Additionally, Hennepin County shot down the idea of light-rail on the Bottineau corridor through North Mpls, nor did the residents fight for a better line (i.e. a W Broadway tunnel), which really suggests that the residents in North Minneapolis aren't very interested in actually having improved transit options.
Er...wow. Did you attend any of the NTN meetings in North? People very much want better transit. But, surprise! They don't always agree on what that looks like. People up there have very good reasons to want a Broadway/Penn alignment for Bottineau and very good reasons to want a Wirth alignment. And they're smart enough to know a tunnel is so far beyond the realm of possibility that they're not going to waste their power fighting for it.
This is a really interesting conversation that I think starts to get a big problem we have locally with planning. I agree with David that likely there was at least a substantial minority of advocates on the Northside who really were in favor of quality transit there (though don't mistake everyone who says they're in favor of transit for actually being in favor of quality transit that would get in the way of their automobility, e.g. transit improvements that would reduce parking, etc). But of course we haven't had quality transit in this city or with few exceptions in this country since the dawn of mass mobility. Most people likely here don't know what quality transit would look like, so they aren't really sure how to advocate for it. If anyone perceives this as arrogance, please note that it is intended towards all Minnesotans, not just Northsiders, so I'm at least equitably arrogant.
So in theory it should fall to planners - the experts - to guide citizens towards the best options. But there are two impediments. One is that much transit planning is outsourced to consulting firms that primarily have expertise with highways are merely looking for new markets. They may have as little idea of what quality transit is as the average citizen. Please remember here that engineering firms still offer very little coursework outside of highway design, and they offered effectively none until very recently. Similarly, there were very few schools with a transit planning focus until around 20 years ago. The Met Council does have transit planners that are focused on transit and very knowledgeable about it. However, they are beaten into submission by the failure of the political class to support them for the last 40 years, so aren't willing to stick their neck out too far (a common deficiency among bureaucrats of all types).
So in reality the responsibility lies with our leaders. In fairness, they tend to start from the same point of ignorance as any other Minnesotan (or American). But if they believe that transit will be an important component of moving our region forward, they need to do their homework to find out what that transit should look like. This doesn't need to be down to the level of what tension overhead wire needs to be kept at, it can merely be the observation that Dallas' LRT is relatively unproductive because it avoids populated areas while Houston's LRT is very productive because it does the opposite. Brownie points would be a trip to France to study how they've built extremely productive LRT for very little money (hint: it involves sacrificing some automobility). It seems to me that local leaders have rarely bothered to do so.
The Met Council has contracts with some of the largest engineering firms in the world, who certainly do have access to tunneling experts.
Along these same lines, you may be right about this, but until you show me evidence that they've bothered to ask these tunneling experts a single transit-related tunneling question, I'd say it doesn't matter. They certainly could have had a freight rail expert look at their plans for the St Louis Park reroute and they didn't. This is understandable to some extent - we're all busy and at some point we either have to fish or cut bait. But again I think that if we had leaders that had a more cohesive and better informed transit vision, they would have long ago ordered a study that looked at this more comprehensively. I've actually read the only study I know of the geologic potential of the Twin Cities for tunneling. Again, maybe it's arrogant, but unless Met Council planners or their consultants have also read this study (which is gathering dust in the basement of Walter Library) or (preferably) replicated it more recently, don't have better knowledge of the feasibility of tunneling here than they do? Potential knowledge is great, but isn't actual knowledge a little bit better?
