 and 17.

That leaves two groups of people taking LRT into downtown. The first is suburbanites, who would surely prefer a speedier route. For those who want to visit Uptown or Eat Street, a single transfer from LRT at the Calhoun Commons station will easy to do. I'm assuming a major restructuring of bus service around the LRT, for which we have precedent.

The second group that might use a Greenway-aligned LRT is those actually living along the Greenway alignment in Minneapolis. These folks seem to get by quite well with the bus and I can't imagine simply putting an LRT nearby would somehow greatly increase transit usage. The studies certainly seem to agree with my intuition. This is the same reason that leads you correctly say that no one will use a Greenway streetcar to SW LRT to go downtown. They'll take the bus instead.

So what's the upside to a Greenway alignment? Perhaps a slightly faster trip for those coming from the SW suburbs who want to end up in Uptown or on Eat Street. It seems to me that number is dwarfed by the number of people who want to go downtown instead. I suppose it also helps those in Uptown/Whittier who want to go out to the suburbs for jobs. But they already have some bus service to do that. LRT would be better, but I think it would be a marginal benefit.

So what of a Greenway trolley? I don't know of any ridership studies so this is all speculation on my part. I think it is a very different service as it operates E/W rather than N/S. It would serve those on the SW LRT who want to go to the Mall of America. I'd guess that would mostly be people from Minneapolis, SLP and Hopkins, as those further out would probably find it more convenient to drive. A Greenway trolley does hit the Midtown Exchange, which would be missed by a Greenway-aligned SW LRT. Still, we need studies to determine if it's viable. I could easily argue that a streetcar on Lake Street would be much more interesting.

As for streetcars on Hennepin/Lyndale/Nicollet/Chicago, I don't know. Chicago may be viable simply because of the volume on the 5. Similar to Central Corridor, it might serve as a necessary capacity upgrade for an already overburdened bus line. We do have the same transfer problem for those on the 5 outside of the streetcar. I don't think they would transfer to a streetcar just to go downtown. Hennepin and Nicollet are far shakier propositions, I think. I just don't see the ridership demand at this point. There may be other reasons to do it (encouraging development, for example).