Postby mulad » January 8th, 2014, 11:12 am
I arrived around 5:40 pm as the main facilitator was speaking. I didn't catch his name, but he said he had "dedicated his life" to the project and sounded very frustrated himself. I guess there had been an open house to start out with, but after the guy was done speaking, the crowd divided up into six major groups. There were tables set up to talk about topics around freight rail, tunnels, watershed/quality issues, green space/park impacts, ridership and alignment, and an "other" table for concerns that didn't quite fit any of the first five.
I sat at the freight rail table(s). Right off the bat, there was an issue in that there were two big round high-school cafeteria tables attempting to share a conversation in a big gymnasium with other talking going on, and it was very difficult to hear. I don't know why they tried to have both tables in one conversation when it would have been better to have the tables talk separately. In the discussion, one of the major problems right off the bat related to the supposed documentation or lack thereof of an agreement with St. Louis Park to allow a reroute. I did manage to get a dig in at MnDOT for the truncation of tracks at Hiawatha Avenue in the late '90s as Charlie Zelle was standing right there (though of course he wasn't there at the time).
There was a lot of discussion relating to simply understanding the facts about how much train traffic there currently is, how the lines are configured now, what the tradeoffs were with different potential reroute alignments, and the impact on TC&W and BNSF themselves. One guy at the table was dubious about Twin Cities and Western being an independent company, and believed that it was owned by one of the major railroads and the name was just something to make it sound more local (it is true that TC&W is closely aligned with Red River Valley & Western and the Minnesota Prairie Line, but I'm not aware of them being controlled by one of the Class I roads or anything).
Commissioner Zelle did pipe up at one point and seemed to get the TC&W confused with the BNSF Wayzata Subdivision, saying it went to Willmar, but it's an easy mistake to make. I also got a bit frustrated when he called it a short line and "not a mainline", which is kind of true, but I think undercuts its value -- it's over 150 miles long (extending to Appleton) and the Minnesota Prairie Line branches off of it.
I was pretty frustrated that we didn't have good facts at our disposal when looking at freight rail issues -- no big maps to look at the reroute options, though several were shown with sparse detail on handouts we were given upon coming into the gymnasium. There also weren't any cost estimates for the various reroute options, though I have to say that the past studies have been quite at odds with each other, and it wouldn't have done much good to have people look at bad data. There is currently another freight reroute study underway, so I guess that's another thing to keep an eye on.
Anyway, after about 40 minutes, I decided to take a peek at the tunnel tables, but they mostly seemed to have wrapped up discussion. I'm a bit concerned about those tables being stacked a bit. I filled out a comment card and was thinking of leaving as the table discussions wrapped up and speakers stood up from each group, but ended up staying to listen to most of them. The volunteer recorder/speaker from the freight rail group started off with some comments that didn't mesh at all with what I'd heard while at the table, though he did eventually wander back to some points I had heard -- perhaps the conversation had changed a lot after I left, I'm not sure.
The two tables for tunnels had more wisely broken up into separate groups, and there were two speakers. I am really reluctant to support any tunnels myself, so I was disappointed that nobody brought up that idea. The first tunnel table seemed to be mildly pushing for deep-bore, but the second speaker was completely in favor of that and tried to assign that opinion to everyone at the first table, which made me very annoyed. He did, however, mention that the tunnel distances didn't seem to make much sense at all, that they're probably longer than necessary. There was a statement about beginning the tunnel at or north of the Lake Street bridge, for instance, but I fear that they may have missed that one of the major choke points (if we don't want to demolish any residences at all) is southwest of the bridge. Again, they probably didn't have any maps showing where the choke points are, which was a shortcoming of the meeting format.
One of the speakers talking about park impacts noted that here haven't been good detailed renderings/simulations of exactly how trees would be affected by building LRT at grade, and fairly basic information about how wide the individual right-of-way need to be has never been widely disseminated. (I'm kind of ambivalent on the whole parkland situation, since this has been a rail corridor for a long, long time -- for most of the area north of the lake channel, I think there's plenty of room, but whatever.)
I'm a bit surprised there was a ridership/alignment table at all, since the facilitator was basically saying at the beginning of the meeting that realignment of LRT through Uptown was completely off the table. But it certainly would have polluted the other discussions a lot more if the topic didn't have an outlet (though most speakers still did mention an alignment through Uptown at one point or another). Anyway, their group summarized many of the points we've made over the years in favor of 3C or some other Uptown alignment. Their speaker mentioned that models assumed bus ridership would make a significant transition to LRT down in Eden Prairie, but missed the corresponding statement that has been asserted here about how existing bus riders in Minneapolis were assumed to keep using the buses. I was a bit surprised to only be one of two people to clap when she mentioned how the argument of SWLRT serving North Minneapolis was extremely weak. Oh well.
I decided to head home around that time, so I don't know what else happened. There were so many things brought up that I've only scratched the surface. Even at age 35, I feel like I'm too young to have followed the planning process appropriately -- when it takes decades to look through options, a project like this really requires a historian to be on staff, and to create readable reports for the masses (maybe there is one?). I was glad that the handout included some of the discarded Uptown/South Minneapolis alignments -- the first I've really seen for many of them -- but it was very thin on the reasons why they were discarded.
I suppose I should mention that I went to college for Computer Science, where we understand software development to be an iterative process. Old ideas are being constantly revisited -- tossed out, thrown back in, etc. The planning process for transit is not set up in that way, expecting that a large number of initial ideas can be filtered down to a single outcome. But you never ever know all of the possibilities to start out with -- some good ideas only become clear late in the process. And the outside world is constantly changing. Heck, the FTA and FRA may allow LRT-like vehicles on freight lines soon, so it'd make some sense to switch out the whole thing to be a DMU commuter rail line and build LRT or streetcar service on surface streets instead. As we've seen with Red Rock, it is possible to go through another Alternatives Analysis iteration, but it's a very cumbersome task. Software is a weird world, so you can't directly apply fast-iteration techniques to something that must result in a billion-dollar piece of infrastructure, but something needs to be done to make it easier to revisit old ideas or add new ones. There are too many times when I've gone to planning meetings to hear that the things I want to talk about are either way off in the future, or have already been set in stone sometime in the past. That's just a terrible way to proceed.