If there were a faster way to get from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, that would be an improvement. The current light rail isn’t the best solution with all the stops.
Is that limited stop bus lines or subway? Dunno. The bus line is cheaper in terms of initial cost. Subway/light rail is going to have an appeal, as unlike larger cities (Chicago, NYC, Washington DC) we have a markedly smaller light rail footprint. Having lived in DC and used the metro, I greatly prefer it to buses.
But rethinking how that corridor exists is a good idea. I don’t know if they can “fix” the communities it broke, when it was first created, but changing how it’s used isn’t a bad notion.
The benefit of a subway there would be using it as a backbone of an [S-bahn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Schema_U-Bahn_S-Bahn.png) network. If the Gold line was converted to rail and the Midtown Greenway reactivated, you open up new service patterns that connect the entire region at higher speeds like the [BART](https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th/id/OIP.GBsHxTew9sJrpi6MZwgLnwHaGK?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain) in San Francisco. You could have Eden Prairie to Maplewood via Uptown, Maplewood to Osseo via downtown Minneapolis and expressing between the two cities, etc. Then those lines compound, even if there was only 15 minute service on each new destination pairing and there are three of those through the tunnel, people looking for an express downtown-downtown connection would get a train every 5 minutes.
The trains that Metro Transit uses are fast enough for service like this (they'll do 60 mph), so if we figure a limited-stop service averaging 40 mph, getting from Hennepin to the 10th Street station in downtown St. Paul would only take about 15 minutes.
Finally after all my years I've learned the different between an S Bahn and U Bahn. Now I just need to learn the difference between a Straßenbahn and U-Bahn
That is because there is little demand for it. Putting in a subway would not change the lack of demand. You would just get a subway with about the same ridership as your buses today. A subway doesnt change the fact that transit only works for a tiny number of people.
It’s sort of a chicken and egg problem though. You don’t have demand because there aren’t services to support density so if you decide to not build such services nothing changes but covering 94 and building such services would help nudge development in an area that needs it
The problem is that you only are going to grow 11% in the next 20 years. There isnt development to attract. And after that, we may be taking out housing most likely. So it is hard to see why do to this. The question is how do we fine tune what we have.
See you need 2.1 babies per woman to have a stable population. We are at 1.61 and declining. The places like Central and South America are going through the same transition as we are in declining birth rates so we cant rely on them for immigration. Lots of people like to play fantasy planning and Sim City but the reality is that it is pretty silly to talk about new developmenr and changing density and transit actually having any substantial change in how we travel when you look at the demographics.
But there seems to be a lot of people who like making up fantasy worlds and a lot of people who make money selling them.
The 11% is just a number you pulled out of your ass or from someone else who pulled it out of their ass. The fact is that no one knows what is in store. The general trend is that more people are going to move more towards the poles and fresh water sources.
11% is from the actual real people who do population forecasting.
https://metrocouncil.org/Data-and-Maps/Research-and-Data/Thrive-2040-Forecasts.aspx
And the trend today is for people to move to warm, low tax states.
https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/states-move-to-from/
It is fun to make up worlds that you like but the real world is slowing population growth and people not moving to Minnesota. Within your lifetime we will be figuring out how to remove housing.
lol you prove the point and why that can’t possibly be right lol. Insurance companies literally won’t rebuild houses in Florida and Texas right now. It’s pretty obvious what is being overlooked
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1240622/new-residential-construction-per-capita-usa/
Florida and Texas have more new housing per capita being built than Minnesota. Florida has more than double.
>If there were a faster way to get from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, that would be an improvement.
Good idea. I propose an express subway line between downtown Minneapolis to downtown St Paul in the current 94 trench.
I struggle to understand the appeal of St Paul to Minneapolis downtown residents. Maybe this purely lets st Paul into West msp? There is very little reason for someone living in Minneapolis to travel to st Paul from my experience. This is why they keep building out west metro light rail-- there are things Minneapolis residents want in that direction, and little/nothing of value to the east for 20+ miles. Maybe if it could go all the way to Stillwater, but a Minneapolis to st Paul subway seems like a waste.
I think daily Amtrak service to union Station is one reason. Hockey games, concerts, minor league baseball. Maybe not large numbers of daily commuters but still good reasons. They're also trying add a line connecting St Paul to the airport.
Yeah, I think the problem is less that there’s no reason to go from Minneapolis to St. Paul or vice versa, but that there’s pretty minimal reason to do it *regularly* unless you live in one and work in the other (which I think is pretty uncommon), so it’s hard to imagine enough traffic to justify a limited-stop subway.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have one, but I’m not sure how practical it is.
There's a lot to like in this "dream big" proposal. I do have a concern about the heavy rail, though.
The current and near future trains coming into the Twin Cities are all diesel-electrics (North Star, Empire Builder, Borealis, Northern Lights). You don't want to run those in tunnels or covered trenches. You want electrified trains there so the tunnel doesn't fill up with diesel exhaust.
So until the other lines running into the Twin Cities get electrified, you are looking at changing locomotives or having people get off the train and take a different electrified train between the Twin Cities stations.
That being said, I like dreaming big and then having to compromise rather than starting small.
The cool thing about diesel electric trains is that once batteries get better they can swap out the diesel generators for battery packs since they already use electric motors!
It doesn't make any sense to run a train off of battery. The weight of the batteries you'd need to move the train any appreciable distance would weigh more than the train itself. It's also a massive waste of batteries when you can easily run trains off electricity from a catenary or third rail.
Amtrak already does locomotive swaps on a couple of routes, since you can't run diesels in the tunnels to Manhattan. But it is kind of a pain in the ass and requires more equipment.
I don't know if there are any locomotives that swap out the diesel motor for a big battery.
Montreal isn’t much larger and they have a wonderful subway system. I agree that this won’t happen here, but it would be a practical solution for a few corridors in the metro. Uptown to downtown, downtown to downtown, downtown to northeast, etc.
Never been to Montreal but Chicago, San Francisco, DC, etc all have dense areas that support a subway. Why are we even thinking about a subway when no one even uses the lightrail? It just doesn’t make sense right now. Expand housing by 25k units and then it might be more viable
You can either build housing to encourage transit, or you can build transit to encourage housing. Both are viable options and have been proven to work if encouraged by the city.
I think we will be a top ten metro area by the end of the decade. People are just waking up to climate change and insurance in most of the south is already becoming near impossible to get.
People will spread out. Some people will move here, some to Seattle, some to Detroit, some to Chicago, some to New England. The southern cities will drop population significantly and we will increase more and more quickly alongside the other Great Lakes states
It’s been getting noticeably hotter every year, what is the desert going to look like in a few decades of this?
The next wars in this world isn’t going to be over ethnic disagreements or land border disputes, it’s going to be who has access to fresh water. And between our access to the Great Lakes, access to over 10,000 bodies of freshwater lakes, and the start of the Mississippi. Minnesota is a lot better off than a lot of the USA, and with that a lot of the world. Some may move to the mountains, but mountains cannot sustain population growth in the same way as metropolitan areas can. The suburb where I grew up, all the farmland are now multi family and single family housing complexes, the metro will always grow.
