BikesOnFilm wrote: June 3rd, 2025, 10:01 am
So instead of supporting a project that is all ready to go, has been refocused to serve denser areas of Minneapolis, and would provide a high frequency northwestern spine line to more efficiently deploy our bus routes around, you would rather chase the idea of an as of yet unstudied line that would require subway tunneling and cost exponentially more both because of mode choice and inflation. All based on the idea that we might have a transit friendly President in the future?
The only way federal transit projects exist post 2026 is if we have a transit friendly US Senate. And because of the way the US Senate is configured, it's a massive uphill climb for Democrats to take meaningful control of that body. With the filibuster, 51 senators is not control. 60 is. We will likely never see Democratic supermajority control of the Senate in our lifetimes.
And again, an Uptown to Northeast train does not exist in any conceptual or planned form. If the idea is to wait until Mayor Pete shows up and restarts grant programs, you're already too late because the federal planning process would take so long that it wouldn't be ready for the FTA to sign the loan for a decade. I've said we can move faster if we abandon the federal grant process and bootstrap the cost of projects locally, but ultimately we don't have the vision for something like that here, and even pro transit Democratic legislators would be more likely to point to the BRT projects on this corridor (that replaced the plan to build a streetcar from Uptown to Northeast, mind you) as reason not to build the multi-billion dollar subway version.
An illuminating part of redesigning the Blue Line Extension has been the avoidance of tunnels at all costs. Even though a tunnel under North Minneapolis would have been the cleanest way to proceed from an equity and land use perspective, it was not pursued in order to keep the grant proposal cost competitive. I don't think the cost of a subway tunnel connecting Uptown to Northeast would be competitive based on this knowledge. And we wouldn't know for sure until we sunk millions into the study to find out if it would be!
The elevator pitch is "We've already studied this thing to death and another study is just a bad faith attempt to ensure the project dies" and I think that's compelling enough for me. Having four lines that fan out from Downtown Minneapolis and connect as many of the big suburban employment centers as possible and drag those suburbs kicking and screaming towards walkability and density is a good enough reason to stay the course.
If even its biggest proponents' elevator pitch is "well, we've already sunk a lot of time into trying to figure this thing out," then I think that says a lot about the project's merit (or lack thereof). Ultimately, if someone proposed the idea of spending $3 billion on a 13-mile train to Brooklyn Park that would average 16mph -- which is slower than the D-Line from Target Center to Brooklyn Center -- and has estimated ridership of 12,500 per weekday, you would not take that person seriously. If proposed today, the Blue Line Extension would have
zero chance at being taken seriously.
Even if we ignore the cost inflation issue and assume it costs the same as SWLRT, what about the "benefit inflation"? If you compare the SWLRT when approved vs the current BLE proposal:
- Estimated Daily Weekday Ridership: SWLRT 35,000 v. BLE 12,500 -- cost per rider has nearly tripled
- Average Speed of Train: SWLRT 28mph v. BLE 16mph -- speed is 1.75x slower
The reason tunnels and other dedicated right of ways are not viable is because of the low ridership. A train with higher ridership estimates can justify higher costs. A 3.5-mile tunnel that would cost, say, $3.5 billion could connect Lyndale - Whittier - Loring Park - downtown - Marcy Holmes. That would be totally transformative for the city.
Instead, however, we are building transit for people that don't want transit. We are building transit for people who consciously chose to live outside of an urban core. Why? I genuinely don't understand why we would care to "drag" suburbanites towards walkability and density when even our urban centers are still struggling with this in many ways. Like, if the attitude on a forum for urbanists is "let's spend $3 billion to troll the NIMBY suburbanites instead of making our urban centers more walkable, livable, etc." then that is remarkably bleak stuff and I guess we'll get what we deserve.