Green Line Extension - Southwest LRT

[UptownSport]

i'm just happy to see the line not built- I get that freight was eventually supposed to go thru SLP-
What I see for benefits to my city are far outweighed by the damage it will do- and any benefit could be better served by extending West (to where people, now, actually live) a few stops, and running midtown streetcar toward SLP- As Talinsday outlined.

Area around lakes is fixed, absent an act of God, there will never be density to justify transit in this area.

Why would you bypass denser areas just to give very wealthy, choice rider, suburbs a quicker ride past us city people?

So I'm quite happy that these articles are mentioning, even in an oblique, that the line itself is in danger of not being built.

Again, we're not erecting a model train, it should serve a purpose and be built where it's actually needed.

[RailBaronYarr]

And these areas DO want LRT. SW LRT is a key part of the transit network. Without it we leave a lot of people in cars in the most job-rich region in the metro.

Just want to say again that the people out in that area (EP) will still be in cars for every trip they take, including the ones to the transit stops. They want the LRT because they're becoming aware (even if subconsciously) that no amount of lane additions and giant overpasses can make their commute in to the city more bearable, especially when you're building more freeway (212) out to spur new development in open land.

[UptownSport]

I'd guess reason they want train is more at that the same reason they want automatically closing trunk lids.

[Chauncey87]

Southwest LRT: Is shallow tunnel on the way?

"With only two days to go until officials recommend a final Southwest Light Rail Transit budget and scope, the chairman of a key funding agency says he sees the writing on the wall.

Peter McLaughlin, who heads the Counties Transit Improvement Board, said Monday that a cut-and-cover tunnel through a tight Minneapolis freight rail corridor appears to be the clearest way forward for the project. Another option would reroute trains through St. Louis Park to make room for light rail, a highly unpopular plan in that city."

Read more: http://finance-commerce.com/2013/09/sou ... z2gS0aBpb0

Just put it in a tunnel. As this story seems to suggest is the only way to get the ball rolling. When companies and residential developers are pushing hard for this line with 100's of millions promised in spending. Whats another 100 million? Also never never never do I want to see lrt running down Henn or any other street in mpls. Why you ask? Just take the Blue line from dte/Metrodome to Target Field. Having rail go into uptown should be in its own row at all costs.

[garfield]

Let's say there are 30,000 riders per day (from southwesttransitway.org). Since this appears to be a commuter rail, most days it will be the same people riding every day. The simple math is this: $1.5 billion divided by 30,000 people would be $50,000 per person. I presume that the actual number of "riders" would be 15,000 (with each person taking two "rides" per day), bringing the cost up to $100,000 per person that actually uses this line. This, of course, doesn't include operating costs, which will surely run an annual deficit. Can anyone truly justify these astronomical costs?

I definitely believe that if this line gets built right now, it will be the last line built in the Twin Cities. I am/was a rail proponent until the fiasco of this line. Everything from the original alignment, to the freight trains, to the cost all make reasonable people question the true motives behind having this line built as planned. At this point, it appears to only be motivated by politics and egos, which can only end very, very badly.

[min-chi-cbus]

I don't see the Twin Cities progressing without extending the rail network, period. It's not even a well-if-they-did-it-so-should-we argument either, it's vital to providing alternatives for transit to a growing metropolis that will choke without a serious "transportation bypass", if you will. Like all things in the world, energy needs fuel to burn, and like the lifeblood of human beings, an energetic and vibrant metropolis' transportation arteries will clog without bypass measures, halting progression. For that reason alone, I want this line built, but I also worry about a missed opportunity and what may happen if we become a city that's either slow to move forward with rail alternatives or won't move forward with rail alternatives.

To counter the argument that this line will cost riders $100K per person, some would argue that for every $1B spent, we actually save/earn $4B-$6B, in the way of costs avoided, development added, quality of living increases, etc. Like all things, we can't measure ROI without considering the subjective measures as well.

I don't like the route, I don't like the cost, and I don't like peoples' and businesses' selfish interests clouding the issue. BUT, this train should be built, but done correctly and done at a competitive price. Any proponent of the Twin Cities though should realize how important this line's outcome truly is to the health and future of the metropolitan area.

[bubzki2]

I think we mostly agree this isn't a great line for its direct service, but, paired with a few well-placed streetcar lines or improved bus lines, it could be an efficient arterial to the core of DT Minneapolis. I think we should hope it gets built - now, not later.

[UptownSport]

This line won't do anything significant for development in Minneapolis.
It is to carry people from the suburbs into Minneapolis, and deliberately avoids dense areas of our city.
Talk of anything ocurring immediately West of downtown will occur with or without the line, and could be well served by simple, inexpensive (relatively) extension of exisisting line, and, West Lake by streetcars, as is mentioned.