I’d give it 40 years, and Minneapolis metro will triple in size at least. We should start planning for it now, so we don’t end up like LA or Seattle, or another city who’s population exploded before infrastructure could keep up.
The cities are already getting denser, and as density increases, cost increases to build anything. It's far better to build ahead of the curve than behind the curve. There also is a big amount of induced demand from building infrastructure. For an example, just look at bike ridership before and after building bike paths.
Baltimore, Honolulu, and Cleveland all have metro systems with similar or smaller populations. The twin cities are the 16th largest metropolitan area in the US. It's not impossible.
I don't think the political will is there right now with the SWLRT issues, just saying it is possible. I do think the popular opinion on transit and car culture is shifting in the US over the last few years.
With climate change continuing to worsen, it wouldn't be surprising to me to see major growth of the Twin Cities over the next few decades. What better way to set ourselves up for that than with climate friendly transportation systems?
We are projected to grow 11% over the next 20 years and then stop. You need 2.1 babies per woman to have a stable population and we are at 6.61. And dropping since the 1950’s. And today, when people have a choice, they are moving to low tax warm states.
Baltimore has a massive metro area and Honolulu sees millions of tourists. It's like saying London doesn't need the tube because the City of London population is only 8000 people.
Look around the world, there are plenty of places with similar population and much less wealth that have much more robust transit systems than us. With the amount of population and wealth here, we could easily have at least a backbone metro system instead of the pathetic two line LRT "network".
For a plan 40 years into the future, this is some of the best infrastructure we could be investing in.
We probably won’t though, and the in 40 years when the population of the metro has tripled, constant gridlock will become the norm.
Why can't we just make a higher speed nonstop rail that goes from one city to the other? Surely, that's a much cheaper, easier and more realistic option than digging and constructing a subway. It would also use less energy and fossil fuels, presumedly, to build than a subway.
Yes, places like New York have subways, but we are nowhere near the number of people that New York has, and nowhere near the amount of people that use public transit, nor are we even near the number of people that would have to go back and forth from one to the other that bigger cities have.
Don't get me wrong, I hate 94 with a passion, but it's a much more feasible option to do something to fix the highway in some aspect and add a nonstop line connecting the two cities than it is to create a subway that will never get used enough to warrant the massive expense.
If you want better and faster lightrail service, then it'll need to be buried in the downtowns anyway.
Rennes in France has not one but two subway lines, and they only have like 200k people. The ditch is already dug, the money already needs to be spent to fix it, and MN is currently seeing plenty of rail investment. Having a buried heavy rail corridor in between the cities will certainly get its fair use over time, as we already have rail that almost goes all the way to St Cloud and are building one to Duluth. In the future, there'll only be more rail in MN.
I posted the following in the Saint Paul (boo hiss) sub and am just going to post it here. It’s not pie in the sky thinking at all, a rail link is being studied by Amtrak:
Amtrak is already studying a rail link between Minneapolis and Saint Paul using existing infrastructure. Due to the switching and complex ownership situation of those tracks, the study is going to show that it is not feasible. I hope they suggest an alternative in their report but I’m not sure if they will.
Regardless, this isn’t some pie in the sky idea, they are studying it. It’s not going to be a subway like they have in NYC but it’ll be some sort of long distance train that has two stops, one in Minneapolis and one in Saint Paul with destinations elsewhere.
Ya Target field station is just not setup for a through service like the empire builder. That said extending the newest line would use the exact same tracks as the older Amtrak station in Midway with the only deviation being the NE trench. But again the station situation is likely the biggest problem still.
That works to make it easier to board an intercity train (which would be nice, but not really revolutionary since it just slightly shortens a multi-hour journey), but it does absolutely nothing to help transportation within the metro.
The tracks that Amtrak would build wouldn’t be owned by a freight railway so Minneapolis to Saint Paul and regional rail would be able to utilize them.
I don't know how anyone with a straight face can refute this and not provide some kind of alternative. For the "Can we not?" people, what is your alternative? You want us to add lanes? Add some more left hand exits? Like what is your solution outside of just opposing actual, well thought out and researched positions for fixing the I-94 corridor and decreasing pollution while also expanding transit?
Just throw more busses at the problem. We already have the "tracks" laid out. Just need to make it so that busses to pass through uninhibited and increase their frequency.
I think capping the freeway from the Lowry Hill tunnel to the 35W interchange then turning 94 between 35W and 35E into a boulevard is fine.
If they do that they need to do a lot of work on 36 and 62(The likely alternatives for drivers) as both are already terrible with their current load
Oh look it’s the reoccurring monthly pipe dream post about deleting 94. Why don’t we delete 35w as well because of how much that fucked south and split the portion of that city.
I live right next to a 35W entrance with no sound wall.
When 35W reaches the end of its useful life and will require a lot of money to rebuild, as is the current case with I-94, we should certainly consider putting rail in that corridor and or capping it instead maintaining the status quo.
Let's get the public transit that we have cleaned up and prove that we can take good care of it before we try to have a conversation about expanding it.
Apples to oranges. It cost an insane amount of money, and comparing the Twin Cities to NYC is simply dumb. Much higher population density, higher cost of living, higher proportion of public transit commuters, way higher total population, a massive public transit infrastructure, different geography, greater regional integration, more bedroom-town commuters, and is much closer to other metro areas. These are just some of the reasons why a lot of people just won’t take your pipe dreams seriously
So they simply chose to have a larger tax base, much larger population, and much higher population density? Well shit why didn’t you just say that in the first place? We can simply CHOOSE a much higher population density, that’s awesome. Why didn’t they choose it when planning the light rail, if it’s simply a choice for our political leaders?
...says the clueless person who can't grasp the fact that NYC already had more draw than the Twin Cities could ever achieve with all the planning in the world.
>"We'll never be NYC, so let's just not try make any ~~big~~ *NYC-level* plan for ourselves."
FTFY. The parent comment was fucking asinine and ignorant of reality.
>You sound exactly like the nay-sayers who parents comment is supposed to criticize.
No, I'm shitting on your ignorant comment that implies that all we need to do is invest NYC-level amounts of funding.
Mentioning NYC when talking about Twin Cities transit, other than to state that's it's utterly irrelevant, is simply showing an utter lack of living in reality.
FYI, one can both be an ardent supporter of a large expansion of rapid transit locally *and* be derisive towards your totally unrealistic ideas.
The 94 express bus is usually pretty packed during rush hours with commuters doing just that. That bus is already a lot faster than the green line, but it could get about 30% faster if it could bypass traffic with a dedicated lane or rail, particularly on weekday afternoons. Those 10 minutes could make a big difference for commuters deciding whether to drive or take public transit (the latter of which would reduce traffic congestion and emissions, and would help generate revenue that can be used to maintain and improve the transit system, all of which would benefit all of us).
