Twin Cities Streets for People

One of the more challenging issues facing Main Streets in Minnesota is situations where that Main Street is also a Minnesota Trunk Highway. For most small towns, the designation of their Main Street as a Trunk Highway is bittersweet. Sweet, because it means the city is probably located along a trade route (or former trade route) deemed important enough for the roadway to be a Trunk Highway, which means that there will be non-residents passing through that may stop and spend money at local businesses. Also because it means there are additional pools of money available for maintenance or improvements to that roadway. Bitter, because it means the City may also have to endure the traffic from folks passing through that have no interest in stopping and just end up speeding through town on their way to somewhere else. Also, it means that the city doesn’t really have control over their own Main Street – the City can’t make any improvements without MnDOT’s approval.

[Edit 1:20 PM- one commenter referred to the Municipal Consent laws that require cities to give approval to anything MnDOT wants to do to a roadway as well. This is important, and establishes a balance of power of sorts. The purpose of this statement is only to point out that if a small town wanted to implement changes to their Trunk Highway Main Street that they believed would improve the Main Street, they are not empowered to do so on their own, and can only do so with MnDOT's approval, which may or may not be obtained, depending on the circumstances and the proposed changes.]

This works out well for some Cities, not so well for others. A lot depends on whether the roadway treats a particular City’s Main Street as a valuable destination, or more of an obstacle that drivers will face on their way between other destinations. Roadway designs often send some pretty clear messages about whether drivers are expected to pass through town quickly without stopping or slow down to interact with the surrounding community. Other times, these messages are subtle. Of course, in all cases, some drivers want one thing, some drivers want the other.

Trunk Highways and Main Streets are an awkward combination, no matter how you look at it. Trunk Highways exist to link destinations, to provide routes for heavy trucks and freight movement, and to provide high-speed mobility between destinations. Main Streets, by definition, are a collection of destinations within close proximity. Main Streets exist to provide convenient access to these destinations. A roadway will rarely do both of these things well. When demands for mobility and accessibility are placed on the same roadway, both sides usually end up compromising, and sometimes, nobody wins.

The City of Ely’s Sheridan Street (TH-1, US-169) is a good example of a “destination” Trunk Highway Main Street, and it has fared pretty well from the situation, in my opinion.

Sheridan Street in Ely, also TH-1 and US-169

I’m not holding up Sheridan Street as a best-case scenario, but I think it is one of the better Main Streets in the State. It’s a two-lane, 30 mph roadway, with permitted parking and frequent intersections (~350′ o.c.), and a relatively active Main Street (even if a bit touristy, and only during the Summer). Traffic here is generally pretty calm. I attribute the good fortune of Sheridan Street primarily to two factors:

1) Ely is an end-of-the line destination simply based on it’s location. If you’re driving on this street, your destination is probably somewhere in or around Ely. It’s not a through-route to anywhere.

2) Traffic Volumes have probably never been high enough to warrant anything else.

But, for every end-of-the-line town on a Trunk Highway that isn’t facing congestion issues, there are probably a dozen other towns in the opposite situation. They are located between two larger destinations, and their Main Street is actively feeling stretched to provide both mobility and accessibility at the same time.

St. Peter’s Minnesota Avenue is an interesting case study of a Trunk Highway Main Street facing a bit of an identity crisis. For some, it’s a lively historical business corridor and traditional Main Street. For others, it’s a frustratingly slow 35 mph zone that forces them to slow down as they travel between Minneapolis and Mankato. For most, it’s probably both, depending on the circumstances. Minnesota Avenue was reconstructed in 2009, and it is often held up as a good example of how Trunk Highways and Main Streets can coexist.

What do you think about Trunk Highway Main Streets? Can Trunk Highways and Main Streets coexist? What do you think are the biggest challenges to these dual-purpose roadways? How can Minnesota or MnDOT improve the policies that govern how these streets look, feel, or operate? Are there any examples of best-case Trunk Highway Main Streets that should be held up as an example to emulate? Any worst-case scenarios? What do you think of the 2009 recent reconstruction of TH-169 in St. Peter?

I received a small bit of money from the University to attend the Congress for the New Urbanism last weekend in West Palm Beach, Florida, which if you don’t know, is a twenty-year old gathering of the architecture and planning left wing. It was a short trip, a surgical strike junket. I was in and out in two days, having delivered an eight-minute talk about my dissertation about bicycles in front of a small room packed to the gills with people I never got to know.

CNU attendees being photographed from a cherry picker.

All conferences are the same, separated only by sartorial subtlety. This one had its own rules too, secret codes spoken by initiates. For example, where I expected to find seas of thick architect glasses, each more outlandish than the next, instead I encountered non-outrageous eyewear, subtle and plain. It was as if the attendant architects had consciously rejected the trademark of their trade. Instead, as befits a group that explicitly rejects futurism and modernity in favor of tradition and history, it seemed like most of the more well-known CNU figureheads sported the traditional WASP uniform of khakis and dark blazers.  Meanwhile, most of the rest of the conferees donned bland grey and navy blue outfits, the intentionally un-noticable uniforms of the bureaucratic urban professions, innocuous yet informally formal.

The WPB convention center.

The Congress occupied about half of the West Palm Beach convention center, filling a hallway overlooking Okeechokee Drive, the main arterial South Florida’s strange social landscape, and the center’s halls filled with displays touting various new urban developments (a new neighborhood in Mobile, another in Arizona) and exciting displays like that of the National Vinyl Siding Institute or another one devoted to form-based codes. Sprinkled in their midst were a few local planning stands, like the display for the West Palm Beach bike share, or for South Florida’s potential commuter rail expansion.

CNU attendees walking on sub-par sidewalks along a West Palm Beach stroad.

My talk was on my ongoing dissertation research, which involves examining different approaches to bicycle planning and advocacy, particularly how different groups try to attract new riders. It was a shorter version of a talk I’ve given before, edited down to its essence: despite lots of good intentions, rates of cycling in the North America are very low. Why is this? To attract new riders we need to build cycling facilities that feel comfortable, and tan accommodate all the different ways and reasons that people ride bicycles. That’s it, though with many more details, photos, clips of videos from my interviews, jokes, etc.

One of the slides from my talk, this one about bike boulevards.

The crux of the talk is about this theory of how people don’t make decisions based on rational calculations about the environment or exercise, or ratios of cost and efficiency. Rather, and I did this in my talk for a hot second, I introduce the concept of “affect”, which is the idea that people act at least as much through bodily habit and non-concious feeling as through intentional decision making. Needless to say, this is kind of a difficulty notion to unpack,which is one of the reasons why my eight minute speech had about as much impact as a dandelion seed.

