No, and that's a problem. You are right it's even more likely to see the city spend nothing at all on Nicollet and fold the VCD back into the general fund than any improvements on Nicollet/Central for transit. That's a big problem (in my opinion) that the city sees it fit to spend capital dollars on a single big transit project but not come forward as a funding partner for the smaller stuff. I'm waiting for the city's complete streets implementation plan to come out to see how they view transit relative to the money we spend milling and overlaying streets or plowing snow or building protected bikeways or anything else we spend money on, and how that compares to building transit shelters or paying for TVMs (and their collection) or buying new buses. I'm mostly ambivalent about the VCD as well (it's not great, but meh), but it represents that the city was willing to come to the table and find money to build transit, just on its own terms. Which is a little problematic when we have an agency that specializes in planning and building and running transit taking into account equity and efficiency and all sorts of other things a city might not be great at thinking about. And maybe I wouldn't have such a big deal with the city deciding to do it if it wasn't 1) such a large amount of money that 2) also competes with MT-run projects for the federal share.And I promise this question isn’t snark (I honestly don’t know the answer): Has anyone in a position to act actually called for scrapping streetcar for a full rollout of aBRT throughout the city? My gut tells me that institutional inertia means that if the streetcar is nixed, we’re more likely to see aBRT on Nicollet (or nothing at all) and the VCD money simply rolled back into the general fund.
It's also a problem (in my opinion) that the city sees the Nic/Central streetcar as a better use of $200-250m dollars than Midtown - both projects wholly inside the city. Totally separate discussion, but it kinda shows what the city values (economic development, downtown, tourism) and what it values a little less (cutting existing transit trip times in half along a corridor of existing bus riders).