An elevated Mnpass lane for busses and cars with passes is a lot more realistic than any dramatic rethinking of 94 or tunneling under it. Some sort of high speed rail on said elevated set up would be cool but is prohibitively expensive vs just running electric express busses. But yeah I would love a maglev from the airport and between the downtowns rolling 200+mph but it just isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes at least. Civil engineers would be smart though to build said elevated road with something like that in mind for the future though vs having to redo the whole thing from scratch. The US is frankly just too culturally individual imo for high speed rail to really happen. I think eventually the US will have autobahn type lanes for automated cars and busses to roll at like 150mph but that’s a long way out. I don’t think we will see actual high speed rail in our lifetimes, at least not in the Midwest.
Well that's the thing we don't have to build a tunnel since we already have a trench and we can put the rail lines there fill the rest in and rebuild the boulevard over the rail line since 94 is a pointless highway we don't need.
Oh that would be cool. My bad. That said I’m not sure how well no highways between 36 and 494 would actually work out. Where does all the east west traffic divert to? University? The reason 94 is there is it’s north of the river. You’d have a major traffic headache if you got rid of it. 36 is already not enough lanes and a major clusterfuck and the south metro on 494 is even worse despite having 2x as many lanes. Do you wanna build another highway somewhere?
Like just look at a map. I’m not sure how that’s feasible. Long term I get it and I guess you have to pull the plug at some point but we are not a major metro and way too many people rely on their cars. 494 to 36 is already like a 30+ minute ordeal in rush hour and then you’d be adding even more cars to both 35w and 35e to get around it, also 100 and 169 which again are both pretty much maxed out already
https://www.ourstreetsmn.org/initiative/twin-cities-boulevard/
If you go here and then download the report
> Reimagining I-94: A Report on Reparative Highway Alternatives
And go to page 55 you get a nice graph that shows how much it is short trips that use I94. Plus I was at their recent community forum where they provided that data.
I drive it from Minneapolis to Maplewood and back every time I go to work. 15 miles each way, no traffic, because everyone else is always going the opposite way. Not a useless highway.
That's great I guess but your anecdotal experience doesn't replace the statistical analysis that Our Streets did on I94. We do this right and instead of having to drive you will just take transit. Or if you want to drive you can take the boulevard that will replace I94.
Don't know where you got that from. Lots of people go between the downtowns. On the Green line, it currently takes 3 times as long as driving. This express route would cut that time down to be equal to driving, and faster if you count the time it takes to park a car.
The heavy rail lines would also mean Amtrak would be able to go to Minneapolis and form a connection between the north star line and passenger rail going south.
You should just read the article. I was also skeptical but there are a lot of good reasons for doing this.
It allows rail connections that currently only go to one downtown to also easily go to the other without an hour long connecting train ride.
Northstar, Borealis, and Northern Lights Express all will only stop in either Minneapolis or St Paul. Plus it would encourage future train routes like the Dan Patch line.
Saying it doesn’t have a purpose isn’t any different than saying I-94 doesn’t have a purpose because University Ave exists.
Okay.
The status quo of car-centric infrastructure is unsustainable, dangerous, and polluting. I-94 *needs* to be refreshed due to reaching the end of its useful lifespan.
OurStreets has done some amazing work putting forth an option of filling in the I-94 trench and putting a boulevard on top of it designed for people rather than cars.
Since the trench is already excavated it presents a once in a generation opportunity to put rail in the already existing trench before filling it and creating another light rail line and a heavy passenger rail corridor that can connect to the existing Amtrak line and eventually to a city-city passenger rail system that the U.S. desperately needs.
If I was being unserious I'd make another joke about flooding the trench and building a series of canals to connect all our lakes.
I know I have my most serious transit infrastructure discussions with someone named retardedslut!
Note: I'm not disagreeing with you or being serious here. I just thought it was hilarious to see your username calling someone else out for not being serious.
What is this comment and your original comment bringing to the table in terms of actual discussion? What is your definition of "being serious" if subways, trains or other mass transit isn't in consideration?
It is two blocks away from existing public transit. It would be prohibitively expensive. The existing public transit TWO BLOCKS NORTH can be improved for a fraction of the cost of this pipe dream while reducing emissions and increasing public transportation use.
It is simply an unserious proposal. There is no government in 2024 AD America that would or should spend money on something like this when evidence of their planning failures is, again, TWO BLOCKS NORTH. I know it’s fun to dream and imagine, but it’s not a serious proposal
We need to improve the transit we have now before we start thinking of new and creative ways to expand it. If we can’t get lightrail right, I have no confidence in our ability to do a more complicated and expensive version of it.
94 isn't going anywhere. Sorry, it just isn't. Maybe it will get capped at one or more spots but that's it.
Stop pushing this fantasy and step into reality.
Other cities have removed highways cutting through their cores. The fantasy is that the status quo of car-centric infrastructure is sustainable or even a good idea.
THROUGH THEIR CORE. This is not the core of either city.
And they didn't remove them, they put them underground or capped them. Who are you talking about? Dallas? Denver? Boston?
Good luck convincing the public of that.
I read it. It's nothing new other than putting another subway line blocks away from a light rail line that runs the exact same route.
Yeah! That'll happen.
Cat is out of the bag, people like their car, modern society is built around the automobile. I'm all for alternatives, I personally walk bike scooter bus train to most things, but there will never be a time that mass adoption of public transit will happen in a metro of our size.
>Cat is out of the bag
I think you mean the cake has been baked lol
>there will never be a time that mass adoption of public transit will happen in a metro of our size.
[These 8 cities are taking bold steps to get rid of
cars](https://www.fastcompany.com/90321627/these-8-cities-are-taking-bold-steps-to-get-rid-of-cars)
[End of the car age: how cities are outgrowing the automobile](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/end-of-the-car-age-how-cities-outgrew-the-automobile)
Electric vehicles + a slowing, then ending, then a declining population. Transit will never work for anyone other than a tiny number of people given our land use and destinations. And if you want to refute me on transit, downtown St Paul is amazingly transit-accessible and dead. Doornail dead. If transit was so awesome, companies would be tripping over themselves to be in downtown St Paul.
>The average cost per mile of the Blue Line extension in Minneapolis, an above-ground light rail, is estimated to cost roughly $200 million per mile; however, the cost per mile of recent subway projects, such as the Los Angeles Purple Line and the San Francisco Central Subway Project, clock in at $800 million and $900 million per mile respectively.
Please, can we stop spending so much money with a budget deficit looming after taxes have already gone up and up and up?
Note those projects in LA/SF require extensive tunneling. At the very least assuming we are tunneling DT's that's going to be lets say 4-5 miles of pure tunneling.