In a way, though, the idea of affect is perfect for an audience of new urbanists. For all its critics, the new urbanism movement is dedicated to the premise of place, the notion that how a street ‘feels’ is important. The architects and planners in the room last Friday had all gone to great lengths in their professional lives to defend things like decorative brickwork, flower planters, and window shopping, fighting losing battles with the cold calculations that have reduced our urban environment to a series of parking structures and concrete block bunkers. In a way, the difference between a narrow sharrow in a half-guttered bike lane and a Green Wave’d cyclepath is a lot like the difference between a Stroad’ed strip mall and a mixed-use walkable neighborhood: each depends on the importance of cultivating comfort and on building environments that accommodate a wide variety of lifestyles.

That said, there’s definitely a gap within the ‘urban fields’ surrounding what you might call urban theory. On one hand you have the kinds of literatures that interest ‘academics’ – things like affect theory or assemblages or real estate capitalism. Here you’ll find lots of French philosophy, self-contained radicalism, and mystifying jargon. Meanwhile, the busy practical professional education of planners and architects requires its students to spend the vast majority of their lives at work, engaged in large projects or making portfolios all night in their studios. Most architects and planners that I talk with are all-too-rarely able to take a break to read a book or discuss abstract and potentially useless questions like “what is a city?”

Looking back, I might have chosen to emphasize slightly different things. New Urbanism has a lot to offer, particularly because it’s focused on thinking beyond simple functional models of space. Someday, I’d like to have more time to talk and think about what we can learn from the attempts over the last twenty years to build urban environments that make us feel more alive, more human. The quality of the environment isn’t simply the ‘icing’ on the cake of modernist functionality. On the contrary, how a space makes you feel is the cake. That’s all there is! Starting to understand and shape the affective quality of a space is an important step along the way to building good cities.

 

The West Palm Beach bike share system.

I just got back from spending a week in West Palm Beach, meeting with New Urbanists and, together, plotting a makeover and economic revival of America.

My voice is gone and after successive nights of little sleep and 14 hours of travel Sunday, not much stamina either, but I’m left with one thought that I want to share today. It is this: the great strength of the Congress for the New Urbanism is the constant, self-reflecting insistence on improvement that all members seem to hold.

I have spent many years as a member of the American Planning Association and the National Society of Professional Engineers. Both professions have their accreditation process and their gatherings are hostage to the continuing education merry-go-round. APA in particular has a cattle car feel, where you run from session to session to get your credits in law or ethics or whatever you need to check off for that year.

At my very first CNU in Denver, I was confused about why the breaks between sessions were so long. Lunch was often two hours and, even then, the sessions afterward didn’t start on time because people weren’t back. Do New Urbanists just like to eat? No, they have a lot to talk about.

The highlight of my week was a late evening conversation Friday night with mostly NextGen members. We arranged chairs out on the courtyard following a CNU reception and we talked about our vision for the future. What are the big changes that need to happen in America? How do we bring them about? Are we thinking big enough or are we still hostage to some flawed assumptions? It was invigorating.

As I get home then, I receive a link to two videos, one recalling the accomplishments of the first 20 years of New Urbanism. The second reflects on what we did wrong or should be doing better. I can see other professional organizations publicly releasing the first, but can you imagine an organization like the American Society of Civil Engineers releasing the second.

If forced to, their video would go something like this. “What have we done wrong…..well, I suppose we should have made a stronger case for more highway funding.”

This is the stuff that makes me proud to be a New Urbanist. If you’re not there and you think you know these people, I’m going to humbly suggest that you don’t. Plan to be there next year in Salt Lake City and add your voice to the mix.

First + Main Video, Dreams

[Click here to watch]

First + Main Video, Confessions

[Click here to watch]

Strong Towns coverage of CNU 20:

• Day 1, NextGen9

• Day 2, Thursday

• Day 3, Friday

• Day 4, Saturday

• Podcast: Mike Lydon

• Podcast: Jennifer Krouse

• Podcast: Andrew Burlseon

• Podcast: Russell Preston

We’ll be releasing more audio at Strong Towns in the coming days, so tune into our podcast. Thank you to everyone who followed us remotely. Hope to see you all in Salt Lake City in 2013.

The corners in question

Two intersections that I pass on my daily commute offer vastly different pedestrian experiences.  Walking vaguely north-ish on 3rd St N in the North Loop you first encounter 6th Ave N, where despite the stop signs giving priority to cars on 6th over their automotive brethren on 3rd, I experience the most consistent yielding to pedestrians of any unsigned, unpainted crosswalk in the city.  Yet the next block up, at 7th Ave N, cars consistently fail to yield despite the crossing being “with” the stop signs.  Here are a few reasons I speculate may be behind the unusual level of respect at one corner, and the egregious level of disrespect at the next:

A day in the life

• Built form.  The intersection at 6th has 5-8 story buildings planted at all four corners, leading to a sense of enclosure rarely felt in our parking lot-pocked metropolis.  It may be that this atmosphere leads motorists to conclude that they’re in a real city, where rules of pedestrian priority apply.  In contrast, at 7th the buildings are mostly lower, though one corner holds a tall 8-story warehouse that extends the full block to 6th, two corners are populated by 2-story buildings, and one corner has been cleared of all structures so cars can be stored there.  Could it be that this low- or no-rise environment results in an assumption of automotive priority?  Do drivers get distracted by the bright blue sky?

  North Loop living at Scylla Lofts and Charybdis Flats

• Tension and release.  At 7th, motorists coming from the north have just passed from between two 7-story buildings to get to this lower-slung corner.  As sailors have known for centuries and Frank Lloyd Wright introduced to architecture, traffic moving through a constrained area will tend to speed up, and it’s possible that the same principle applies here, speeding cars through to and beyond 3rd St N on the momentum encouraged by passing through the narrow space between two tall buildings.  Of course, as I mentioned above, there are tall buildings at 6th as well, but as 6th is a wider street than 7th, perhaps proportion leads motorists to perceive the buildings on 7th as taller than their neighbors on 6th.
• Street design.  As I just mentioned, 6th (the courteous street) is wider than 7th (the discourteous one), which is an outcome we wouldn’t expect if we follow the maxim Wider=Faster.  These corners also defy the logic of woonerven or shared spaces, as in this case the users are less courteous on 7th, which is not delineated by striping or even very many signs (except for the stop sign).  Strictly speaking, the same is true of 6th, but this street is effectively striped by its patches of asphalt and bare brick.
• Street texture.  Speaking of, I always assume pavement texture affects the way people drive – it seems like adding roughness is a sure-fire way to get people to slow down, and sure enough on these corners 7th is paved with (somewhat) smooth asphalt while 6th has brick pavers – but only on half the street.  On the side of 6th that is paved with asphalt I experience as much yielding as on the other side.
• Street connectivity.  These being Avenues in the North Loop, neither 6th nor 7th is especially connective.  7th extends to just the two blocks centered on 3rd St, although I sort of suspect that that could be a contributor to rude driving – most motorists are only there because they’re lost, so they’re too busy trying to figure out where they are to watch for pedestrians, or else they realize they missed their turn and they’re cruising back to where ever they’re late getting to.  6th is more connective, since it technically extends to Olson Hwy.  It terminates a block north of 3rd, though, and thanks to a combination of a small rise and the 4th St Viaduct, it appears to terminate within a block or so south of 3rd as well.  It’s possible this appearance of non-connectivity cuts down on attempts to cut through, while the actual connectivity discourages the selfish confusion seen on 7th.

