Green Line Extension - Southwest LRT

[Nick]

http://www.startribune.com/local/south/179408811.html

With strong words and threats of lawsuits, more than 300 people packed St. Louis Park City Hall on Wednesday, most of them to convince Hennepin County and Metropolitan Council officials not to send freight trains through their neighborhoods.

To make room for a proposed Southwest light-rail line, officials want to reroute freight trains now going through Minneapolis to St. Louis Park instead. More than 100 protesters gathered outside City Hall before Wednesday's meeting -- the second of three public hearings that Hennepin County is holding this month to hear from residents on the possible environmental impacts the Southwest line could have on the five cities it would go through if approved.

I see flashes of Linden Corner in this.

[helsinki]

Yes, this is NIMBYism at it's most stark.

For instance, Strib quotes this with a straight face: "St. Louis Park resident Brian Zachek said 'If it derailed, it would tumble literally on top of us.'"

And then with it's next breath: "Zachek lives about 34 feet from freight train tracks that about two trains use each day. If freight trains that currently go by Minneapolis near the affluent Kenwood neighborhood are rerouted through his neighborhood, he said six to eight more trains would go by a day, increasing noise and safety risks."

In other words, trains already run on this rail line. 2 a day. The re-routing might add 6-8 trains a day. Will this lead to de-railment and injury to Mr. Zachek's person and property? No. The real reason for the opposition, it appears, was voiced by a lone soul who could present a counter-argument to the self-interested herd:

"Greg Hannon of St. Louis Park, was booed when he said he thinks other residents have politicized the issue and are just concerned about their property values going down. 'To me this is a simple economic issue," he said. "They're simply trying to protect their investment.'"

Well said.

[min-chi-cbus]

Of course it's about property values, which is why I say just re-route the thing and pay up!

I'd also like to see the 30,000 or so people who may use this line daily against the 300 who protested against the line.....would have made for a more fair representation!

[mattaudio]

Someone had mentioned that the city of St. Louis Park had consented to the proposed alignment a long time ago back when the trains were moved out of the greenway-- anyone know the history of that?

[Didier]

Is it really fair to blame anybody for not wanting their property value to decrease?

[mattaudio]

Agreed, I think it is fair to put up a stink, but there has to be some sort of balance. People haven't always done their due diligence when purchasing property. If I was purchasing property next to a railroad track, I'd do as much research as I could into the potential for changes in usage. Yet on the main issue of nimbyism I'm torn, since people want to protect their own property value within reason. Yet there comes a point where people wish to prevent creation of new supply (think Linden Corner, parking minimums, etc) because new supply in the marketplace lowers the equilibrium price for existing in-demand housing.

[Tyler]

Is it really fair to blame anybody for not wanting their property value to decrease?

Maybe not. But they live next to railroad tracks already. Right? Did someone guarantee them that rail traffic would never increase on those tracks?

[MNdible]

Did someone guarantee them that rail traffic would never increase on those tracks?

No, in fact, quite the opposite. As Mattaudio noted above, they were in fact promised that the traffic would increase. The reroute of the freight traffic onto Kenilworth was always viewed as a temporary situation, with the long term plan to move it to SLP. I don't recall all of the history, but it seems to me that the thought they reroute to the SLP track was going to happen a long time ago, so in many ways, they've just been enjoying a decade-long delay.

[woofner]

This whole mess got started when MnDot decided to grade separate the intersection of Hiawatha and Lake in the late 90s. They claimed that a bridge for heavy rail over Hiawatha would have been unfeasible (as it may have been, as I understand that freight rail requires a lower grade than bikes or light rail), so they decided to make TC&W go through St Louis Park & the BNSF sub downtown instead of its previous route, which we now call the Midtown Greenway. I'm not sure if St Louis Park consented at this time or not.

The reason they ended up routing through Kenilworth 'temporarily' is that the wye from BNSF to the Soo tracks in St Louis Park is inconveniently missing rail, which you can see on google more or less. Presumably the reason they haven't built that wye yet (which somehow costs tens of millions of dollars?) is that MnDot would rather spend the money on highways, so they were waiting for the SWLRT project to get federal transit money to pay for the bad side effects of a highway project (Hiawatha). I keep reading these articles about SWLRT and waiting for someone to mention this, but they never do.

[Nick]

BUT YOU GUYS:

The proposal is to take a major freight train route from a rail corridor through a small winding rail track into a residentual neighborhood including St. Louis Park High School. Anyone seeing the comparison of the tracks would say the proposal does not make sense. The proposal is ridiculous and dangerous. The motivation for the change from a designated rail corridor to a neighborhoold spur line is reflective of new normal cynical political behavior. Office holders are now beholden to political benefactors at the expense of the safety and security of neigborhoods. This proposal defies logic on its face. We need help in our St. Louis Park neighborhood. We have probably not contributed enough to the Hennepin County Commissioners' political campaigns. The commissioners have probably already sold their souls. May God have mercy on them when our children die as the result of their mismanagement. The fault is probably with us for not paying more attention to what was going on. Instead of trusting elected officials and working at our jobs, we should have been more politically involved. In fairness to the elected officials, getting elected is expensive. The elected officials need to listen to the big money contributors. In this case the big money is in Kenwood where the rail coridor is located now. Frankly, the big money could probably move the freight rail anywhere they liked regardless of the safety,security, or ecomomic impact. All of the above is just Political Science 101. The person with the gold makes the rules.