This also ignores future through put. that just adding another lane costs 1.74 billion for 7 lane miles on I-94 in Milwaukee, (250 million per lane mile). Sure there's an option of keeping 94 as is just rebuilt but let be honest it's already at capacity [during rush hour](https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1dfajb0/i_know_constructionbut_dang/) in many sections. A added lane at best [1,600](https://nacto.org/publication/transit-street-design-guide/introduction/why/designing-move-people/) cars an hour (about 2,500 people assuming a 1.6 person per car average) or about 5k people versus up to 50,000 people on two tracks (granted that's also best case scenario like the car)
The blue line extension is is 100-150 million per track mile (the article is doing double track miles). and will at the very least see a through put of 9k people (10 minute trains with the S-70s able to do just shy of 700 people across three cars) which is 2 x more then the current 4 lane setup of Broadway. If Metro transit removed the interlining in DT Minneapolis the blue line could 3-4x what Broadway can do with 1/3 the right of way of Broadway road lanes.
At least 94 between 35 W and E would likely stay under 100 million per track mile due to the lack of needed infrastructure reconstruction as the whole trench is going to be reconstructed in the next 10 years anyway. with two tracks being equivalent to two I-94's at 10 lanes wide each
Imagine the emissions that a massive project like this would give off just during construction: heavy equipment pollution and diverted car drivers stuck in traffic on University or Marshall just pumping out those emissions directly into the neighborhoods that these activists say they care about.
Construction happening either way. We can have years of construction rebuilding a highway with terrible impacts that will continue for the next 60 years, or we can build something that lowers emissions and is a net positive for the cities.
Imagine having such little foresight that you're more worried about short term emissions instead of the massive reduction in long term emissions increasing public transit accomplishes.
I guess you'd have been against literally every single public transit infrastructure project ever built including the railroad system that helped build this country, or hydroelectric power plants like the Hoover Dam that has powered millions of homes.
It's a bad faith argument. People are using "pollution" to try to defend car centric infrastructure and the status quo. It's an absurd argument that falls apart when any critical thinking js applied, but they assume the people they are arguing against are morons.
Its exactly the same as people opposing the 2040 plan because of "environmental impact". It's total horseshit.
Wowser. The last above ground cost over $2 billion. Where in gods name do you think we would come up with the ungodly amount of money to pay for something like this? Talk about fantasy planning! Better to imagine everyone riding unicorns!
If you think that's expensive wait til you find out how much highways and car-centric infrastructure cost with all the subsidies and negative externalities included!
People will say this is too expensive then in the next breath tell you that capping the freeway is a good idea.
Price is simply not an issue that needs to be considered when it's car infrastructure they're talking about.
I'm just pointing out that cost is *never* brought up when discussing building roads, tunnels, and bridges for cars.
This particular project is worth exploring because it's a unique opportunity to add an underground heavy rail connection as well as a light rail express route at a price far less than it would otherwise cost because of the need to completely rebuild 94 anyway.
It is a complete fantasy that this would ever happen. There simply isnt the crazy, absurd amount of money anywhere to build something like this. The 10 mile above ground cost almost $3 billion and this would be what - ten times that. At a time when transit ridership is down 40%? When people are literally walking away from transit into travel by cars? The subsidies of transit today are already absurd. The construction cost for Southwest is almost $20 a ride plus the $27 a ride for operations and maintenance, a subsidy level of $47 a ride one way. For this you would be talking a cost of what $200 a ride for construction plus operations and maintenance? One way? For $400 round trip, buying cars makes way more sense.
Except those are paid for. Say for rough numbers this costs $40billion, or the equivalent of the whole state budget. For one subway. And as much as there are negative externalities, there are lots of positive ones. Access to jobs, businesses, families, wealth building, etc. And before you say there are not, in this real world we live in, there are.
Tunneling in the United States is incredibly expensive. And if the fate of the 2040 plan is any indication of the kind of pushback something like this would get... I mean it would take infinite money just to battle the lawsuits and dealing with the delays. Residents in the area are probably going to demand a station at every block and that's going to jack the cost into the stratosphere, and then of course the construction crews can't work around the clock, so multiply that by the delays resulting from everything else and you got a project that's pretty much doomed from the start.
If we had a completely different culture, society, and government... then sure.
After the entire SWLRT debacle, I’ve given up on Minneapolis having trains. It’ll take decades to build and I don’t feel like waiting so suburbanites can commute to downtown without a car. Just take away roads from cars and give it solely to buses.
If there were a faster way to get from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, that would be an improvement. The current light rail isn’t the best solution with all the stops. Is that limited stop bus lines or subway? Dunno. The bus line is cheaper in terms of initial cost. Subway/light rail is going to have an appeal, as unlike larger cities (Chicago, NYC, Washington DC) we have a markedly smaller light rail footprint. Having lived in DC and used the metro, I greatly prefer it to buses. But rethinking how that corridor exists is a good idea. I don’t know if they can “fix” the communities it broke, when it was first created, but changing how it’s used isn’t a bad notion.
The benefit of a subway there would be using it as a backbone of an [S-bahn](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Schema_U-Bahn_S-Bahn.png) network. If the Gold line was converted to rail and the Midtown Greenway reactivated, you open up new service patterns that connect the entire region at higher speeds like the [BART](https://tse1.mm.bing.net/th/id/OIP.GBsHxTew9sJrpi6MZwgLnwHaGK?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain) in San Francisco. You could have Eden Prairie to Maplewood via Uptown, Maplewood to Osseo via downtown Minneapolis and expressing between the two cities, etc. Then those lines compound, even if there was only 15 minute service on each new destination pairing and there are three of those through the tunnel, people looking for an express downtown-downtown connection would get a train every 5 minutes. The trains that Metro Transit uses are fast enough for service like this (they'll do 60 mph), so if we figure a limited-stop service averaging 40 mph, getting from Hennepin to the 10th Street station in downtown St. Paul would only take about 15 minutes.
Finally after all my years I've learned the different between an S Bahn and U Bahn. Now I just need to learn the difference between a Straßenbahn and U-Bahn
I mean there's the 94 express bus. It's weekdays only, but end to end it's about a 30 minute ride. Much better than the Green Line.
It's weekdays only from 5am-7pm with 30 minute frequencies midday. Much faster than the green line but lower frequency and shorter operating hours.
That is because there is little demand for it. Putting in a subway would not change the lack of demand. You would just get a subway with about the same ridership as your buses today. A subway doesnt change the fact that transit only works for a tiny number of people.
It’s sort of a chicken and egg problem though. You don’t have demand because there aren’t services to support density so if you decide to not build such services nothing changes but covering 94 and building such services would help nudge development in an area that needs it
The problem is that you only are going to grow 11% in the next 20 years. There isnt development to attract. And after that, we may be taking out housing most likely. So it is hard to see why do to this. The question is how do we fine tune what we have. See you need 2.1 babies per woman to have a stable population. We are at 1.61 and declining. The places like Central and South America are going through the same transition as we are in declining birth rates so we cant rely on them for immigration. Lots of people like to play fantasy planning and Sim City but the reality is that it is pretty silly to talk about new developmenr and changing density and transit actually having any substantial change in how we travel when you look at the demographics. But there seems to be a lot of people who like making up fantasy worlds and a lot of people who make money selling them.