  The real dock street

• Street use.  All this analysis may come down to one thing: how the street is used.  In the North Loop, streets have traditionally been used for loading docks.  Both 6th and 7th still have loading docks on them, but while on 7th the truck loads parallel to the street along the curb, on 6th the loading is done perpendicularly, so it’s not uncommon for a semi to stretch across the roadway and leave enough room for only one car at a time to go past.  This would of course be a clue that you’re not on a typical barrel-through-and-ignore-your-surroundings roadway, so maybe a typical reaction is to be more courteous to fellow users.

It seems like for the decades we’ve been pouring money into roads, very few have stopped to think about how design affects the behavior of users.  It wasn’t until the 70s that Hans Monderman in Holland may have been the first to buck this trend and actually put his theories of transport psychology into practice.  The concept of the woonerf is dependent on touchy-feely theories of design or psychology, so while it’s been popular on the continent and even spread to parts of Britain, the American road engineering establishment, the early successes of which depended on a veneer of scientificity, has not been receptive.  Chucking the old familiar signs and stripes may be a radical change, but it’s just as radical to assume that after millenia of engineering and design co-existing and cooperating in built environments, the roadway is the first human structure that has no need of design.  So you may not agree with my observations and conclusions about these particular corners – and if you don’t, or have something to add, please do so in the comments – but I hope you agree that the field of transport psychology needs more attention.

The Minneapolis Bike Coalition has put forward their preferred design for a redesigned Park & Portland (for background on these streets, see here and here).  Full disclosure: I helped with the street rendering. From the Bike Coalition blog:

Key features:

• Remove a traffic lane that isn’t needed. The core of this proposal is transforming one of the car lanes into space that adds to the neighborhood, pedestrian, and bicycling environments. Park and Portland are both currently three lanes in each direction; yet, they carry no more than 13,000 cars a day at any point (and much less at most points). Basically, that means that there is one wasted car lane. It’s not needed to move cars. Have you noticed that there is never any congestion on these roads except periodically where cars are turning? It’s not your imagination! These roads were built before there was an Interstate 35W, and there simply isn’t the traffic demand to warrant 3 lanes each. With a 11 feet of extra space to play with (the width of one of the traffic lanes), there is plenty of space for transformation!
• Move the bike lane to the right side and use the parked cars as a protective buffer. The existing 5-foot left-side bike lanes are not a very comfortable place for most cyclists, and there are common safety problems where drivers turn left. We propose moving the bike lane to the right–where drivers have come to expect cyclists to be. And we propose moving the bike lane between the curb and the parked cars. This is similar to the bike lanes on 1st Avenue North, although this would be much better. There is more space (when we take the lane), so there can be a wide bike lane and an adjacent buffer zone to prevent worries about dooring from the parked cars. Well-designed parking protected bike lanes in other cities have drastically increased biking and improved safety. To greatly reduce the likelihood of drivers parking in the bike lane, we’d strongly recommend using flexible posts to clearly separate the bicycling area. Note that we recognize that intersection treatments will be important to successfully implementing such a design safely–intersections have been done well elsewhere and they certainly can be on Park and Portland.
• Provide planters on the right side of the street to extend pedestrian realm. One of the challenges with providing parking protected bike lanes on Park and Portland is that there is an existing 6.5-foot wide concrete edge on either side of the road that isn’t in great condition and would mean a rough bike ride if there were bike lanes there. While the road is being repaved this year, repavings do not include concrete area, so it will stay rough. We propose getting around that while greatly enhancing the attractiveness of these roads by using the right-side concrete area as a place for planters. A lot could be done with them–they could become community garden space, or just have flowers. They could also be removable if the County prefers to take them out in the winter to ease snow maintenance.

Benefits:

• Greatly improved bicycle environment that would attract more cyclists
• Traffic calming
• More green space and potential community garden space
• Reduced pedestrian crossing distances because of the planters

Another year of 30 Days of Biking has come and gone. In addition to miserably failing to tweet regularly, I missed a few days of riding while I was traveling on the east coast. All the same, for me, this was the best year of 30 Days of Biking to date.

For folks who haven’t heard of 30 Days of Biking, it’s a joyful community of bicyclists that commit to riding their bike every day for the month of April and then sharing stories on twitter with @30daysofbiking or using the hashtag #30daysofbiking. Since its inception in 2010, 30 Days of Biking has grown to a worldwide community of cyclists numbering in the thousands. This group of cycling supporters embodies many of the things I love about the Minneapolis urban scene. They play off of the social nature of our Midwestern city by mixing the spirit of adventure with a challenge.

And here’s what I really love about this idea: These are real people. Just like me. Just like you.

Just a few of the photos uploaded by 30 Days of Biking participants

By participating, we’re asked to remember the joy in and of bicycling –a simple ride around the block counts for just as much as a 50 mile ride! I was reminded daily why I started bicycling in the first place. I relish feeling the wind against my skin, getting to know my neighbors, exploring the urban environment, and staying healthy. Bicycling is a sure fire way to experience your city streets and feeling connected to this community of cycling supporters reinvigorated my work as a cycling advocate.

This year I can say I sincerely experienced 30 Days of Biking. Though I missed a few days, I did try. A few times I had to be creative to fit in a ride. I went on short rides during my lunch hour, rode on a stationary bike, and while traveling I tested out Washington DC’s bike share system. When I returned to Minneapolis, I marveled at our city’s on-street cycling infrastructure like I was seeing it again for the first time. One morning, entirely too early, I was overjoyed to see dozens of cyclists on the Midtown Greenway. I tested new ways to commute to the Northeast Ride office on Central Ave. and biked out of the city to put some good miles on my legs.

In an uncharacteristic move, I only took a few photos during 30 Days of Biking. But, they were during a sunset ride along the Stone Arch Bridge, which is pretty much as Minneapolis as it gets.

Next year’s goal: Actually tweet about it…  :-)

Though the automobile-highway system is mature, and we will not be building any significant mileage of new highways in the Twin Cities, does that mean we should build none?

Connectivity is important, more connected cities are more efficient (at least to a point) from a transportation and economic productivity perspective.

When I was young and imagined becoming a planner, I believed planning was about drawing lines on maps (i.e. creating plans). Of course you could not just put them anywhere, you had to finesse constraints (budgets, the built environment, the natural environment, and so on). But I liked drawing lines on maps, connecting A to B, finishing the unbuilt. I later learned planning was not nearly so fun.

The reason we have now reached the unfun stage of line-drawing is probably that all the “good lines” (and some bad ones) have already been built. If the political and economic benefit:cost ratio were high, someone already did it. If the ratio were low, no one did, and no one would.

Yet there may be some remainders, perhaps projects with good ratios that somehow went missing. Over my time in the Twin Cities, I have seen reference to the following. I am not suggesting any of the links below have B:C ratios above 1, just that some people believe they do. The number of possible links is enormous (and in some senses infinite, but in practical terms, simply very large).