[Ubermoose]

I'd also like to see the 30,000 or so people who may use this line daily against the 300 who protested against the line.....would have made for a more fair representation!

Nobody is saying there shouldn't be light rail. It is all about colocation versus relocation at the cost of $123,000,000. The studies showed that colocation is a viable option, but the Met Council wants to ignore the facts.
As one of the NIMBYs I have to say that I think many of the posts are a little unfair. If you look at the schools and neighborhoods that this would go through, along with the blind turns, maximum grade changes, increased speeds, and longer trains than what had been talked about in the past, then you might be a little more sympathetic towards those of us who have been long time residents and have children who walk to these schools.

[Tcmetro]

Why not build an elevated viaduct for the freight trains? It's only about 2 miles and that would take care of the street crossing issues at SLP High.

[helsinki]

Why not build an elevated viaduct for the freight trains? It's only about 2 miles and that would take care of the street crossing issues at SLP High.

Or just build pedestrian crossings above the tracks, like at Northstar stations. Much cheaper.

[MNdible]

Or just deal with the eight slow moving trains a day.

[Silophant]

^ This. People are acting like they're going to be building a busy highway through here. It's going to be one train every two hours or so.

[Ubermoose]

^ This. People are acting like they're going to be building a busy highway through here. It's going to be one train every two hours or so.

That makes the $123 million price tag to relocate even more ludacris when you could have rail and freight coexist in a corridor which already exists and one way or another is going to have rail traffic.

[mulad]

Hmm. There are only like 5 grade crossings along the route at the moment (well, 6 if you count the Lake Street/Library Lane intersection as two crossings), and probably only 2 or 3 of those would have enough traffic to justify grade separation -- maybe only one of them. The Dakota Avenue grade crossing seems like it would cause the most trouble, though I'm not really aware of the traffic flows in that area.

But trains can be scheduled. As long as they avoid the rush periods at the beginning and end of the school day, they shouldn't cause much trouble. Mn/DOT has also wanted to increase the speed along the line -- I presume it's currently 10 mph, and I'm sure they'd aim for at least 25 mph, and maybe as high as 40, which would let them clear intersections much more quickly. It might be tricky to get trains going that fast, though, since one end of a long train would probably be going through the TC&W/MN&S junction as it passed the school, which could restrict speeds significantly.

Does anyone have a current price tag for routing the Twin Cities & Western trains through St. Louis Park? There was a 2009 study that put the cost at $48 million (the Strib article noted that routing through SLP is currently estimated to be $123 million less than colocating both LRT and freight rails in the Kenilworth corridor).

[talindsay]

^ This. People are acting like they're going to be building a busy highway through here. It's going to be one train every two hours or so.

That makes the $123 million price tag to relocate even more ludacris when you could have rail and freight coexist in a corridor which already exists and one way or another is going to have rail traffic.

Haha, Ludacris is a musician; I think you meant to describe this plan as ludicrous.

But your point is actually the first *good* point I've heard against relocating the tracks. If there's really only eight trains a day, why spend a tenth of the project cost to get them away from the light rail? I honestly thought this line had higher traffic than eight trains a day.

[Andrew_F]

Where are you guys getting the $123 million to relocate? I thought, as Mulad notes, that the $123 million was the additional cost to co-locate freight and LRT on Kenilworth vs moving the freight.

[woofner]

The official site for the rail project hasn't been updated since June of 2011, when the Environmental Assessment was finalized. I haven't seen any update of the $48m capital cost, but there are lots of documents there. I will look through them if I have time, which seems unlikely.

My quick perusal did remind me of two important points:

• The grade crossings really aren't the issue here. The problem is that this rail line is really close to a lot of homes, the noise and vibration level for which will increase significantly. It's disingenuous for opponents to tout safety as their primary concern, but it's also difficult for advocates to explain away this problem.
• The main cost driver of the rail relocation is the viaduct that has to be built at the connection between the north-south line and the line that TC&W trains will continue on to the west. This suggests that solving some of the grade crossing problems near the High School, while likely feasible, would also significantly increase the cost of relocation [Edit: it's more of a walled embankment than a viaduct, although there must be a viaduct at some point to take it over the LRT tracks].

[Addendum: I like the High School viaduct idea because I think that area has a lot of potential for Wooddale-style redevelopment. If only MnDot were making Hwy 7 less of a freeway instead of more of one.]