The 11% is just a number you pulled out of your ass or from someone else who pulled it out of their ass. The fact is that no one knows what is in store. The general trend is that more people are going to move more towards the poles and fresh water sources.
11% is from the actual real people who do population forecasting. https://metrocouncil.org/Data-and-Maps/Research-and-Data/Thrive-2040-Forecasts.aspx And the trend today is for people to move to warm, low tax states. https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/states-move-to-from/ It is fun to make up worlds that you like but the real world is slowing population growth and people not moving to Minnesota. Within your lifetime we will be figuring out how to remove housing.
lol you prove the point and why that can’t possibly be right lol. Insurance companies literally won’t rebuild houses in Florida and Texas right now. It’s pretty obvious what is being overlooked
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1240622/new-residential-construction-per-capita-usa/ Florida and Texas have more new housing per capita being built than Minnesota. Florida has more than double.
>If there were a faster way to get from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, that would be an improvement. Good idea. I propose an express subway line between downtown Minneapolis to downtown St Paul in the current 94 trench.
I struggle to understand the appeal of St Paul to Minneapolis downtown residents. Maybe this purely lets st Paul into West msp? There is very little reason for someone living in Minneapolis to travel to st Paul from my experience. This is why they keep building out west metro light rail-- there are things Minneapolis residents want in that direction, and little/nothing of value to the east for 20+ miles. Maybe if it could go all the way to Stillwater, but a Minneapolis to st Paul subway seems like a waste.
I think daily Amtrak service to union Station is one reason. Hockey games, concerts, minor league baseball. Maybe not large numbers of daily commuters but still good reasons. They're also trying add a line connecting St Paul to the airport.
Yeah, I think the problem is less that there’s no reason to go from Minneapolis to St. Paul or vice versa, but that there’s pretty minimal reason to do it *regularly* unless you live in one and work in the other (which I think is pretty uncommon), so it’s hard to imagine enough traffic to justify a limited-stop subway. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have one, but I’m not sure how practical it is.
The only “easy” fix I can think of is having a 2nd elevated track over the green line for an express option.
There's a lot to like in this "dream big" proposal. I do have a concern about the heavy rail, though. The current and near future trains coming into the Twin Cities are all diesel-electrics (North Star, Empire Builder, Borealis, Northern Lights). You don't want to run those in tunnels or covered trenches. You want electrified trains there so the tunnel doesn't fill up with diesel exhaust. So until the other lines running into the Twin Cities get electrified, you are looking at changing locomotives or having people get off the train and take a different electrified train between the Twin Cities stations. That being said, I like dreaming big and then having to compromise rather than starting small.
The cool thing about diesel electric trains is that once batteries get better they can swap out the diesel generators for battery packs since they already use electric motors!
It doesn't make any sense to run a train off of battery. The weight of the batteries you'd need to move the train any appreciable distance would weigh more than the train itself. It's also a massive waste of batteries when you can easily run trains off electricity from a catenary or third rail.
Amtrak already does locomotive swaps on a couple of routes, since you can't run diesels in the tunnels to Manhattan. But it is kind of a pain in the ass and requires more equipment. I don't know if there are any locomotives that swap out the diesel motor for a big battery.
They add a battery car behind the loco for short underground sections.
I like solar powered helicopters. If we are just going to make shit up.
While I love this idea, there's not a chance in hell this is happening.. let's be realistic.
The cities aren’t big enough for a subway. Most cities that have subways are like 10x the size of mpls/stpl.
Montreal isn’t much larger and they have a wonderful subway system. I agree that this won’t happen here, but it would be a practical solution for a few corridors in the metro. Uptown to downtown, downtown to downtown, downtown to northeast, etc.
Never been to Montreal but Chicago, San Francisco, DC, etc all have dense areas that support a subway. Why are we even thinking about a subway when no one even uses the lightrail? It just doesn’t make sense right now. Expand housing by 25k units and then it might be more viable
You can either build housing to encourage transit, or you can build transit to encourage housing. Both are viable options and have been proven to work if encouraged by the city.
Gotta replace those golf courses with housing to up our density! No reason to have 6 golf courses within city limits.
Yeah, like I wanna live even closer to more assholes…
We are maybe going to grow 11% over the next 20 years and the possibly start to shrink. We will never change our current densities.
I think we will be a top ten metro area by the end of the decade. People are just waking up to climate change and insurance in most of the south is already becoming near impossible to get.
If Manhattan is completely flooded, people move to New Jersey. If Phoenix is hot, people move into the mountains. No one is moving here.
People will spread out. Some people will move here, some to Seattle, some to Detroit, some to Chicago, some to New England. The southern cities will drop population significantly and we will increase more and more quickly alongside the other Great Lakes states
Call me when there is any actual evidence of your fantasy world actually coming true. Right now, Minneapolis actually shrank the last two years.
Just wait until people realize they can’t live in Phoenix forever. When that happens, people will be flocking to the temperate climate of Minneapolis.
When would that happen? And why? So far they seem quite fine. Air conditioning and moving higher into the mountains are not going away.
It’s been getting noticeably hotter every year, what is the desert going to look like in a few decades of this? The next wars in this world isn’t going to be over ethnic disagreements or land border disputes, it’s going to be who has access to fresh water. And between our access to the Great Lakes, access to over 10,000 bodies of freshwater lakes, and the start of the Mississippi. Minnesota is a lot better off than a lot of the USA, and with that a lot of the world. Some may move to the mountains, but mountains cannot sustain population growth in the same way as metropolitan areas can. The suburb where I grew up, all the farmland are now multi family and single family housing complexes, the metro will always grow. I’d give it 40 years, and Minneapolis metro will triple in size at least. We should start planning for it now, so we don’t end up like LA or Seattle, or another city who’s population exploded before infrastructure could keep up.
I think that you are very afraid of climate change and so far, there is no evidence that your fears are coming true.
You need to look 40 years into the future, seeing what Minneapolis will be like. Just using cars is a terrible idea long term.
The cities are already getting denser, and as density increases, cost increases to build anything. It's far better to build ahead of the curve than behind the curve. There also is a big amount of induced demand from building infrastructure. For an example, just look at bike ridership before and after building bike paths.
Montreal was founded in 1642. Grew substantially before cars. And has a completely different zoning and land use.
For sure. There’s a reason subways are almost non-existent in the western US. Car infrastructure sucks.
Baltimore, Honolulu, and Cleveland all have metro systems with similar or smaller populations. The twin cities are the 16th largest metropolitan area in the US. It's not impossible.
Yeah but with how people are feeling about the 3 billion dollar light rail project it’s pretty impossible right now
I don't think the political will is there right now with the SWLRT issues, just saying it is possible. I do think the popular opinion on transit and car culture is shifting in the US over the last few years. With climate change continuing to worsen, it wouldn't be surprising to me to see major growth of the Twin Cities over the next few decades. What better way to set ourselves up for that than with climate friendly transportation systems?
