Blue Line Extension - Bottineau LRT

[twincitizen]

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/94/202 ... body=House
A new bill introduced by Jon Koznick, Marj Fogelman, Marion Rarick, and Kristin Robbins (all Republicans) attempts to divert state funding for the blue line extension in favor of of an arterial bus rapid transit line along the same route.

This is the existing law that this proposed bill seeks to amend:

$40,000,000 in fiscal year 2024 is for a grant to Hennepin County for the Blue Line light rail transit extension project, including but not limited to predesign, design, engineering, environmental analysis and mitigation, right-of-way acquisition, construction, and acquisition of rolling stock. Of this amount, $30,000,000 is available only upon entering a full funding grant agreement with the Federal Transit Administration by June 30, 2027. This is a onetime appropriation and is available until June 30, 2030.

[nils]

https://metrocouncil.org/News-Events/Tr ... Commo.aspx

It's a few years old and some of the ridership data has certainly changed, but I would bet that LRT still makes the most sense for the corridor. LRT is an investment for the future in a way that BRT is not.

“..analyzed a total of 9 light rail transit (LRT) and 12 bus rapid transit (BRT) route alternatives for this corridor”

And have you read the analysis referenced therein?

[DanPatchToget]

I'm not necessarily saying that BRT would be better than LRT for this route, but I wonder how much of the decision to go with LRT weighs on the design of Target Field Station being built for an extension and the Met Council wanting that through-routing by any means necessary. It makes sense to have that through-routing, and I wish they had designed that for the eastern end of the Green Line in St. Paul, but the big and expensive question is what way of extending it makes the most sense. We have the Green Line Extension going through undeveloped land and in a shallow tunnel, and with the Blue Line Extension it's going along a surface highway and shoehorning it at-grade through a dense urban area. I hate to say let's wait before committing, but I wonder if it would be wise to see the performance of the Green Line Extension before building another LRT extension in suburban areas that don't have a solid anchor of ridership like our existing light rail lines do.

[nils]

That’s all very reasonable, and I mostly agree. At this point, the only real reason for pushing BLE seems to be some version of sunk cost fallacy.

It’s particularly telling that even one of the Met Council’s “key considerations” for sticking with LRT is: “A change from LRT to BRT would mean starting over.” I mean, come on. How bleak is that? That’s like your wife saying her “key consideration” for not leaving you is that she doesn’t feel like she has a choice anymore.

Ultimately, if anyone genuinely believed there would be enough demand on this line to exceed what BRT could handle, BRT would be the better choice. When buses are consistently full, you can increase frequency — and frequency is the flywheel of transit.

The same number of riders that would fill 2-car trains every 15 minutes could easily support buses running every 5 minutes. That kind of frequency would encourage even more ridership, creating that virtuous cycle we all know about. Instead, we’re saddled with the baggage of another failed transit investment operating well below capacity with declining ridership and the inevitable threats of service cuts that come with it.

[angrysuburbanite]

I’m generally not a fan of watering down light rail to bus rapid transit. Bus rapid transit is fine for some corridors but is so easy to half-invest in (see: Red Line, Purple/Bronze Line). From a network perspective BLRT is just such an obvious corridor for light rail—there’s a reason it has been identified in network plans dating back to the midcentury subway proposals.

I get that nothing I say could change your mind seeing your entire account is devoted to posting in opposition to this project specifically. The sunk cost fallacy could be true, but doesn’t change the fact that bus rapid transit is just not even close to replacing the transit quality of light rail. And you can increase light rail frequency too, I’m not sure what your point is there.

This corridor has lots of low car ownership neighborhoods and apparent latent demand for better transit service that isn’t fully tapped into, even into Brooklyn Park. Most of the bus routes around the corridor are already strong performers, unlike SWLRT, and would benefit from the network effects of a light rail spine. The stations are much more accessible than those of SWLRT as it is in the street directly, and is serving a completely different suburban travel market.

If you are trying to say that more service like the D Line—which has dubious BRT quality infrastructure, slow speeds, and frequent bus bunching—is superior to a light rail project, I just don’t know what to tell you. I get that it would be a slower light rail line than the existing blue line, but LRT prioritizing access over pure speed has precedence in both our metro area with the Central Corridor and many other legacy systems in other cities. Think of it as less of a “high speed rapid transit” corridor and more of recreating what should exist had we not lost urban rail in the 1950s. I’m sick of people saying BRT is “more flexible” than rail because all that means is that less infrastructure—and thus less money—is dedicated to transit users. The cycle of cuts and underperformance you describe would happen with BRT, but the permanence of the LRT infrastructure forces cities to plan around transit, ensuring its success in the long term.

If BRT was truly the superior option, the Met Council, every city on the line, and the Federal Transit Administration wouldn’t have approved the corridor as planned.