[Rich]

The simple math is this: $1.5 billion divided by 30,000 people would be $50,000 per person. I presume that the actual number of "riders" would be 15,000 (with each person taking two "rides" per day), bringing the cost up to $100,000 per person that actually uses this line. This, of course, doesn't include operating costs, which will surely run an annual deficit.

I'm no good at math, but it seems like you're comparing all the expenses of the line over it's lifetime with one day's worth of riders.

And you're ignoring fare revenue. Shouldn't we also acknowledge that the line could generate a billion dollars or more in fare revenue from the hundreds of millions who will ride it over it's lifetime?

[Tom H.]

I'm no good at math, but it seems like you're comparing all the expenses of the line over it's lifetime with one day's worth of riders.

This is the same type of mistake people make when they conflate the federal deficit and the federal debt.

[RailBaronYarr]

The simple math is this: $1.5 billion divided by 30,000 people would be $50,000 per person. I presume that the actual number of "riders" would be 15,000 (with each person taking two "rides" per day), bringing the cost up to $100,000 per person that actually uses this line. This, of course, doesn't include operating costs, which will surely run an annual deficit.

I'm no good at math, but it seems like you're comparing all the expenses of the line over it's lifetime with one day's worth of riders.

And you're ignoring fare revenue. Shouldn't we also acknowledge that the line could generate a billion dollars or more in fare revenue from the hundreds of millions who will ride it over it's lifetime?

Yes, but there are also operating costs that aren't even recovered by fare revenue (I think the Blue Line recovers ~35-38% of its revenue, varies by year), beyond the up-front capital cost of construction. Which is why the car/highway side will typically respond to the point that gas taxes, tolls, etc are only paying for roughly 50% of state/fed DOT annual budgets (that include both capital and ongoing maintenance) - transit doesn't even pay for 50% of its operating costs let alone the up-front ones.

Of course, doing a full analysis of "costs" is pretty tough when comparing modes, lines, etc. Any individual highway doesn't necessarily cause car-dependency for a region, but the way we've built out our places has. The cost of having to own 2+ vehicles per household (national average was 1.92 last I checked) gets passed on to families (and we've convinced ourselves that we want to drive rather than need to). Opportunity cost of property tax revenue lost from roads/exits/etc as well as reduced property values nearby (and yes, some portions of many rail projects). Emergency vehicle response costs. Pollution mitigation costs. Way too difficult to accurately calculate the cost beyond capital+operating for a rail vs bus vs highway project.

[mulad]

As others have mentioned, the $1.5 billion number is capital cost -- related to building tracks, catenary, and signaling (the equivalent of a road for cars), maintenance facilitiies (the equivalent of parking structures and mechanic shops for cars), and then the LRVs (obviously the equivalent of cars themselves). It's hard to compare LRT to road construction costs because so much is rolled into one number, and also because we tend to build a whole line at once (I'm not sure if we ever got to the level of building 15 miles of highway through urbanized areas all in one shot -- highway construction is typically more incremental).

As one point of comparison, an average new car was costing $31,087 as of March 2013, and the average car age is 11.4 years, so the typical family's capital cost per car is $2,726 per year at the moment -- not including infrastructure costs for roads, parking, or the shops where maintenance happens.

Light-rail vehicles tend to have much longer service lives than automobiles. I've typically heard 30 years as a rule of thumb. The infrastructure also needs to be refreshed periodically -- often quoted as being around 70 years. But heck, let's be conservative and say that we'll rebuild the whole darn thing in 25 years. $1.5 billion divided by 30,000 riders, divided by 25 years works out to $2,000 per rider per year. And in reality, the cost for rail vehicles would probably be 1/3 of the capital cost or less, so you can see how the shared infrastructure can bring a big benefit.

Tracks and catenary are typically more expensive than highways, but they also have high capacity. Each LRV can carry 200 people or so, putting a 3-car train around 600 people. Even with our region's 10-minute service pattern, a 2-track line could probably carry 60,000 to 120,000 people per day past a single point before extreme crowding set in, and scaling up frequency and train length would let capacity go up significantly higher (the interlined Blue/Green Line segment in downtown Minneapolis would have double that capacity, for instance). My typical point of comparison is I-94 at Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, which sees about 160,000 cars per day across 6 lanes.

But even comparing the capacity of light rail to that of a freeway is rather misleading because of the fundamental reality that trains can stop periodically to pick up and drop off passengers while operating on the main line, while cars need to exit from freeways in order to do that. The physical footprint is smaller overall, allowing more density without the same noise and pollution problems that come with freeways. (There are obviously some noise problems because of bells/horns, but they can be mitigated by more grade separation.)