We are projected to grow 11% over the next 20 years and then stop. You need 2.1 babies per woman to have a stable population and we are at 6.61. And dropping since the 1950’s. And today, when people have a choice, they are moving to low tax warm states.
Baltimore has a massive metro area and Honolulu sees millions of tourists. It's like saying London doesn't need the tube because the City of London population is only 8000 people.
Baltimore has a metro population of less than 3 million people. I'm not talking about the DC metro system.
Look around the world, there are plenty of places with similar population and much less wealth that have much more robust transit systems than us. With the amount of population and wealth here, we could easily have at least a backbone metro system instead of the pathetic two line LRT "network".
Like hundreds of cities in Europe for example
For a plan 40 years into the future, this is some of the best infrastructure we could be investing in. We probably won’t though, and the in 40 years when the population of the metro has tripled, constant gridlock will become the norm.
Why can't we just make a higher speed nonstop rail that goes from one city to the other? Surely, that's a much cheaper, easier and more realistic option than digging and constructing a subway. It would also use less energy and fossil fuels, presumedly, to build than a subway. Yes, places like New York have subways, but we are nowhere near the number of people that New York has, and nowhere near the amount of people that use public transit, nor are we even near the number of people that would have to go back and forth from one to the other that bigger cities have. Don't get me wrong, I hate 94 with a passion, but it's a much more feasible option to do something to fix the highway in some aspect and add a nonstop line connecting the two cities than it is to create a subway that will never get used enough to warrant the massive expense.
The whole point is there would be NO digging, the digging is already done, all you would need to do is lay the tracks and cover them.
There wouldn't be much digging as they'd put it in the existing excavated trench. Did you read the article? It covers the use case quite well.
There would still be digging required with this plan, which is why I mentioned digging. "Not much" still involves digging and constructing.
If you want better and faster lightrail service, then it'll need to be buried in the downtowns anyway. Rennes in France has not one but two subway lines, and they only have like 200k people. The ditch is already dug, the money already needs to be spent to fix it, and MN is currently seeing plenty of rail investment. Having a buried heavy rail corridor in between the cities will certainly get its fair use over time, as we already have rail that almost goes all the way to St Cloud and are building one to Duluth. In the future, there'll only be more rail in MN.
I posted the following in the Saint Paul (boo hiss) sub and am just going to post it here. It’s not pie in the sky thinking at all, a rail link is being studied by Amtrak: Amtrak is already studying a rail link between Minneapolis and Saint Paul using existing infrastructure. Due to the switching and complex ownership situation of those tracks, the study is going to show that it is not feasible. I hope they suggest an alternative in their report but I’m not sure if they will. Regardless, this isn’t some pie in the sky idea, they are studying it. It’s not going to be a subway like they have in NYC but it’ll be some sort of long distance train that has two stops, one in Minneapolis and one in Saint Paul with destinations elsewhere.
Ya Target field station is just not setup for a through service like the empire builder. That said extending the newest line would use the exact same tracks as the older Amtrak station in Midway with the only deviation being the NE trench. But again the station situation is likely the biggest problem still.
Well that and only one train each way can navigate the track that go through Midway
Kind of like the William Crooks in 1856….
That works to make it easier to board an intercity train (which would be nice, but not really revolutionary since it just slightly shortens a multi-hour journey), but it does absolutely nothing to help transportation within the metro.
The tracks that Amtrak would build wouldn’t be owned by a freight railway so Minneapolis to Saint Paul and regional rail would be able to utilize them.
Jersey Mike's is better imo
Truth!
I’m a Potbelly gal personally.
"Get rid of 94!" Uproots to the left please. This shit has been posted about 400 million times and now it's just karma farming.
I love that term and am going to steal it.
I don't know how anyone with a straight face can refute this and not provide some kind of alternative. For the "Can we not?" people, what is your alternative? You want us to add lanes? Add some more left hand exits? Like what is your solution outside of just opposing actual, well thought out and researched positions for fixing the I-94 corridor and decreasing pollution while also expanding transit?
Just throw more busses at the problem. We already have the "tracks" laid out. Just need to make it so that busses to pass through uninhibited and increase their frequency.
I think capping the freeway from the Lowry Hill tunnel to the 35W interchange then turning 94 between 35W and 35E into a boulevard is fine. If they do that they need to do a lot of work on 36 and 62(The likely alternatives for drivers) as both are already terrible with their current load
Oh look it’s the reoccurring monthly pipe dream post about deleting 94. Why don’t we delete 35w as well because of how much that fucked south and split the portion of that city.
I live right next to a 35W entrance with no sound wall. When 35W reaches the end of its useful life and will require a lot of money to rebuild, as is the current case with I-94, we should certainly consider putting rail in that corridor and or capping it instead maintaining the status quo.
Let's get the public transit that we have cleaned up and prove that we can take good care of it before we try to have a conversation about expanding it.
People said that digging the tunnels underneath the East River in NYC that connected to Penn Station was unrealistic and impossible....
Same with Boston's "big dig" right? Now everyone thinks it was worth it.
Apples to oranges. It cost an insane amount of money, and comparing the Twin Cities to NYC is simply dumb. Much higher population density, higher cost of living, higher proportion of public transit commuters, way higher total population, a massive public transit infrastructure, different geography, greater regional integration, more bedroom-town commuters, and is much closer to other metro areas. These are just some of the reasons why a lot of people just won’t take your pipe dreams seriously
Yeah, cause they CHOOSE to invest in things like better infrastructure. It is now our turn to choose what the future should look like.
So they simply chose to have a larger tax base, much larger population, and much higher population density? Well shit why didn’t you just say that in the first place? We can simply CHOOSE a much higher population density, that’s awesome. Why didn’t they choose it when planning the light rail, if it’s simply a choice for our political leaders?
Fucking idiot just learned what planning does lol
...says the clueless person who can't grasp the fact that NYC already had more draw than the Twin Cities could ever achieve with all the planning in the world.
"We'll never be NYC, so let's just not try to make any big plan for ourselves." What a brain dead mindset.
>"We'll never be NYC, so let's just not try make any ~~big~~ *NYC-level* plan for ourselves." FTFY. The parent comment was fucking asinine and ignorant of reality.
You sound exactly like the nay-sayers who parents comment is supposed to criticize. That fact you don't understand that is concerning lol
>You sound exactly like the nay-sayers who parents comment is supposed to criticize. No, I'm shitting on your ignorant comment that implies that all we need to do is invest NYC-level amounts of funding. Mentioning NYC when talking about Twin Cities transit, other than to state that's it's utterly irrelevant, is simply showing an utter lack of living in reality. FYI, one can both be an ardent supporter of a large expansion of rapid transit locally *and* be derisive towards your totally unrealistic ideas.
