Green Line Extension - Southwest LRT

[NickP]

https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2022/09/ ... el-vision/

[Korh]

This might sound stupid

But part of me thinks it would of been better to put the bike trail in the tunnel instead.

[DanPatchToget]

This might sound stupid

But part of me thinks it would of been better to put the bike trail in the tunnel instead.

You might be on to something with that. It would be smaller than a light rail tunnel, so in theory cheaper and easier to build, though it would be kind of long (one of the longest trail tunnels in the state?) and need a substantial amount of lighting and security cameras to make people feel safe going through it.

IIRC way back when the freight train reroute was still being considered some options to keep the freight rail in Kenilworth were explored including building a trail bridge over the chokepoint. If that was considered I'm guessing it was rejected because of visual blight of the bridge and the need for security fencing so people don't throw stuff onto the tracks or overhead wires.

[Anondson]

If that was considered I'm guessing it was rejected because of visual blight of the bridge and the need for security fencing so people don't throw stuff onto the tracks or overhead wires.

I attended the earliest public meetings where the options were shown including putting the bike trail on a bridge over the rail.

I recall it got rejected because any option required every government stakeholder to agree, and the elevated bike trail option was one the Minneapolis Parks Board rejected it outright. A staff person told me parks board members heard from residents along the Kenilworth Trail who objected to elevated public views into their backyards and houses.

[acs]

If that was considered I'm guessing it was rejected because of visual blight of the bridge and the need for security fencing so people don't throw stuff onto the tracks or overhead wires.

I attended the earliest public meetings where the options were shown including putting the bike trail on a bridge over the rail.

I recall it got rejected because any option required every government stakeholder to agree, and the elevated bike trail option was one the Minneapolis Parks Board rejected it outright. A staff person told me parks board members heard from residents along the Kenilworth Trail who objected to elevated public views into their backyards and houses.

Jesus, so the park board and NIMBY's cost us $1.5b and 10 years because they didn't like bikers in their view. It's literally been a conservative meme for the last decade about how we should have "just moved the damn bike trail" and I had always thought there was a sound technical reason not to.

[BigIdeasGuy]

If there is one constant in transit planning in the time I've been following it here it's that political officials refusal to piss off a small number of people no matter how much it positively impact literally everyone else. This being a prime example. Also see the Blue Line Extension and Riverview debates.

There seems to be an endless willingness for elected's to spend $100's of millions and years of delay to keep a small group of people from complaining even if it leads to a project with less utility that it would otherwise have. And zero willingness from the same elected's to say "yup this result suck for you I get that & I'm sorry about that but the reality is doing this is going to lead to a better project for everyone and I can't justify the additional delay and cost to keep you 7 home owners happy"

Until that changes IDK if's worth continuing to push for rail transit vs pushing every dollar possible into aBRT.

[COLSLAW5]

yea other than the riverview corridor and Blue line I think we will only see and hear about BRT build out for the next 15 years.

[DanPatchToget]

If there is one constant in transit planning in the time I've been following it here it's that political officials refusal to piss off a small number of people no matter how much it positively impact literally everyone else. This being a prime example. Also see the Blue Line Extension and Riverview debates.

There seems to be an endless willingness for elected's to spend $100's of millions and years of delay to keep a small group of people from complaining even if it leads to a project with less utility that it would otherwise have. And zero willingness from the same elected's to say "yup this result suck for you I get that & I'm sorry about that but the reality is doing this is going to lead to a better project for everyone and I can't justify the additional delay and cost to keep you 7 home owners happy"

Until that changes IDK if's worth continuing to push for rail transit vs pushing every dollar possible into aBRT.

ABRT is not a replacement for rail. BRT on the other hand can be debated, but more often than not it seems to be just throwing a bunch of buses on a freeway or road without the infrastructure/service to make it nearly the same as LRT.

I do however agree that politicians don't seem willing to piss off certain people in order to keep a transit project on the right track. The original Blue Line and Green Line certainly made people upset, especially business owners along University, so who/what changed to make politicians less firm?

[mattaudio]

the park board and NIMBY's cost us $1.5b and 10 years because they didn't like bikers in their view. It's literally been a conservative meme for the last decade about how we should have "just moved the damn bike trail" and I had always thought there was a sound technical reason not to.