Freeways

There are two significant new freeway sections proposed for the Twin Cities:

• Stillwater Bridge – Many cuttlefish have died discussing this facility, and I will say no more here.
• Mn 610 – This route north of Maple Grove does not yet connect to I-94, as has been planned since at least the 1960s.

Missing Freeway-Freeway Ramps

• It is well known by locals you cannot travel directly on I-94 Westbound and go to I-35W Northbound, or from I-35 SB to I-94 EB. (Mn 280 will get you there.)
• It is similarly well known you cannot go from I-94 EB to I-35E SB, or from I-35E NB to I-94 WB. (Ayd Mill Road does not quite serve the purpose).
• The new I-494 US-169 interchange will also miss some ramps.

  For example, if you’re headed south on 169, there will not be an exit to go west towards Eden Prairie on 494.

  Additionally, if you’re headed east on 494, there will not be a ramp that takes you north on 169.

  “Highway 212 to the west is what motorists tend to use to make those movements,” explained Grand.

Water Crossings

• North of the Twin Cities a new Mississippi River crossing has been proposed by MnDOT to connect US 10 with I-94.

Railroad Crossings

• The Grand Rounds is the name for the Parkway system in Minneapolis, Southeast and Northeast are not yet connected, but proposals to do so have been put forward, and would upgrade 27th Avenue and extend across the railroad tracks to Industrial Blvd.
• Just to the west of that, Oak Street Extended would also cross the same railroad tracks. This is discussed in the plans for SEMI, which also discuss Granary Road and the east RR crossing that would become part of the Grand Rounds.
• Van White Boulevard a road extension that will in which “two bridges that will carry the boulevard over two sets of railroad tracks, a city public works yard and the Cedar Lake Trail.”
• E River Pkwy extension from the University of Minnesota to St. Anthony Main.

Freeway Crossings: Griddus Interruptus

The freeway system in the Cities did a number on the existing grid network. For instance on I-94 between Lexington and Snelling Avenues, the city grid (N-S) includes the following streets (Lexington, Dunlap, Griggs, Syndicate, Hamline, Albert, Pascal, Simpson, Asbury, and Snelling (~ 10 streets per mile)). Only Snelling, Pascal, Hamline, and Lexington actually cross I-94. (There is also a pedestrian bridge at Griggs.) Similar patterns on the other freeways can be found.

This pattern is typical on the trenched freeway system crossing the old urban grid, and would be different had the freeways been either tunneled or elevated.

Building Crossings

• Nicollet Avenue is interrupted by an undistinguished K-mart at Lake Street. The city hopes to restore Nicollet to its original glory.

New Semi-separated Roads

• Granary Road (sometimes Granary Parkway or Dinkytown Road) would run in the famous Dinkytown Trench and connect the St. Anthony Main area with the SEMI redevelopment area. It could provide major relief to University Avenue (and potentially allow University and Fourth to be restored to two-way traffic. It is still under discussion.
• Ayd Mill Road has been proposed for many years to extend to I-94. This aims to solve one of the missing freeway connection problems (I-35E N to I-94W). It is opposed by neighbors.
• Pierce Butler Route is an east-west route in St. Paul just south of the Railroad tracks. There are proposals to extend it to the east and discussions (mostly negative) about the idea to extend it to the west to Mn 280, though extending from Transfer Road to Vandalia may be possible.

Land Crossings: Griddus Nobuildus

The suburbs in Greater>>MSP have largely retained the 1 mile spacing from the original rural grid, but the interior grid, which gives block spacings of on the order of 0.1 miles in the Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul (and many first ring suburbs such as Richfield and Bloomington) is nonexistent outer ring suburbs like Woodbury or Eden Prairie. Some suburban blocks are transected, others remain much more naturalistic in their form (though, to be fair, there are apparently rules about interconnectivity, so that most suburban homeowners have multiple paths to the arterial network and I have not seen a full square mile block as a pure tree or multiple pure trees). As the built density is lower than in the Cities, one would not expect the same street density, but the connectivity is lower than the density would suggest.

Comments

N.B. I have not seen a complete catalog of Missing Links for the Twin Cities. (Adam Froehlig has a great resource here that you should look at if you are interested in the topic, including details on cancelled projects, as well as other fantasy routes.) This list is not complete either, but will serve as a starter.

Please add other items of seriously proposed and not canceled routes (with references) in the comments. Fantasy lines are welcome too, but please label as such.

Caveat: This post is descriptive, it describes some missing links in the Greater>>MSP street network. It does not suggest any or all should be built, though I encourage debate on that in the comments.

Caveat 2: This post does not cover upgrades, links that exist but might be “improved” (widened, grade separated, etc.) or realignments.

WalkScore's calculated 30-minute bus/rail travel shed for downtown Minneapolis

Almost all of us are guilty of living sprawling lifestyles, either now or in the past. Sprawl is a huge urban planning problem, but it’s a difficult one to handle simply because it’s so prevalent. There’s little will to change when everyone shares part of the blame, but we must find ways to do so in order to help deal with the challenge of climate change and changes in the cost and availability of energy sources.

Finding ways to deal with urban/suburban sprawl isn’t helped by the fact that it’s difficult to define in the first place. Sure, city dwellers deride the suburbs for their common cul-de-sacs and curvilinear streets, but even the scale of our central cities is pretty vast—Minneapolis itself stretches 11 miles north to south, a distance which would take 3 to 4 hours to traverse on foot. Saint Paul is almost as wide east to west. By bicycle or public transportation, that would typically take an hour to 90 minutes, about three times the average one-way travel time for a car commuter in our area.

I’m sure it happens all the time: A car commuter grows weary of his or her commute, but is confronted with a stark reality when they look up the bus journey on metrotransit.org or a mapping site—The trip will take 3 to 4 times as long as it would by car, if it can be done at all. The reaction is often to blame the bus or the train. Clearly something is wrong with the system!

Well, sort of. It’s true that public transportation can and should be sped up and expanded, but there are some inherent limits to the technology. A bus or train running at the same top speed as a car will never be able to reach the same end-to-end speed because of the number of stops made in between. The only ways to get public transportation to be competitive for end-to-end travel time is to increase the top speed, leapfrog over potential intermediate stops, and/or make extensive use of exclusive transitways to bypass congestion. Each of these has trade-offs, such as increasing expense, reducing potential ridership, and sometimes taking property through eminent domain.

Sprawl is the real reason why it’s often impractical to switch a car trip to a train, bus, or bike ride. Most of us make daily demands of our transportation networks that are illogical (and sometimes those demands are made by others upon us). If the car never came along, our cities would be much more compact. People would most likely still travel about the same amount of time each day to work, learn, or shop, but transportation through slower methods would have limited outward growth and encouraged building up rather than out.