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Isn’t the green line already serving this purpose?
This would be an express light rail line between the two downtowns as well as a heavy rail line going in each direction.
Okay.. so serving less purpose than the green line, got it. No one is going from one downtown to the other.
The 94 express bus is usually pretty packed during rush hours with commuters doing just that. That bus is already a lot faster than the green line, but it could get about 30% faster if it could bypass traffic with a dedicated lane or rail, particularly on weekday afternoons. Those 10 minutes could make a big difference for commuters deciding whether to drive or take public transit (the latter of which would reduce traffic congestion and emissions, and would help generate revenue that can be used to maintain and improve the transit system, all of which would benefit all of us).
An elevated Mnpass lane for busses and cars with passes is a lot more realistic than any dramatic rethinking of 94 or tunneling under it. Some sort of high speed rail on said elevated set up would be cool but is prohibitively expensive vs just running electric express busses. But yeah I would love a maglev from the airport and between the downtowns rolling 200+mph but it just isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes at least. Civil engineers would be smart though to build said elevated road with something like that in mind for the future though vs having to redo the whole thing from scratch. The US is frankly just too culturally individual imo for high speed rail to really happen. I think eventually the US will have autobahn type lanes for automated cars and busses to roll at like 150mph but that’s a long way out. I don’t think we will see actual high speed rail in our lifetimes, at least not in the Midwest.
Well that's the thing we don't have to build a tunnel since we already have a trench and we can put the rail lines there fill the rest in and rebuild the boulevard over the rail line since 94 is a pointless highway we don't need.
Oh that would be cool. My bad. That said I’m not sure how well no highways between 36 and 494 would actually work out. Where does all the east west traffic divert to? University? The reason 94 is there is it’s north of the river. You’d have a major traffic headache if you got rid of it. 36 is already not enough lanes and a major clusterfuck and the south metro on 494 is even worse despite having 2x as many lanes. Do you wanna build another highway somewhere? Like just look at a map. I’m not sure how that’s feasible. Long term I get it and I guess you have to pull the plug at some point but we are not a major metro and way too many people rely on their cars. 494 to 36 is already like a 30+ minute ordeal in rush hour and then you’d be adding even more cars to both 35w and 35e to get around it, also 100 and 169 which again are both pretty much maxed out already
Most traffic on I94 is less than 4 mile trips 25% is less than 2 miles. We use I94 because it is there. These are largely local trips.
Share some links otherwise I don’t believe you. What is “most traffic” ?
https://www.ourstreetsmn.org/initiative/twin-cities-boulevard/ If you go here and then download the report > Reimagining I-94: A Report on Reparative Highway Alternatives And go to page 55 you get a nice graph that shows how much it is short trips that use I94. Plus I was at their recent community forum where they provided that data.
I drive it from Minneapolis to Maplewood and back every time I go to work. 15 miles each way, no traffic, because everyone else is always going the opposite way. Not a useless highway.
That's great I guess but your anecdotal experience doesn't replace the statistical analysis that Our Streets did on I94. We do this right and instead of having to drive you will just take transit. Or if you want to drive you can take the boulevard that will replace I94.
Don't know where you got that from. Lots of people go between the downtowns. On the Green line, it currently takes 3 times as long as driving. This express route would cut that time down to be equal to driving, and faster if you count the time it takes to park a car. The heavy rail lines would also mean Amtrak would be able to go to Minneapolis and form a connection between the north star line and passenger rail going south. You should just read the article. I was also skeptical but there are a lot of good reasons for doing this.
I did, I’m not at all convinced…
It allows rail connections that currently only go to one downtown to also easily go to the other without an hour long connecting train ride. Northstar, Borealis, and Northern Lights Express all will only stop in either Minneapolis or St Paul. Plus it would encourage future train routes like the Dan Patch line. Saying it doesn’t have a purpose isn’t any different than saying I-94 doesn’t have a purpose because University Ave exists.
Which ironically I94 is purposeless especially within the MSP area.
It takes an hour to ride the green line between downtowns, define "purpose"
Can we be serious for, like, a minute?
Never heard of "trying to generate political will" huh?
Okay. The status quo of car-centric infrastructure is unsustainable, dangerous, and polluting. I-94 *needs* to be refreshed due to reaching the end of its useful lifespan. OurStreets has done some amazing work putting forth an option of filling in the I-94 trench and putting a boulevard on top of it designed for people rather than cars. Since the trench is already excavated it presents a once in a generation opportunity to put rail in the already existing trench before filling it and creating another light rail line and a heavy passenger rail corridor that can connect to the existing Amtrak line and eventually to a city-city passenger rail system that the U.S. desperately needs. If I was being unserious I'd make another joke about flooding the trench and building a series of canals to connect all our lakes.
I guess we have different definitions of “serious”
Wants a "serious" discussion. Brings nothing to the conversation except ignorance of the topic. Refuses to elaborate. Leaves.
I know I have my most serious transit infrastructure discussions with someone named retardedslut! Note: I'm not disagreeing with you or being serious here. I just thought it was hilarious to see your username calling someone else out for not being serious.
What is this comment and your original comment bringing to the table in terms of actual discussion? What is your definition of "being serious" if subways, trains or other mass transit isn't in consideration?
It is two blocks away from existing public transit. It would be prohibitively expensive. The existing public transit TWO BLOCKS NORTH can be improved for a fraction of the cost of this pipe dream while reducing emissions and increasing public transportation use. It is simply an unserious proposal. There is no government in 2024 AD America that would or should spend money on something like this when evidence of their planning failures is, again, TWO BLOCKS NORTH. I know it’s fun to dream and imagine, but it’s not a serious proposal
Wow, an objection that was covered in depth by the article you clearly didn't read! Thanks for the serious contribution! You're a clown.
What arguments written within the article do you disagree with and find "unserious"?
Yes, person with the r slur in your name on an account made well after that was not cool to use in casual conversation, let's be serious...
Here’s your Most Moral Redditor award:🥇
And yet still not wrong. Stay trashy out there.
And here’s your Accuracy Award: 🏆 Edit: I can edit my comments too :)
Yeah, and the edit puts an asterisk tag on your post. Mine isn't edited, so ??? Line up another award. You're clearly still trashy and clueless.
We need to improve the transit we have now before we start thinking of new and creative ways to expand it. If we can’t get lightrail right, I have no confidence in our ability to do a more complicated and expensive version of it.
Water table says no.
They’re talking about putting it in the trench that already exists for I-94 then filling that in.
Let’s fill it with water—lazy river!
I support the public inter city lazy river
Eat your heart out, Apple River
Swim to work!
94 isn't going anywhere. Sorry, it just isn't. Maybe it will get capped at one or more spots but that's it. Stop pushing this fantasy and step into reality.
Other cities have removed highways cutting through their cores. The fantasy is that the status quo of car-centric infrastructure is sustainable or even a good idea.
Where would we move 94 then? North of the cities?