That predicament was late into the planning game, after it felt settled that TC&W freight rails, a major bike path, and two LRT tracks needed to share a tiny Kenilworth corridor. Before that:

- There were assumptions made to routing TC&W freight trains north along the MN&S line to the BNSF Wayzata Sub with the "iron triangle" transfer tracks being replaced. This dated back to plans/assumptions about TC&W traffic when MnDOT severed their old mainline in the mid-1990s to build a freeway-scale single-point urban interchange at Hiawatha and Lake (upside was getting the Midtown Greenway, so it worked out). But St. Louis Park was NOT up for rerouting freights along slow, curvy tracks in the middle of a neighborhood to make the short hop from TC&W to BNSF rails.

- The alignment locally preferred alternative process that resulted in the 3A Kenilworth alignment being chosen to move forward. I know saying 3A vs 3C is probably going to get me banned on here but there may be youngfolk who weren't even aware of these early planning meetings around 2008-2009. This LPA alignment was heavily influenced by GWBush-era Federal Transit Administration Cost Effectiveness guidelines which prioritized speedy trips to capture "choice rider" at park & rides such as Southwest Station, at the expense of connecting dense urban neighborhoods that are more expensive (in theory) to rail up vs old RR corridors such as Kenilworth.

- The LPA process was quite flawed. The C option (the letters were the route variants closer to downtown) as presented crossed the existing Blue/Green lines perpendicular in Downtown Minneapolis, preventing interlining - and the reason we now call the project the Green Line *extension.* Later there was the 3C-Alt2 option which routed west through Downtown before circling around Target Field to interline. Not a great route, but avoided the interlining problem. The LPA process was also flawed by some ridiculous assumptions with urban station planning and tunneling along or adjacent to Nicollet/Eat Street including permanently open caissons in the ROW for stations. Of course the business community hated it the way it was presented. Moreover, no consideration was made of joining with the recently-completed I-35W construction between Downtown and Lake Street to provide a high-speed LRT link between the Greenway and Downtown at the same time as another immensely expensive massive earthwork project. There were sketchy numbers and assumptions in the LPA process, such as an Uptown Station on 3C not having meaningfully higher ridership than the under-construction 21st St Station on a quiet dead-end street at the western end of the Kenwood neighborhood. Finally, trying to be gentle since some folks may still hold this view, but there's an idea that the Penn Ave and Bassett LRT stations are going to somehow be a major social justice win for North Minneapolis.

- The false assumption that railroad corridors will be the easy place to run LRT alongside, a lesson it took many times for planners to learn. BNSF required a crash wall, now costing nearly $100 million, for LRT rails parallel to their mainline. https://www.rtands.com/track-constructi ... pikes-356/ Remember, the original Blue Line/Bottineau plan was to route via another BNSF corridor. And Hennepin County blocked a private land purchase BNSF and CP Rail wanted to do to have shared directional running around/across Northtown/Shoreham yards similar to their shared/directional mainlines between St. Paul Park and Hastings. Assuming railroad corridors were the obvious place for LRT was stupid before, but the bad blood between BNSF and Hennepin County after this incident made things much worse. At least for Bottineau, it appears to be resulting in an urban alignment between Robbinsdale and Target Field. But Southwest wasn't able to pivot from this mistake. Estimates during the LPA process were that 3C via Uptown would only cost about $260 million more than 3A via Kenilworth.

Hindsight is easy but lots of us were there in meetings back in the day saying these things as foresight now proven out by a decade of disaster.

[BigIdeasGuy]

If there is one constant in transit planning in the time I've been following it here it's that political officials refusal to piss off a small number of people no matter how much it positively impact literally everyone else. This being a prime example. Also see the Blue Line Extension and Riverview debates.

There seems to be an endless willingness for elected's to spend $100's of millions and years of delay to keep a small group of people from complaining even if it leads to a project with less utility that it would otherwise have. And zero willingness from the same elected's to say "yup this result suck for you I get that & I'm sorry about that but the reality is doing this is going to lead to a better project for everyone and I can't justify the additional delay and cost to keep you 7 home owners happy"

Until that changes IDK if's worth continuing to push for rail transit vs pushing every dollar possible into aBRT.

ABRT is not a replacement for rail. BRT on the other hand can be debated, but more often than not it seems to be just throwing a bunch of buses on a freeway or road without the infrastructure/service to make it nearly the same as LRT.

aBRT isn't a replacement for LRT you are correct but 1. I don't think there a current route where aBRT couldn't provide enough capacity on existing infrastructure and 2. Spending huge sums of both money and political capital on rail that gets watered down by self interested actors isn't conducive to great projects that are needed to justify the massive upfront cost.

