The Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis touch each other, and their Downtowns are just 9 miles apart. The reason that they formed separately is due to the changing needs through their early history as they drew their identities from Mother Mississippi. Saint Paul was located where there was an easy steamboat landing, vital to bringing European people up to the rich land. Once this careful toehold was placed on the rugged land, the powerful falls further upstream were vital to developing industry in what became Minneapolis. Each city went its own way, joined to the other.

Modern times have produced a broad blot of suburban sprawl, uncontained by the kind of topography that defines cities like New York or San Francisco. The population has swelled to about 3.5 million people in the broadest definition, scattered over 17 counties stretching into Wisconsin, covering 6,364 square miles. This mega beast has little unifying force other than the economy of the region and the common culture of the Upper Midwest.

Most importantly, it has almost no efficient mass transit, relying only on a system of buses that carry about 240,000 passengers a day, less than a tenth of the commuter population. The rest travel mainly by car.

There was an efficient trolley system in the early days that guided the development of the urbanized area. The Twin City Rapid Transit Company was a private and profitable company that covered both Saint Paul and Minneapolis with 500 miles of track, and had stations distributed such that almost no one was more than 1/4 mile from a stop. But this was dismantled in 1954 when the line was acquired for its property holdings and the unprofitable transit lines handed over to the government, to be replaced by buses.

Fifty years on, the need for efficient transit is obvious. But how do we accomplish it? The many different jurisdictions and two strong urban cores make planning difficult at best. A body known as the Metropolitan Council, appointed by the Governor, has been charged with taking care of this problem. And that’s where it all gets … amazingly, only worse.

The Met Council, as it is known, operates the buses through the semi-independent Metropolitan Council Transit Operations (MCTO). They coordinated with Hennepin County to build the Hiawatha line in Minneapolis stretching mostly along an old rail bed, with a tunnel into the airport terminal on its way to the Mall of America, and some track on Downtown Minneapolis streets. The cost was projected to be $400M, but ballooned to $715M by the time it was built. It has been popular, but the cost over-runs did not build confidence in the Met Council and its ability to make rail transit happen.

The next project is the Central Corridor, a plan to use the same Bombardier Flexity Swift LRV trains run into Saint Paul. Planning is complicated by the run into another city and County, and no less than 8 agencies are involved in the planning – The Met Council, MCTO, MnDOT, Federal FTA, Ramsey and Hennepin Counties, Saint Paul and Minneapolis. How on earth does anyone manage this?

The answer is that a few strong personalities have dominated the effort, and much has been left up to the consulting engineers at BRW, later URS. The process that they developed was necessarily top down, starting with what they knew from the Hiawatha Line – the system of high speed trains made by Bombardier. They then selected the location of the line, which public pressure demanded be along the 120′ wide University Avenue commercial corridor. Then, once the Draft Environmental Impact Statement was issued, they began asking people about the details.

This process has been precisely backwards. The process of designing any product has to start with the consumers, and there is a base of about 30k people per day along the route chosen. They have their insights and needs, and more importantly the rest of the neighborhood that does not yet commute by transit has other needs. They were not asked their opinions until after major decisions were made. The location that was chosen does not lend itself to high speeds, given that it must alongside traffic at speeds of no more than 35 MPH – the current express bus that runs parallel on I-94 takes 28 minutes between Downtowns, but the planned line will take 35 minutes.

Which takes us back to the primary assumption of this line, namely that it will use the Bombardier Flexity Swift LRV. This is a large train with motors capable of propelling it to 70 MPH quickly, and a steel cage to match the safety requirements of such speed. It is a heavy beast, running about half that of a freight train. What went unexplored was the possibility of using streetcars such as those run in Portland, Toronto, Seattle, and other cities – and being planning in Albuquerque and many others. These run at the speed of local streets, no more than 40 MPH, and are scaled appropriately. They weigh about half as much, and the infrastructure to support them typically costs half as much to build as a result.

I have been saying for nearly two years that the Central Corridor will cost $1,200M if all of the proposed amenities are added up. This number was finally confirmed by respected local journalist Jane McClure in the community newspaper Highland Villager last week, despite two years of people telling me I was crazy or some kind of anti-transit Republican for this number. This is not a small point. The Federal Government has limits for projects that are anointed with their 50% payment of all costs, and for this line it is about $840M. The “official” cost of the line is only $923M, and this myth was carefully maintained by the consultants and fed to local media, who never questioned it.

I have gone on about this because a deadline has been announced by our Republican Governor, Tim Pawlenty. He is no friend to transit, but he has gleefully stayed out of this discussion to let the transit people continue to march down their top-down planning system to ultimate failure. But with the Legislative Session due to consider a Bonding Bill that must cough up $140M to keep this moving, the Gov has given them a February 29th deadline to come up with a plan that can meet the magic $840.

If they can do it, it’ll be a stripped down version with none of the promises, and a wide array of interests angry and ready to organize to get what they want. These opposing interests include the counties, the cities, and the University of Minnesota. All are just beginning to gird for a long fight.

I am placing here on this blog the prediction I have made in person and on several political discussion groups for two years: this design will not go forward, and will collapse in failure. Furthermore, this could have all been avoided if we had first learned what we known now that the public has been engaged, and that it would be a terrible shame to put all of this on the shelf because of the inability of the Met Council to do anything. A transit system based on the Streetcar, such as the one on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, would not only be more appropriate for the urban environment, but could also be built for about $400M. I only hope that we can come to our senses and re-start this effort with this appropriate, and affordable, system. We’ll see.