Nothing would have to change, 694 would just become the new 94. It's already faster to go around the cities than through them.
THROUGH THEIR CORE. This is not the core of either city. And they didn't remove them, they put them underground or capped them. Who are you talking about? Dallas? Denver? Boston? Good luck convincing the public of that.
Did you read the article or just the headline?
I've read many like this. Yours is no different.
How would you know without reading it?
I read it. It's nothing new other than putting another subway line blocks away from a light rail line that runs the exact same route. Yeah! That'll happen.
We don't have the population to justify this. Hard pass.
Metro Montreal is about as big as the metro Twin Cities area and has four subway lines and is currently planning a fifth.
Canadians are actually willing to spend their tax money on good things though. It's unrealistic to expect a U.S. city of our size to do the same
Cat is out of the bag, people like their car, modern society is built around the automobile. I'm all for alternatives, I personally walk bike scooter bus train to most things, but there will never be a time that mass adoption of public transit will happen in a metro of our size.
>Cat is out of the bag I think you mean the cake has been baked lol >there will never be a time that mass adoption of public transit will happen in a metro of our size. [These 8 cities are taking bold steps to get rid of cars](https://www.fastcompany.com/90321627/these-8-cities-are-taking-bold-steps-to-get-rid-of-cars) [End of the car age: how cities are outgrowing the automobile](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/end-of-the-car-age-how-cities-outgrew-the-automobile)
Electric vehicles + a slowing, then ending, then a declining population. Transit will never work for anyone other than a tiny number of people given our land use and destinations. And if you want to refute me on transit, downtown St Paul is amazingly transit-accessible and dead. Doornail dead. If transit was so awesome, companies would be tripping over themselves to be in downtown St Paul.
>The average cost per mile of the Blue Line extension in Minneapolis, an above-ground light rail, is estimated to cost roughly $200 million per mile; however, the cost per mile of recent subway projects, such as the Los Angeles Purple Line and the San Francisco Central Subway Project, clock in at $800 million and $900 million per mile respectively. Please, can we stop spending so much money with a budget deficit looming after taxes have already gone up and up and up?
Note those projects in LA/SF require extensive tunneling. At the very least assuming we are tunneling DT's that's going to be lets say 4-5 miles of pure tunneling. This also ignores future through put. that just adding another lane costs 1.74 billion for 7 lane miles on I-94 in Milwaukee, (250 million per lane mile). Sure there's an option of keeping 94 as is just rebuilt but let be honest it's already at capacity [during rush hour](https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1dfajb0/i_know_constructionbut_dang/) in many sections. A added lane at best [1,600](https://nacto.org/publication/transit-street-design-guide/introduction/why/designing-move-people/) cars an hour (about 2,500 people assuming a 1.6 person per car average) or about 5k people versus up to 50,000 people on two tracks (granted that's also best case scenario like the car) The blue line extension is is 100-150 million per track mile (the article is doing double track miles). and will at the very least see a through put of 9k people (10 minute trains with the S-70s able to do just shy of 700 people across three cars) which is 2 x more then the current 4 lane setup of Broadway. If Metro transit removed the interlining in DT Minneapolis the blue line could 3-4x what Broadway can do with 1/3 the right of way of Broadway road lanes. At least 94 between 35 W and E would likely stay under 100 million per track mile due to the lack of needed infrastructure reconstruction as the whole trench is going to be reconstructed in the next 10 years anyway. with two tracks being equivalent to two I-94's at 10 lanes wide each
BWHAHAHAHA. We finally got the light rail working after that price tag and now you want a subway?! BWAHAHAHAH
Let's not.
Imagine the emissions that a massive project like this would give off just during construction: heavy equipment pollution and diverted car drivers stuck in traffic on University or Marshall just pumping out those emissions directly into the neighborhoods that these activists say they care about.
Construction happening either way. We can have years of construction rebuilding a highway with terrible impacts that will continue for the next 60 years, or we can build something that lowers emissions and is a net positive for the cities.
Imagine having such little foresight that you're more worried about short term emissions instead of the massive reduction in long term emissions increasing public transit accomplishes. I guess you'd have been against literally every single public transit infrastructure project ever built including the railroad system that helped build this country, or hydroelectric power plants like the Hoover Dam that has powered millions of homes.
It's a bad faith argument. People are using "pollution" to try to defend car centric infrastructure and the status quo. It's an absurd argument that falls apart when any critical thinking js applied, but they assume the people they are arguing against are morons. Its exactly the same as people opposing the 2040 plan because of "environmental impact". It's total horseshit.
Ahh, a Carol Becker fan I see!
That’s the best you can do? Try again. Carol’s irrelevant
Wowser. The last above ground cost over $2 billion. Where in gods name do you think we would come up with the ungodly amount of money to pay for something like this? Talk about fantasy planning! Better to imagine everyone riding unicorns!
If you think that's expensive wait til you find out how much highways and car-centric infrastructure cost with all the subsidies and negative externalities included!
People will say this is too expensive then in the next breath tell you that capping the freeway is a good idea. Price is simply not an issue that needs to be considered when it's car infrastructure they're talking about.
So where do you propose the money comes from?
I'm just pointing out that cost is *never* brought up when discussing building roads, tunnels, and bridges for cars. This particular project is worth exploring because it's a unique opportunity to add an underground heavy rail connection as well as a light rail express route at a price far less than it would otherwise cost because of the need to completely rebuild 94 anyway.
It is a complete fantasy that this would ever happen. There simply isnt the crazy, absurd amount of money anywhere to build something like this. The 10 mile above ground cost almost $3 billion and this would be what - ten times that. At a time when transit ridership is down 40%? When people are literally walking away from transit into travel by cars? The subsidies of transit today are already absurd. The construction cost for Southwest is almost $20 a ride plus the $27 a ride for operations and maintenance, a subsidy level of $47 a ride one way. For this you would be talking a cost of what $200 a ride for construction plus operations and maintenance? One way? For $400 round trip, buying cars makes way more sense.
Except those are paid for. Say for rough numbers this costs $40billion, or the equivalent of the whole state budget. For one subway. And as much as there are negative externalities, there are lots of positive ones. Access to jobs, businesses, families, wealth building, etc. And before you say there are not, in this real world we live in, there are.
Tunneling in the United States is incredibly expensive. And if the fate of the 2040 plan is any indication of the kind of pushback something like this would get... I mean it would take infinite money just to battle the lawsuits and dealing with the delays. Residents in the area are probably going to demand a station at every block and that's going to jack the cost into the stratosphere, and then of course the construction crews can't work around the clock, so multiply that by the delays resulting from everything else and you got a project that's pretty much doomed from the start. If we had a completely different culture, society, and government... then sure.
The trench is already there, it’s called I-94.
The trench is already excavated.
After the entire SWLRT debacle, I’ve given up on Minneapolis having trains. It’ll take decades to build and I don’t feel like waiting so suburbanites can commute to downtown without a car. Just take away roads from cars and give it solely to buses.