[Tom H.]

So here's the billion-dollar question: to what extent does an elected Met Council provide enough political muscle/legitimacy to overcome these small loud voices? Because at some level, I think the unwillingness to fight those fights does come from not feeling that they have enough of a political mandate to do so under the current appointed structure.

[Anondson]

Minnpost dive into a lawsuit over a demotion of an engineer who objected to the change orders being approved by Council staff always ended in line with contractor projections.

The engineer was objecting to the submitted costs, such as over estimates of work stoppage.

https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2024/01/ ... ight-rail/

[DanPatchToget]

We could've been a real city:

I'd love to know how that proposal came about and how long and how serious it was being considered.

As much as I don't like light rail going through Kenilworth, I'll take it any day over a highway pretending to be a parkway.

[Tcmetro]

A little difficult to see, but it looks like it's dated 1938. Those were the days when high speed urban roads were considered to be a extension of the parks system - the era of the Bronx River Pkwy, the Arroyo Seco Pkwy, Lake Shore Drive, and locally with Lilac Dr (now Hwy 100).

I believe these plans stuck around to the 1960s or so. The plan was to have Hwy 7 and the Kenilworth freeway connecting into what is now 394 to downtown. There was also a plan for a freeway from Hwy 7/Lake St along what is now the Midtown Greenway tying into 280 at 94, as well as the Cedar Ave and the Hiawatha Ave freeways.

[mattaudio]

We could've been a real city:

But look at that bridge up the hill connecting Penn Ave to Franklin Ave - that would be a useful connection.

[Mdcastle]

Yeah, the original intent of MN 280 was to connect the expressway stub of what is now CSAH 25 to the Midway area via the Greenway, bypassing congestion downtown, the southwest suburbs being rapidly growing at the time and the Midway being a lot more important as a job center than it is now. The Greenway freeway wouldn't even have had an interchange with 35W. It being only half built and Midway being a lot less important today is why the current 280 doesn't make a whole lot of sense with where it is and how built up it is relative to the traffic it currently has.

[commissioner]

If that was considered I'm guessing it was rejected because of visual blight of the bridge and the need for security fencing so people don't throw stuff onto the tracks or overhead wires.

I attended the earliest public meetings where the options were shown including putting the bike trail on a bridge over the rail.

I recall it got rejected because any option required every government stakeholder to agree, and the elevated bike trail option was one the Minneapolis Parks Board rejected it outright. A staff person told me parks board members heard from residents along the Kenilworth Trail who objected to elevated public views into their backyards and houses.

Are these the same residents that went ballistic trying everything they could think of to stop the line from going through their neighborhood when the Met council went with what they are doing now? If that's the case, then I highly doubt that they would have let anything through.

[DanPatchToget]

This might sound stupid

But part of me thinks it would of been better to put the bike trail in the tunnel instead.

Today I learned Bergen, Norway did that with a nearly 2-mile bike/pedestrian tunnel, but it's *in addition* to a light rail tunnel.

https://en.visitbergen.com/about/sustai ... ned-bergen

[twincitizen]

Why am I just now noticing how insanely shortsighted it is that this almost $3B project did not include a trail along the portion of the route stretching from Shady Oak Station to at least Golden Triangle Station, or even better to the end of the line. I offer the ending at Golden Triangle because from that point outward it is possible to use existing trails along Valley View Rd and Flying Cloud Dr to reach the last couple EP station areas. But for that middle portion of the route that is all brand new ROW, what the heck were they thinking not building a trail along the LRT tracks, especially on those long bridges and overpasses.

[thespeedmccool]

Why am I just now noticing how insanely shortsighted it is that this almost $3B project did not include a trail along the portion of the route stretching from Shady Oak Station to at least Golden Triangle Station, or even better to the end of the line. I offer the ending at Golden Triangle because from that point outward it is possible to use existing trails along Valley View Rd and Flying Cloud Dr to reach the last couple EP station areas. But for that middle portion of the route that is all brand new ROW, what the heck were they thinking not building a trail along the LRT tracks, especially on those long bridges and overpasses.

The answer is probably that this somehow would've cost $200 million.