"Something will have to be postponed..."
I wonder what Peter McLaughlin was alluding to with that one. You can't exactly postpone a bridge or tunnel on the line and put it in later. Why not postpone all park & rides, except for the one at the end? The SLP and Hopkins stations will develop just fine (arguably better) without Park & Rides.
I'm pretty sure he means that some CTIB priority below the SWLRT line will have to be postponed because SWLRT will take all the money. Peter is looking at, and talking about, the whole long list of transit-funding priorities in front of the CTIB and indicating that as SWLRT swells, it's pushing out other projects. My guess is that he's really referring to Bottineau here.
Personally I'm beginning to think Bottineau should get to jump ahead of SWLRT in the queue - it's cheaper and not riddled with as many serious issues as SWLRT. We can take this one back for reevaluation while Bottineau goes forward. And of course that would serve the North side better than SWLRT anyway so maybe once the north side actually had service people would stop trying to pretend SW needs to "serve" the northside.
This is just my evolving opinion, I didn't think that a week ago and I may not think that next week; but up to now I've been of the opinion that "3C lost and we need to move on" right up until they started talking about tunnels in a park. Once we're talking about substantial tunneling *ANYWHERE* it seems to me that Nicollet should be back on the table. Let Bottineau get built now, delay SW a few years and see if we can't make an Uptown alignment work.