Travelers to cities outside the U.S. often remark about how fast and efficient transit networks are in other countries, but in reality, they’re often not any faster than what we have here. In reality, they’re simply seeing the effects of a more compact geography, amplified by the fact that tourist attractions are also centrally-located a lot of the time. There isn’t just a greater population density, there’s also a greater density of places where people want to go.

Twin City Rapid Transit route map from 1914

The same used to be the case here during much of the streetcar era. While the Twin City Rapid Transit system famously extended from Lake Minnetonka in the west to Stillwater in the east, the core of the system barely extended past the borders of Minneapolis and Saint Paul themselves. In an accident of history, the borders of he core cities roughly correspond with 30-minute travel times to the respective downtowns.

Now, the car is never going to go away, and many people will fight long and hard to keep their hands on the steering wheel. However, I’m convinced that they’re at or near a peak in this country and will become much less popular in future decades. Fuel prices will rise and the everlasting push for safer and more efficient cars will keep making the vehicles themselves more expensive. Along with direct costs are moral and ethical issues—externalities ranging from direct and indirect pollution from CO2 and other pollutants, altered landscapes in places like the Alberta tar sands, and violence and economic impacts on people elsewhere in the world. Changing over to renewable energy sources will help, but it’s unlikely to cover our current needs.

Moving away from car-based transportation requires us to shift our population around and change where we place businesses, schools, and other amenities. In the Twin Cities, these shifts almost certainly have to be toward the core of our region, because Minneapolis and Saint Paul themselves are much more walkable, bikeable, and transitable than anywhere else, and that’s where the existing and future investments are most sustainable.

30-minute bus travel shed for a job site in Eden Prairie's Golden Triangle

Some suburbs will certainly see improved transit mobility in the future, but job and population centers are so dispersed that a transit system that attempted to serve all of them would probably collapse under its own weight. Some communities are going to have to get by with minimal transit access and instead build more exclusively around the idea of getting around on foot and by bike. Pick a spot and turn it into a real town center.

We’re going to go through a Big Crunch as car ownership rates decline and more people seek out transit-rich environments that have jobs and the amenities of daily life in close proximity. The population won’t tolerate trip times tripling or quadrupling in length, so communities out on the edge must plan to become denser and more connected, or they’ll be left behind as populations move elsewhere.

There has been a lot of discussion across the internet lately about how we’re digging ourselves into a financial hole by overspending on infrastructure that isn’t very productive. Chuck’s post a few days ago called Paved with good intentions is a good example. For the purposes of this post, let’s just assume we agree with Chuck, and that something needs to change in the way we view infrastructure.

As many of our bridges continue to age and the list of bridges that need repaired or replaced continues to get longer, at some point, we should consider whether or not all of our existing bridges are worth replacing. I think most people would agree that there are probably a few bridges out there where the replacement costs are simply too great to justify the expense, but how do we determine which ones? This is a difficult discussion to have, in part because for every bridge that I might consider removing, I can think of two others that we should consider building (for example, why have we never constructed a France Avenue extension over the railroad tracks to Lake Street?). Removing a bridge will almost always be unpopular with the neighborhood, but inherent in this discussion is the understanding that we’re going to have to make difficult and unpopular decisions.

The Stillwater Bridge immediately comes to mind as a candidate for removal simply because of the unusually large replacement costs, but I’ll leave this case study for others to consider.

Instead, here are some of my ideas about a few local bridges:

Cedar Avenue Bridge (over Lake Nokomis), Minneapolis

Cedar Avenue over Lake Nokomis

The Cedar Avenue bridge over Lake Nokomis (map) was dubbed Planning Blunder #9 by Streets.mn authors Bill and Alex. This bridge is a clear example of a roadway that went over when it should have gone around. In hindsight, I think nearly everyone would agree that if we could start over, we’d make a different decision about this bridge. But now that it’s in place, does it make financial sense to remove it? From an engineering standpoint, traffic could certainly be re-routed west along a reconstructed Nokomis Parkway with a few intersection and signal improvements (which would actually allow the City to tackle a few longstanding traffic, parking, and design issues they’ve had around Fat Lorenzo’s – hello improved outdoor dining area!). This would probably be cheaper than replacing the bridge, but it would be close. This would be an interesting case study to develop some firm numbers for.

Midtown Corridor Bridges

A few years back, the City of Minneapolis conducted a study of the couple dozen bridges spanning the Midtown Greenway. The purpose of the study was to determine the historical significance of the former freight rail trench and the bridges that cross it. Given the purpose of the study, it’s not surprising that bridge removal was not recommended, although it’s significant that the study considered it briefly. The study recommended reclassifying some of the bridges as bike/ped bridges in an effort to buy some time before the bridges would need to be removed or replaced. This is a good idea, but it doesn’t really solve the problem. Eventually, bridges will fall under their own weight even without loading. I don’t think the City has made any final decisions about whether these bridges will be removed, replaced, or reclassified, but a historical designation would surely give them fewer options. The impact of removing (rather than replacing or reclassifying) some of these bridges is not fully known. Since many of these bridges carry only a few hundred vehicles per day, it’s hard to justify the $1.8 million replacement cost. A few of these bridges are probably some of the best candidates out there for full removal.

60th Street Bridge, Sunfish Lake

The 60th Street / Acorn Drive / Pieper Road bridge over I-494 between Inver Grove Heights and Sunfish Lake is hard to justify by nearly any criteria (map). The bridge leads to a cul-de-sac in Sunfish Lake that serves only about 8 (not-as-expensive-as-you-would-think) homes. This is not a short span bridge, and there are at least a half-dozen feasible alternative ways to provide access to these residential properties that doesn’t involve building a bridge. This bridge probably carries less than 100 vehicles per day. RUMOR ALERT: I remember hearing at some point that the owners of these 8 homes had privately funded the bridge, but a quick Google search doesn’t provide any documentation of this. If anyone can confirm or deny this, please let me know by leaving a comment. Privately funded or not, this bridge seems unnecessary (at least, as long as Acorn Drive is a residential cul-de-sac).

Minnehaha Parkway Bridges, Minneapolis

This example hits close to home, literally, since I live a stone’s throw from the three bridges over Minnehaha Creek within a few hundred feet of the intersection of Portland Avenue and Minnehaha Parkway (map).  The three bridges – Portland Avenue, 50th Street to the west, Minnehaha Parkway to the east – seem redundant. When I tally up the number of roads (including frontage roads), and the number of intersections that exist within a two or three block area, it seems like with a little bit of careful planning we could eliminate at least one of these bridges and still allow all these roads to intersect. In this case, however, it may not be economically feasible to do so, even if the neighborhood was supportive. These bridges have very short spans and are also very low (maybe 10′ above creek level?). These will be some of the least expensive bridges to replace (and they have the lowest risk of causing injury or harm if they collapse), so we might find it would be less expensive to simply replace the bridges than to figure out how to effectively remove them.

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These are just a few of my ideas, but I’d like to hear some of yours. Which bridges do you think are the least productive? Which are the least essential? Which are the most expendable?

Nice Ride bikes in the scenic North Loop.