[thespeedmccool]

Every few months on this forum we have this discussion, and every few months I feel I have to remind the thread that transit is not just about making money and filing seats. It's about keeping pace with our peer metros while we compete for businesses and transplants. It's about shifting transportation away from carbon-burning cars and toward cleaner modes. It's about redesigning our cities from car-centric to human-scale. It's about actually providing a decent service that everyone wants to use, not a safety net that poor people have to use.

BRT makes no sense for this corridor and serves no purpose other than placating people who hate cities and think government spending is communism. Might as well just mothball the Blue and Green Lines today if we're not gonna even try to build out an LRT system from the region.

[Tiller]

Rail infrastructure is also far nicer for people who use wheelchairs to take compared to busses, even BRT, because the fixed rails means the ride is smooth enough that you don't need a whole process for strapping down wheelchairs.

That also means a LRV doesn't have limited wheelchair(/stroller) strap-down spots like a bus does, which sometimes means people with wheelchairs are unable to board the bus during busy times due to lack of spots. This is all also facilitated by fully level boarding and a consistent small gap between train floor and platform floor, which means Ramps are not needed.

The planned Light Rail for Bottineau is of course great for anyone using a wheelchair to have more independence, though it also increases transit's schedule reliability.

When a wheelchair needs to board a bus, everyone needs to get out of the way who is trying to board, the ramp needs to be deployed, the person in a wheelchair needs to navigate it into the bus, parallel park themselves, and then get strapped in. Same thing when leaving. With LRT like what is planned for the BLE, you just roll on/roll off. Fast. Easy. No 5-10 minute process that can delay the bus.

Also the "we'd have to start over again" isn't purely sunk cost. It also is in reference to the fact that delaying the construction of infrastructure brings increased costs due to construction inflation, which is always higher than normal inflation. How many more years would switching the LPA from LRT take? Let's not find out. Let's just build this already.

[BigIdeasGuy]

Ultimately, if anyone genuinely believed there would be enough demand on this line to exceed what BRT could handle, BRT would be the better choice. When buses are consistently full, you can increase frequency — and frequency is the flywheel of transit.

The argument that BRT has more than enough capacity almost certainly could be made about every proposed & under development metro/LRT/streetcar line in the US, including the Uptown-DT-NE idea. In fact I would guess all but a handful of currently operating metro/LRT/streetcar lines would also fail based on that standard if proposed today.

If "does BRT deliver enough capacity" is what you want to evaluate projects by I think there is an argument that it's a reasonable standard, just hold every line to the same metric, including your favorites. I also think you have to admit if this is the standard you want to use you also need to accept that the odds of a new rail line ever getting built in the US is well below 1%, which is fine if that's where you end up, just be honest about it.

[Silophant]

Given that labor costs and shortages are a pretty big obstacle for almost every US transit system, the Latin American "build BRT stations and simply run a bus every 15 seconds" model is about as pie-in-the-sky as a deep-bore subway all the way out to Brooklyn Park.

[mattaudio]

Given that labor costs and shortages are a pretty big obstacle for almost every US transit system,

Too bad we didn't start with an automated light metro 25 years ago. Given how much grade separation there is on the Green Line extension, it wouldn't have been much of a stretch for that corridor. Obviously the original Hiawatha Line, Central Corridor, and particularly the downtown shared alignment are far from being an automated light metro with grade separation.

[BikesOnFilm]

Is there any other automated light metro system operating in the country other than the Honolulu one?

If that one ends up being the model everyone wishes they followed after over a decade of it being mocked as indulgent and foolhardy, that’ll be amusingly ironic.

[Tiller]

I think Vancouver is the usual comparison point when talking about automated light metro. Maybe in a decade when our transit system (LRT/BRT/ABRT) is fairly built out, we can push to incrementally build automated light metro as the next upgrade along our older and/or higher ridership aBRT lines. It'll probably be a while before our LRT lines get those kinds of upgrades.

Maybe Southwest and Hiawatha could get more grade separation for automation mid/long term, though Central and Bottineau would probably be long long term projects - the minimal currently-existing grade separation would probably mean fully reconstructing them.

[DanPatchToget]

Would be nice if they could at least grade-separate the Blue Line Extension along Bottineau Boulevard, and maybe also the major intersections on Broadway in Brooklyn Center. Wouldn't even have to be one long viaduct or tunnel, just some short trenches/bridges to get under/over the intersections, which would still probably add $1-2 billion to the construction cost if I had to take a wild guess, but considering this is already going to cost north of $3 billion it would be nice to have a train that doesn't require crossing a car sewer to access and the trains aren't at the mercy of traffic signals and crazy drivers along the suburban stretch.

[BikesOnFilm]

It should always be stated as clearly as possible that the $3 billion price tag includes a massive contingency fund.