[mamundsen]

The simple math is this: $1.5 billion divided by 30,000 people would be $50,000 per person. I presume that the actual number of "riders" would be 15,000 (with each person taking two "rides" per day), bringing the cost up to $100,000 per person that actually uses this line. This, of course, doesn't include operating costs, which will surely run an annual deficit.

I'm no good at math, but it seems like you're comparing all the expenses of the line over it's lifetime with one day's worth of riders.

And you're ignoring fare revenue. Shouldn't we also acknowledge that the line could generate a billion dollars or more in fare revenue from the hundreds of millions who will ride it over it's lifetime?

I was just going to comment with this some idea/question. I'm glad I am not alone.

[Tom H.]

Looking at the agenda from yesterday's special CTIB meeting, it looks like EP alignment choices have been narrowed down to 4 options.

(Note: apparently the 'City Center' station is what they would call the Mitchell station if it's moved a few hundred feet further west, for some reason. I guess it's close to EP City Hall?)

The biggest cost saver is to terminate the line at SouthWest Station, and relocate express bus operations elsewhere ($85-90M in savings). What's news to me is that apparently co-location of bus and LRT operations at SWS would require substantial extra cost, presumably because more structured parking is needed to accomodate the park-n-riders of the two modes. (I wonder how the modeling is done for that. Certainly at least some fraction of SWT express bus commuters would become LRT riders - they wouldn't all be brand new customers.)

$90M in savings would be a huge boon, at least for the public image of the line. The SWS terminus option looks to me like the biggest winner of the options presented at the meeting, although details on where the express bus operations would be relocated to is notably absent. The current set-up at SWS has nice bus-only entrance and exit lanes onto the 212 freeway.

[papazim]

This option was discussed at last week's CMC meeting and there was not much appetite for trying to get the bus operations to move. A more likely scenario would be to co-locate the LRT and bus operations at SouthWest station, build additional structured parking, and terminate the line there. While still substantial, the savings would then be less than the $85-90M listed.

[Chauncey87]

"Light-rail plan rankles some in Minneapolis City Council."

"ST. PAUL, Minn. — Minneapolis City Council members are fighting back against a likely solution to an impasse along the Southwest light-rail line.

Planners with the Metropolitan Council have recommended that the project route the LRT trains in shallow tunnels along the scenic Kenilworth Corridor in Minneapolis."

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/displa ... il?refid=0

I really don't know what else to say. Well over FIVE years of planning and now once the trigger is about to be pulled everybody and there mother comes out of the woodwork. Lisa wants this to pretty much go back to the start never mind the tens of millions already spent. Now maybe a lawsuit? If you route this on Henn to make it reach uptown before heading into SLP then your going to have to deal with what happened on University all over again! Making what was once a relatively fast line from EP into DT turn into a ride no faster then a bus once it reaches uptown. I really do enjoy rapid transit meaning if your going to put in rail make it fast! At the minimum faster then what it is replacing. I want rail to one day head into uptown, but not at the expense of reduced lanes of car traffic and having the train sit at every red light. Sort of what it does now in once you reach DT on the Blue Line.

[Silophant]

If you route this on Henn to make it reach uptown before heading into SLP then your going to have to deal with what happened on University all over again!

We'd build a slightly slower line that serves many times more people, increases capacity on some of the most heavily used transit routes in the city, and sparks a whole bunch of TOD in what is already one of the fastest-growing areas in the region? Sounds good to me.

[Chauncey87]

Henn ave already has a lot of bus routes serving uptown. What would happen to all of those bus routes if you put a train into uptown? My simple guess would be they would be rerouted, or just cut due to being redundant. So now you pretty much are spending twice the cash to get around the same level of service I really doubt putting a train into uptown would increase the already HIGH capacity now already serving uptown. Why do you or anyone think it is acceptable to build a train that goes as slow as a bus? Same goes for a street car. Just push the city council to put a tunnel under Hennepin Ave. Reroute the bus system to feed the new line. Now that is an increase in capacity.

[Silophant]

A tunnel would definitely be a better option for uptown, and for downtown, and most of University. However, I can't understand the constant argument that Hennepin already has a lot of buses, so replacing Hennepin Ave bus routes with a surface LRT wouldn't improve things at all. University is already well-served by buses, which are jammed full for much of the day. So, we're running a train down it. Even a single LRT holds more people than a 60-ft bus, and multiple unit trains multiply that. Plus, the dedicated guideway and (limited) signal priority will, in fact, make it at least as fast as a bus. Even if it is the exact same speed, a train is an increase in capacity.

[FISHMANPET]

Why are we talking about Hennepin now?