We finally have the report on SAFETEA-LU’s Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program! The FHWA released the report today, and it is now available to all for their delight and edification (PDF).

This final report has been being promised since 2009 or so, with delivery dates being pushed later several times. This report has been of great interest in the transportation debate, since transportation enhancements are viewed as expendable. The report suggests otherwise, looking at 4 very different communities (Minneapolis, Marin County CA, Columbia, Missouri and Sheboygan, WI).

Key outcomes of the NTPP include:

• Average increases of 49% in the number of bicyclists and 22% in the number of pedestrian trips between 2007-2010.
• In 2010, an estimated 16 million miles were walked or bicycled that would have otherwise been driven –  32 million total driving miles were averted between 2007 and 2010.
• For the four pilot communities, bicycling mode share increased 36 percent, walking mode share increased 14 percent, and driving mode share decreased 3 percent between 2007 and 2010. In Minneapolis, bicycling mode share increased by 33% and walking mode share increased by 17%.
• The pilot communities saved an estimated 22 pounds of CO2 in 2010 per person or a total of 7,701 tons. This is equivalent to saving over 1 gallon of gas per person or nearly 1.7 million gallons from 2007 to 2010.

Per the FHWA, 89% of program funds were spent on infrastructure in all 4 communities; in the Twin Cities, that number was 87%. Other funds were spent on education and bike parking. Of these capital projects, most are in some state of incompletion.

Twin Cities projects evaluated include:

• Network gap closures on Marshall Avenue in Saint Paul, Como Avenue in Saint Paul/Minneapolis, and Minnehaha and 20th Avenue South in Minneapolis.
• Road Diets on Franklin Avenue and Minnehaha Ave and 20th Ave South.
• NiceRide Bicycle Sharing and the Sibley Community Partners Bike Library.

In general, the report is mostly unbiased, but has flaws. As a pilot program, solid ways to measure every statistic is a work in progress, and not every metric has solid data. Data collection was not explicitly funded, and thus was done in part with reserved program funds in each community. The means of measurement varied in each community and project. The statistics can certainly be attacked, and almost certainly will be attacked — although the attack may be less based on the math, and more on ingrained notions against spending money on transportation enhancements.

Given the delays in delivering this report, it’s hard to believe that additional communities will get similar investment moving forward — at least in the current transportation and funding environment, which is definitely focused on pavement and silly bridges, rather than projects that encourage density and environmental progress. However, the data may serve as a lever to preserve transportation enhancements at least as a fractional percentage of budgetary spend. In the meantime, even in places like Minneapolis, everyone may need to expect smaller-scale projects that cost less for a while.

[V150 train, modified TGV, conventional World speed record holder at 357.2 mph from WikiCommons]

The following post is by guest writer Matt Sindt, a recent graduate of the Hamline University School of Law who has worked in both state and local government, serving as a staffer on both the Business, Industry and Jobs Committee, and the Economic Development and Budget Committee of the Minnesota State Senate.

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The benefits of a High Speed Rail (HSR) system have been hotly debated across the political spectrum in the U.S. for decades, especially in the Upper Midwest, but developments abroad have brought the ages old struggle into stark relief. Over the last decade, China has built a modern HSR system that can reach 220 MPH. China has invested over 300 billion dollars on HSR. This investment has allowed the Chinese to drastically abbreviate travel times between their major cities.

China’s rail program should make us consider whether or not such a program should be instituted in the U.S. The main reasons the U.S. should invest in HSR are jobs, conservation, safety and comfort.

The debate over building an HSR line in the Upper Midwest has been going on for over 20 years. The discussions have focused on what would be the best route for a new passenger rail line between Minneapolis and Chicago. The Tri-State II report listed two general options; one passes through Winona, MN, the other through Rochester, MN. Recently, the French national rail company (SNCF) published a report with a route through Hudson, WI. This allows travel to Eau Claire, WI rather than to La Crosse, WI as with the majority of domestic proposals. The advantages of the French proposal are obvious since their route is approximately 25 miles shorter than the La Crosse route. The route is also more attractive because the Eau Claire Metropolitan Area has 73,000 more people than the La Crosse Metropolitan area.

There are reasons why a Rochester line is preferred. The Mayo Clinic is considered an international destination and the metropolitan population is fairly sizable at 186,000. The Tri-State III report proposes a line running through Rochester. On a practical level, their plan is inferior because travel time would be 191 minutes rather than 162 minutes. The ultimate failure of these local planning reports is that they rely almost exclusively on existing infrastructure that is at least 50 years old.

Reliance on old infrastructure is bad enough but they also plan to share the infrastructure with freight trains that by their very nature frustrate the purpose of an HSR system. What is the use of having a train that can go 220 MPH if it spends half of its time stuck behind a freight train going 55 MPH? It is for this reason that dual, dedicated tracks must be built, grades lessened, and super-elevators (cants) installed to make the system function to the extent of its abilities. Whenever its practical to use and modify disused or abandoned rail lines this should be done to lower costs, but new lines should be built when necessary. This option is more expensive but provides superior service.

The national conversation began in earnest when in 2009, the Obama administration solicited bids for five regional high speed rail networks. The five networks included lines in: California, Texas, Florida, the Mid-West, and the East Coast. In response to this invitation, SNCF put forth a highly detailed bid. The French plan called HST 220, called for the use of AVG train-sets which are capable of reaching 220 MPH.

SNCF’s bid is a good place to start the discussion in order to provide somewhat specific notions of what cost, service, jobs and other benefits and liabilities would be incurred in such a massive undertaking. The total estimated cost in 2009 dollars for four out of five lines was $140 billion. Amtrak announced plans in 2010 for 220 MPH HSR service on the east coast corridor connecting Boston and Washington D.C. for a total cost of $117 billion. Adjusting for inflation, the total cost of all five projects would be approximately $270 billion. While a highly significant sum it is not astronomical since the annual federal budget in 2012 was $3.796 trillion. The annualized cost of all five projects combined would be less than 0.5% of the federal budget. All public investment will be paid back based on profit estimates. The SNCF plan estimates a 15 year payback cycle while Amtrak estimates 20 years. The two estimates combined calculate that 2.1 million full-time temporary and permanent jobs will be created over the 30 years.

The continuing volatility in the world’s fossil fuel based energy sector is a threat not only to the environment through oil spills and global warming but also because of the instability it causes our national security. As demand increases and supply declines over the next few years and decades, crude oil prices will continue to rise. These increases will exacerbate the already precarious financial position of the American airline industry. Providing a viable alternative in high speed rail would allow for a dramatic decrease in the number of short to mid-range commuter flights. A significant decrease in the number of commuter flights would lower demand for jet fuel and therefore lower the price of fuel making long-haul flights more profitable. The SNCF estimate alone yields a decline in annual fuel consumption equivalent to .2% of America’s fuel consumption in 2010.

Because HST’s are powered purely by electricity renewable resources may be used exclusively. Even using the USA’s current fossil fuels, SNCF claims that their HSR lines would reduce the amount of pollution by 4.4 million tons over the first twenty years.