So there is no plan for this to cost $3 billion at this time, only that if it did, the project wouldn’t need additional funding.

And it’s also worth remembering that the SWLRT contingency funding went to building a tunnel, a famously difficult thing to plan and budget around due to uncertainty about what exists underground until you start digging, and there are no tunnels on the Bottineau project.

[nils]

Given that labor costs and shortages are a pretty big obstacle for almost every US transit system, the Latin American "build BRT stations and simply run a bus every 15 seconds" model is about as pie-in-the-sky as a deep-bore subway all the way out to Brooklyn Park.

In your hypothetical where there’s enough demand to fill busses every 15 seconds your primary concern is the cost of additional bus drivers..?

[nils]

It should always be stated as clearly as possible that the $3 billion price tag includes a massive contingency fund.

So there is no plan for this to cost $3 billion at this time, only that if it did, the project wouldn’t need additional funding.

And it’s also worth remembering that the SWLRT contingency funding went to building a tunnel, a famously difficult thing to plan and budget around due to uncertainty about what exists underground until you start digging, and there are no tunnels on the Bottineau project.

It wasn’t a cost overrun on a planned tunnel that caused the project to balloon in cost. It was a complete failure by project planners to include an entirely foreseeable and knowable need for a tunnel in the original scope and budget.

[BikesOnFilm]

It wasn’t a cost overrun on a planned tunnel that caused the project to balloon in cost. It was a complete failure by project planners to include an entirely foreseeable and knowable need for a tunnel in the original scope and budget.

Tell me you weren't around for the SWLRT planning saga without telling me you weren't around for the SWLRT planning saga.

[nils]

It wasn’t a cost overrun on a planned tunnel that caused the project to balloon in cost. It was a complete failure by project planners to include an entirely foreseeable and knowable need for a tunnel in the original scope and budget.

Tell me you weren't around for the SWLRT planning saga without telling me you weren't around for the SWLRT planning saga.

I’m actually quite proud I wasn’t in the room when they decided to create the greatest transit boondoggle in Minnesota history, but it sounds like you know all about it. So let me know which part I’ve got wrong.

Back in the 2010 report “Kenilworth Corridor: Analysis of Freight Rail/Light Rail Transit Co-Existence” the tunnel was removed from consideration, given its exorbitant and unpredictable costs and environmental impacts.

“From the standpoint of engineering, constructing a tunnel at this location would not be considered accepted engineering practice because of cost and potential environmental impacts, given the availability of other reasonable alternatives. In short, the Kenilworth Corridor is not a location that represents a typical application of a tunnel for LRT design purposes. A tunnel would be vastly more expensive than other available alternatives, produces unpredictable environmental impacts and carries continuing maintenance, safety and security problems..”

By the time they realized they wouldn’t be able to relocate freight, instead of stepping back, reassessing the alignment choice, or seriously exploring better alternatives, the Met Council memory holed the 2010 analysis and pushed forward with a shallow cut-and-cover tunnel that had been described as “not considered accepted engineering practice” just 3 years earlier.

This predictably led to massive cost overruns and a decade of delays that make the contingency on the BLE look pretty darn reasonable.


It’s also funny to imagine someone in 2013-2014 strongly defending the Kenilworth tunnel while arguing that any serious reassessment would “result in increased costs and delays.” Turns out refusing to reassess because it “would result in increased costs and delays” delivered the biggest cost and delay disaster in Minnesota transit history. Shocking, I know.

And here we are over a decade later watching the exact same logic being used to ram the BLE through “Don’t reassess! Don't reference the studies previously published! It will just cause delays and cost increases!”

[Tiller]

It wasn’t a cost overrun on a planned tunnel that caused the project to balloon in cost. It was a complete failure by project planners to include an entirely foreseeable and knowable need for a tunnel in the original scope and budget.

The tunnel wasn't "needed", it was to appease NIMBYs. It would have been cheaper to buy out the complainers who lived nearby.

The project planners did definitely screw things up too, though the entire process for federal funding, county-led transit line planning, and municipal consent all came together to make it a mess. Those things wouldn't have changed if they re-assessed the corridor, we we would have just dealt with different drama caused by those factors.

And here we are over a decade later watching the exact same logic being used to ram the BLE through “Don’t reassess! Don't reference the studies previously published! It will just cause delays and cost increases!”

There is no tunneling through swamps happening this time - luckily this line was routed out of the RR corridor where it would have been alongside freight in a swamp. The biggest risk for the BLE is that "vital stakeholders" try to force the $2B project to do unreasonable things so that someone's cucumber garden doesn't have shade from a rail viaduct or something. Right now the BLE will actually serve a dense part of minneapolis as well as some useful nodes in the suburbs. This doesn't have to be complicated, it just has to be built.