The Met Council and Metro Transit have two problems; both interrelated and neither easily solved. One is the Southwest Light Rail line; four years behind schedule, $450 million over budget and, already, the most expensive public works project in Minnesota’s history.
The other is a ridership decline that’s wiped out all the gains made since the Metropolitan Transit Commission (MTC) took over from Twin City Lines in September 1970. Together, they threaten the long-term future and credibility of transit in the metropolitan area at a time when we need an alternative to automobiles. We’ve seen what cars, freeways, growth and sprawl have done to the environment, and the region, since the end of World War II — nevermore.
In the 1960s I was a fresh-faced twenty-something straight out of the U with grand plans to revive rail transit and the glories of the streetcar and the Twin City Rapid Transit Company. As a kid in the 1940s, my ambition was to work for the streetcar company and, with my grandfather, I rode every line in the system, even managing a tour of the Snelling shops from a company official who coached me to run a streetcar in the yards.
After college, when I eventually went to work for MTC, my boss was a general manager who was running transit systems when I was still in diapers and sleeping in a crib. He helped me shed some of my transit naivete. I can remember friends looking askance when I told them I’d gone to work for MTC. Transit was a “loser.” The numbers said it all.
The Twin Cities system had gone from 200 million annual riders, 900 streetcars and buses, 500-plus miles of track, and five operating divisions in 1946, to 50 million annual riders, and 550 ancient buses limping out of three 70-year-old streetcar-barns-turned-bus-garages. “Why would you want to do that,” my friends asked? I did, and enthusiastically bragged about it.
My first boss, that same general manager, told me these years would be the best in my working life. Fifty years later, I know he was right. There were five or six of us in those early days. My background was history, geography and English. We had a couple math whizzes, marketing types and a graphic artist. They called us “young Turks,” and we behaved accordingly. There were no “sacred cows.” With the protection and encouragement of our boss, we took the system apart.
Great things happened: Twenty years later there were hundreds of new buses, more routes and express services, new shops and maintenance facilities, park-ride lots. The system gained credibility with policy makers and, best of all, the riders came back. The bus system prospered, but rail was slow to make a return. Legislators were skeptical. Even the Met Council and the Star-Tribune were naysayers. The old Minnesota Highway Department, jealous of competition for transportation funding, unless it meant asphalt and concrete, wanted nothing to do with rail.
I did some of the early work on rail, including an operations and maintenance plan but despaired we’d ever see a rail system and went to work for a transit management company. I was wrong. A couple of years later Gov. Jesse Ventura came along. The governor wanted rail and changed some minds. The Blue Line to the Mall of America made its debut in 2004, almost 50 years to the day after the last streetcar ran in Minneapolis. Ten years later, in 2014, the Green Line opened, linking downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Planning and discussions about the Southwest Light Rail Line got started in the late 1980s. The right-of-way was there. I can recall walking it from Hopkins to Kenwood with a transit commissioner. At the time Hennepin County was forming a rail authority and acquiring the land for a pedestrian-bike trail with the long-term goal of using it as a rail corridor which, ironically, it had been for over a hundred years. To this day long freight trains continue to rumble through Kenwood, but the neighborhood, the wealthiest and most privileged in Minneapolis, selfishly wanted none of it and did everything it could to block the construction of a light rail line. There were other routes but, operationally, this was the best.
The opposition continues to this day and led to a number of unfortunate engineering decisions that drove up the cost. It’s why we are where we are. Two years ago, COVID came along and everyone ran for cover. The home to work transit market dried up.
So here we are, an expensive, incomplete light rail line and ridership in the toilet. What to do about it? For sure it will be discussed in the coming legislative session. I’m hoping policymakers stay the course. The region has a lot invested in its transit system. The Met Council should finish the southwest corridor, but do an audit and find out what went wrong and correct it.
The Met Council and the Legislature should, also, hold up a mirror and revisit the need for structural changes to the council and how it does business. Personally, I believe it should be an elected body more accountable to the public. Others disagree. Elsewhere, some are calling for a halt to transit system expansion even ending the commuter rail experiment. That, too, would be a mistake.
COVID changed everything, but we don’t know what will emerge from these changes. It’s time to take a rest and reevaluate where we are, where we’re going, and, then, change accordingly.
John Diers is a Prior Lake resident who spent 40 years working in the transit industry and is the author of “Twin Cities by Trolley: The Streetcar Era in Minneapolis and St. Paul” and “St. Paul Union Depot.” To submit questions or topics for community columnists, email editor@plamerican.com.
