Want to go to Mpls in 2015? Good luck!

I have railed quite a bit about how transit is based on bad premises and in particular on the destruction that the Central Corridor “light” rail will bring to University Avenue, the Midway, Summit-University, and Frogtown neighborhoods.

I don’t go to Minneapolis often. It’s not a bad city, but it’s not my city and I seldom have any reason to go there. But I know that a whole lot of people do need to go there [and to get here] so keeping the routes to and from Minneapolis usable is important.

Our MnDOT people know that too, so one has to be especially cynical when now we learn that in addition to screwing up University Avenue they want to make us pay to use I-94 [or at least any lane that is moving].

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

A sign of the times [past times, that is]

Remember Johnny’s Bar which sat at 2251 University for so long? Remember the big stein sign which adorned its front? Apparently this piece of nostalgia is available for purchase.

So if you are a historian with an interest in West Midway/ South St. Anthony matters or if you are a bar owner looking for new adornment there is a chance for you to obtain this piece of history.

More information

It’s Alive

Well, it was a ray of hope. Pawlenty’s veto on train funding had given a ray of hope, one of the few rays of hope possible while he is governor.

Unfortunately, the train is alive again. There are still hurdles to jump, but it’s still alive.

And just to make things worth, keep this in mind: Our local politicos had to give him something in exchange. We may never be sure what it was, but it seems almost certain that it would have had to have been something better. It could hardly have been something worse.

Norm Coleman disappointed by Central Corridor veto, Pawlenty backpedaling?

Please make no mistake. I did not approve of Pawlenty’s massive, wholesale quantity, hostile anti-urban line item vetoes made so vindictively Monday. The man is evil and an enemy of the city! [Actually, it is not my role to proclaim him any more evil than we all are, but he brings about evil deeds. And he may not be any more an enemy of the city than other suburbanites, but he is in a position to make this more manifest.]

I did note the veto of Central Corridor rail funding and quoted Representative Hausman as saying that the veto had single-handily killed the boondoggle [mournful for her, joyful for those of us who have been trying to save our city and University Avenue].

Although, I had suggested that there might be hyperbole involved, it was a time for hope. Sometimes even bad people can do good things for bad reasons.

Today we learn in an AP story carried by the DPP that Norm is not happy about this veto of a boondoggle he has supported for 20 years, but the official gubernatorial spokesperson Brian McClung says that Pawlenty still has the “utmost respect” for our senior Senator.

And it reports that on his radio show this morning that Pawlenty said about the project, “It may come back, we'll see,"

Somehow, it just won’t die.

Grounds for Hope on Central Corridor?

Governor Pawlenty has vetoed $70,000,000 for Central Corridor funding,

Representative Alice Hausman is quoted as saying,

"In my opinion the governor single-handedly killed the central corridor,"

[from Minnesota Daily:]


I don’t know enough to know if this will actually kill the train or not. There may be some hyperbole here or it may be just that somehow this will go through anyway with costs being shifted to local taxpayers.

But we can hope.

It would be overly simple to note that His Excellency is from Eagan and that people who live in Eagan and other suburbs live in those places because they are the enemies of city people and that Governor Plenty’s dislike of us combined with the absence of any Republicans in our city’s legislative delegation does not make it the easiest to obtain any funding for our interests, so I will likely be putting more up about the governor’s line-item vetoes announced today most of the news does sound like bad news to city people, but I want to examine things more first.

Westover: The Vandals have sacked Rome

I’ve railed about transit before and continue to be amazed at how the phony ideas behind it seem to have been elevated to some kind of generally accepted, almost Biblical truth.

I comment Craig Westover’s column in today’s DPP to everybody’s attention.

I have excerpted the last paragraph as a teaser:

[C]urrent transit planning is not being done for the benefit of the public. The transportation policy being railroaded through the Legislature is about convenience for the well-connected and a legacy for the legislative elite for which everyone else pays. It's cool. The current dust-up among the Met Council, the Legislature and the counties is just more of the $6.6 billion entertainment value of the "historic" transportation bill, which is the best most of us can hope for.

In combination with Dave Orrick’s article on the front page of the Local section [“Draft of a Dream”] about how the manipulators hope to redesign University Avenue with little concern for what happens to the present residents and business people along the Avenue, we all ought to be just a tad scared. [WARNING: Open House tomorrow, 10 am to 1 pm. 1080 University, aka the Old Library]

Previous posts:

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/03/county-now-deeper-in-transit-ripoff.html [3/26/08]
http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/moving-train.html [12/16/07]
http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/big-lake-ripoff.html [12/13/07]
http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/12/transit-and-taxes.html [12/7/08]

Fuel for the Mill

Somebody wrote me a while back wondering why I had not written about the Rock Tenn [If you are over forty think Champion or Hoerner Waldorf or Waldorf] burner proposal. I guess that one reason is I just don’t know enough about the matter. [I know, I know, that doesn’t usually stop me.]