HST’s are far safer than both automobiles and airplanes. Over 50 years of service throughout the world, high speed trains have a fatality rate, measured in passenger miles traveled per fatality, that is one-sixth of the rate of commercial air-travel throughout the same period.

Additionally, high speed trains routinely provide 7 more inches of seat pitch than American commercial airlines do. This is the international industry and government standard for defining seating area. Seat pitch more or less correlates to legroom. More legroom allows for more comfort and a better travel experience for passengers.

A parallel in US history to this project was President Eisenhower’s decision to build the Interstate Highway System. In much the same way as HSR could be used, a European model was adapted to American use. During WWII, Eisenhower observed the speed with which German troops could be deployed using the autobahn. When he became President he created a federal highway system to allow for the efficient transfer of troops in short order. This lead to decades of American prosperity. Eisenhower was a man of extraordinary vision who grasped the inherent possibilities of a truly interconnected stream of commerce that would not only ease traffic but foster it as well.

For over a decade, America has been mired in a prolonged economic decline. That is why a leader with a bold vision would propose a nation-wide system of federal HSR lines. The Presidency’s executive authority should be utilized to provide for centralized planning of projects, purchasing of equipment in bulk, and uniform quality control throughout the system. This would prevent interference by parochial interests in state and local governments from frustrating the purpose of the project. The overarching purpose is to improve connectivity between markets, decrease our national dependence on foreign oil, decrease pollution, lower travel costs, and ease travel congestion, and save lives by substituting a safer form of transit.

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Guest Writer Profile: Matt Sindt is a recent graduate of the Hamline University School of Law who has worked in both state and local government, serving as a staffer on both the Business, Industry and Jobs Committee, and the Economic Development and Budget Committee of the Minnesota State Senate.

Join Streets.MN on Twitter and Facebook (you can also add us to your RSS Feed). It’s a great way to join the conversation about land use and transportation in the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota.

How can a country that is so wealthy be in such enormous debt? How can a country that can build such marvelous transportation systems not find the money to sustain them? How can a people that enjoyed decades of unrivaled economic hegemony — staggering levels of growth beyond anything seen in human history — be facing such economic turmoil after a couple years of, not even decline, but just slowing growth? The answer to these questions reveal some uncomfortable truths about who we are, how we got here and what options we have for our future prosperity.

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I’m struck by how strongly our culture associates growth and prosperity with highway construction and expansion. Tom Friedman, a respected left-of-center columnist with the New York Times, had an entire chapter in his most recent book, That Used to Be Us: How America fell behind in the world it invented and how we can come back, devoted to the concept that “our winning equation” is, in part, to invest in infrastructure and then watch prosperity flourish, just like it did in the 1950′s and 1960′s.

Of course, this ignores that fact that our investments during the first generation of America’s Suburban Experiment (1950-1975) were higher return investments that generated a lot of positive cash flow. I like to point out that, when we built the 35W bridge here in Minnesota for the first time, it connected far flung areas of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan region in a way that had not been done before. Following that investment, new commercial real estate was developed, new residential housing went in and the resulting influx of tax receipts made us feel wealthy. When the bridge fell down and had to be rebuilt, we didn’t experience all that new growth, just the costs of construction and delay. Maintenance has an entirely different set of financial metrics than new construction.

Which is why our transportation spending is set up to favor new construction. It is just so much more fun. Maintenance is simply a pain, a local concern. That highway fix it project means nothing but congestion and delays and, when it’s all done, all you have is a little smoother ride. By contrast, new construction is so much better. Not only do the politicians get a ribbon cutting scene, but we can all (once again) “solve” congestion while getting a new WalMart, Taco Bell and Quiki Mart in the process. New growth just feels so much better.

How else can you explain what I experienced last week in Memphis? Here is a city with enormous infrastructure maintenance problems having spent untold sums running highways all over the region. Their local transportation board is proposing the region spend $10 billion more, almost all of it adding new capacity on the far flung (new growth) extremes of the network. Maintenance? That’s someone else’s problem.

How else can you explain a state (Minnesota) that would prefer to spend more on one bridge to aid exurban commuters from the neighboring state than on maintaining all of the state’s 1,149 bridges that are currently rated as structurally deficient? We culturally believe in the power of new growth to solve our problems, that investments in highway capacity and combating congestion pay dividends to us as a society.

Unfortunately, we base this belief on the illusion of wealth that was created in the early years of the Suburban Experiment, where the first life cycle of horizontal expansion had produced growth for our economy and that pesky overhang of maintenance was still a decade or more away. We should know better by now, but there are few in a position to change the system that don’t benefit, at least in the short term, from it being perpetuated.

The emperor has no clothes, indeed, but we’re still in the phase where we jeer and deride the one pointing it out. That will change soon.

What will speed up that change is an understanding of the fact that our transportation investments are not creating wealth, they are destroying it. Now I’m not talking about just the investments where the old Target store at the old interchange is induced to move into the new Target store at the new interchange four miles up the road. I mean almost all of our highway spending. It costs more to build and maintain than it generates in returns and, therefore, will only continue so long as we have the capacity and the desire to delude ourselves.

Let me provide an example. Pretend you were a local elected official and I came to you and said that I had a project that would reduce congestion, allow us to improve traffic safety, create local economic development opportunities and return 2,194% of the cost of the project to the local economy? Sounds good.

What if I then said that the federal government would pick up 90% of the cost, making the local share just $716,000? This is now a no-brainer, right?

Today let’s just look at the federal contribution. I did a Google search for a Diverging Diamond enhancement project with a cost benefit analysis and came up with this one from Kentucky. Yes, I have an obsession with the delusion that is the diverging diamond interchange, but the selection of Kentucky was just random. The report for the project contains an appendix that has a cost benefit analysis as follows:

You can see that by the time you get to 2030, for the diverging diamond without the added enhancements, the cost is $7.2 million but the benefit is nearly 22 times that at $157 million. That is an AWESOME rate of return. Graphically, it would be presented to public officials like this, which makes it easy to understand why it could be supported.

At this point, we’re not going to delve too deeply into what this benefit is. That will come later. Let’s give it the most optimistic spin. Nobody is suggesting that this is money that will pour back into the government. What is being suggested here is that transportation investments like these will reduce congestion, increase mobility, create jobs and that will all grow the economy. So the $157.1 figure could be thought of as the increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Still sound good? Consider that the federal government — through all means of taxation, including income tax, tariffs, business taxes, estate taxes and even including the gas tax — currently captures 15.8% of the economy. Put another way, for each dollar of GDP, about sixteen cents finds its way to the federal government. That means that our whopping $157.1 million in GDP growth only returns $24.2 million to the federal coffers. Graphically, it would look like this.

 

Okay, this still feels like a good project, doesn’t it? The Federal government spends 90% of $7.2 million and, over the subsequent 15 years, brings in $24.2 million. We should just do this over and over again because we’re just getting richer, right?