I guess that Mayor Coleman the Second did note at a recent meeting burning fuel oil there negated the improvements made by getting Xcel [NSP] to change from burning coal to natural gas by the high bridge.

Gee. What a surprise.

I can remember driving on the Short Line Road [what the yuppies and Dakota County trespassers now call “Ayd Mill Road”] a few years ago and seeing the steam pipes being installed along the Milwaukee Railroad [now Queen Elizabeth’s Canadian Pacific] line and reading articles [no, not while I was actually driving] whooping it up that this new energy source would allow whatever the paper plant was being called to stay in business for a long time.

And I remember our city leaders exulting while telling us that they had gotten NSP to switch from coal to gas. Since it never occurred to me that burning gas would not produce steam, I never made the connection.

But couldn’t somebody downtown?

Central Corridor again

Governor Plenty says that we need compromise to reduce the scope of the Central Corridor Light Rail.

We need to eliminate the hookup to the Union Depot or the University campus tunnel or both. And we certainly cannot add stops at places where they might be useful.

I have a suggestion:
Eliminate the whole thing.

Earlier posts: Moving the Train [12/16/07], Transit and Taxes [12/7/07]

Moving the Train

Another truth about Transit that I did not mention in earlier posts.

Transit people believe the stuff they say, that they have a kind of civic morality which justifies any amount of civic iniquity. They believe in the rightness of their cause and their own personal goodness that things like whether right or wrong is done to others do not bother them.

About a dozen years or so ago, these wonderful people who give us our metropolitan transit service conducted a survey about how to make the busses run faster.

After spending a bunch of public dollars the Transit people were given a conclusion which I don’t have the exact word for but which can be reasonably paraphrased as, “Busses will make better time if they don’t have to stop to pick up or drop off passengers.”

You can picture the Metropolitan Council execs slapping their foreheads in amazement. Who would have ever thunk it?

Well, now they’re telling us that to have the University Avenue light rail stop at half-mile intervals instead of one mile intervals will make the train take too long, be too expensive, and reduce ridership. It beats me how a train that doesn’t stop and pick up people can have more riders than one which does, but leave the wonks [who, of course won’t be riding the thing themselves or trying to run businesses on University Avenue, or sleep in a house on Sherburne or Aurora] to come up with some kind of explanation.

University Avenue is under attack and all that our city, county, and state leaders seem to be able or willing to do is to discuss how to carry that attack out. Light rail [also known as street cars without stops] isn’t the only thing attacking the Avenue, but it is one of the biggest and it is one where the role of the state is most evident.

University Avenue is a street. Streets are indeed part of a public transportation system, created to move people and things to and from the private properties which adjoin them or to other streets which do the same thing. Historically, University Avenue has seen horses, locomobiles, street cars, cars, trucks, bicycles, and trucks. It will continue to see most of these later uses even after light rail is built, if it ever happens.

People have bought or rented property along University Avenue to operate business or to live or bought property near University Avenue in Frogtown, Aurora-St. Anthony, Midway, and other places because its proximity of the Avenue brings them commerce or allows them conveniently move about.

The businesses along the Avenue need the traffic lanes and parking the Avenue provides. The Powers That Be seem intent on removing most of this so that people who operate trains can operate trains. They say that this is progress and that in the long run properties along the Avenue will have a greater aggregate value

They fail to consider that an aggregate increase of value does not mean that anything good will happen for the owner of a specific property, that whatever increases in property value do develop are probably going to happen around the stops, because that is where people will be able to get without having to find the elusive parking place.

However, it seems that most of this increase of property value will do nothing for property values and therefore property taxes. Construction, both old and new doesn’t line up with the stops. The Capitol complex doesn’t pay taxes. Rondo Library doesn’t pay taxes. The Wilder Foundation will be occupying a good chunk of Lexington.

I haven’t supported this boondoggle. Previous posts reflect that. [link, link.

So it makes sense that if we can only have stops at one-mile intervals that we move the stops. We don’t need a stop by the Capitol. It’s not going to be taken down anytime soon.

So I have this idea which I haven’t seen posted anyplace: Let’s put the stops at Western, Victoria, Hamline, and Fairview. Let the economy move things there. Target [a company which I personally do not patronize for personal reasons but which is a large Minnesota-based enterprise] recently jumped through a whole lot of hoops to build a new store at Hamline. Probably some of these hoops could have been lessened if there were to be an exit at Hamline. Think of what could happen at Victoria or Western. Perhaps some of the small business there might be able to survive or at least be able to receive just compensation from somebody else who could use the opportunity instead of being left to wither like the present plan calls for.

Of course, if they really wanted to get people between the downtowns they would have chosen a different path and left University Avenue to do what it always has done. Alongside the Great Northern [which really should have been the path for I-94] or somehow along the present I-94 would have made more sense.