Not so fast. It is not like the $24.2 million is going to be spent on transportation, or even that $7.2 million of that is going to be spent on transportation. The Federal government does many things, has tremendous obligations and spends the vast majority of its funds on things that our society deems more worthy of our investment than transportation. In fact, in 2011, the Federal Highway Administration’s budget was 41.1 billion, just 1.07% of the Federal budget. If we are only going to spend 1.07% of what we bring in on transportation, that means this project yields just $259,000 in funds that actually pays for transportation investments.

 

If the problem here is not obvious to you at this point, let me elaborate. We spend money on transportation. We feel wealthy and experience this enormous “return” (more on that in a second). Only a fraction of that wealth is actually cycled back into the system, however, and an even smaller fraction of that will actually be captured to pay for the project. The amount recouped is ultimately nowhere near the amount invested.

The most obvious “solution” to this problem is to devote more of our Federal budget to transportation projects. That would be the solution of the American Society of Civil Engineers and their adherents in the Infrastructure Cult. Okay, let’s not bother calculating the time value of money (the fact that the costs are today but the benefits are spread out over many future years), but just evaluate what it would take in terms of an increase in our budget to go from $0.26 million returned to break even at $7.2 million. That increase — 27 times the current budget — would make the Federal Highway Administration’s budget $1.1 trillion, bigger than the national security budget ($895 billion), Social Security ($730 billion), Medicare ($491 billion) or Medicaid ($297 billion). That’s not going to happen.

So what if we just raised taxes and the federal government captured more of the wealth generated by this improvement? The calculations reveal that the Federal government would need to increase its take of GDP from 15.4% to 19.8% of the economy, a tax increase of $640 billion with all that extra money devoted just to roads. Only the true socialists and/or the true believers in the power of the Suburban Experiment will think that is a good idea.

Now let me drop the bomb I’ve been alluding too: Those “benefits” that we kind of think of as prosperity, wealth or GDP; they really aren’t. There are derived from a set of narrow correlations between time saved and prosperity that we witnessed in the early 1950′s when we built those initial highways. We connected these far flung places — places only served by railroads or poorly constructed roadways prior — and we saw all kinds of economic gains. We then used that knowledge to build equations to justify expansion of the system. Nobody ever questions those equations today (why would they) and nobody stops to consider the diminishing returns of the system.

So there is not actually any money here, just a few seconds of saved time here and there that economists and engineers equate with money when they are trying to justify a project. Do you take home more money, generate more wealth for the economy or spend more of your income when you can arrive at work 45 seconds more quickly? Not me either. These equations are a joke. (If you want to learn more, read our 2010 series on Costs and Benefits.)

So when I say we are going broke, that this system provides the illusion of wealth in the near term but ultimately destroys wealth, that the decay you see around you in our transportation system is not due to a lack of investment but to the lack of financial viability of the system, you can get a sense of how far gone we are. We are literally operating in a totally different paradigm from reality.

When someone like James Howard Kunstler says we need to rebuild our passenger rail system, that the highway era is a transitional phase that is going to come crashing down on us, we all smile and nod to his face and then giggle behind his back because “that guy is a little crazy“. Like I said earlier, the emperor has no clothes, but we’re still in the phase where we ridicule the guy pointing it out. We need to get past that. Quickly.

Yes, this is just one project, but I picked this project because it is a low cost, high return endeavor. That is the argument that the engineering profession is making and one of the reasons people got so mad at me when I did my earlier posts on the diverging diamond; the diverging diamond makes better use of existing infrastructure and pays a high return, especially when compared to things like adding another lane or building another interchange. Even so, the math on it is ridiculous. Imagine what the math on a project like the infamous St. Croix bridge would be.

In a follow up post I’m going to look at the original construction of our passenger rail system and show how important capturing value to pay for capital costs is to making transportation systems work as well as how such a system naturally resists excessively ridiculous spending, or at least creates systems that break early enough to avoid catastrophe. In the process, I’ll explain why funding the highway system with gas tax dollars was flawed but also why continuing to fund it with deficit spending is perilous. I’ll also, if needed, address any engineers (or those sympathetic to them) that want to argue that we shouldn’t look at the revenue for a single project because it’s the system, dude, that generates the prosperity. Yeah, how’s that working out?

The time to shift our focus to building Strong Towns is now.

 

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In an undated photo from the HC Library, Herman Olson makes a convincing case for tearing it all down and building a freeway

Once upon a long, long time ago, Minneapolis didn’t have any neighborhoods.  Well, of course the city had neighborhoods, but they were the sort of organic shorthand referring to important intersections, like Cedar-Riverside or Chicago-Lake, you know, the kind of place that in the old world would have been called a square and given its own name.

In this amorphous pre-neighborhood era, all planning was handled by a grumpy old man named Herman Olson.  He spent his time thinking about where to put public markets and how to cram more cars into the downtown, but no one really put much stock into his recommendations, because no one could remember why he was qualified to say where stuff should go except that he had worked for the city for decades.  Since the City had plenty of other employees who’d also worked there for ages, Olson was frequently ignored.

And, in the late 50s, he was finally replaced.  The colleges of the day were churning out urban planners and giving them a scientific veneer and an interest in something called comprehensive planning, and Minneapolis received a typical product by the name of Lawrence Irvin.  No one really knew what comprehensive planning was, but the new planners were very insistent on doing it, and they got cracking by working on the Official Plan that was to be published in the fall of 1960 and to be heavily dependent on the concept of neighborhoods.

The earliest introduction to Irvin’s conception of neighborhoods that I can find is in a document with the amazingly dated title Minneapolis in the Motor Age, basically a book-length argument for why we need to subvert our lifestyles to accommodate cars.  He* starts with the reasonable observation that streets can “unify or divide related activities.”

Blobs are the answer

The idea that streets can unify or divide seems a platitude when you consider that depending on placement, any physical object can unify or divide any number of other objects.  So it’s a pretty big leap when on the next page Irvin declares that one of the “functions of importance” of streets to land use is to “provide a means to define Neighborhoods” (emphasis in the original).  What he’s after is the consolidation of vehicular traffic onto arterial streets, and he uses a cool chart to attempt to portray the severity of the problem of car-choked side streets:

Not too different from today

Irvin goes on to explain that arterial streets should not go through communities and neighborhoods because neighborhoods and communities “must not be divided by major physical features in such a way as to prohibit effective internal circulation” (emphasis again in the original).  Besides its circularity, this argument is notable because, in the midst of a document that proposes building wider and faster roads to accommodate the needs of the motor age, Irvin is acknowledging the ways that roads actually inhibit mobility.  But hey, he comes up with a far out map of a “hypothetical” community to illustrate his point:

North Anywhereville

Finally, Irvin drills down to the level of the neighborhood, sketching a almost kibbutz-like concept that can “support”  (he probably means justify) an elementary school and a park within a half-mile walk, includes a few stores but “separate[s] residential and non-residential districts.”  There’s a conceptual neighborhood drawing, too, but greyscale this time.  It shows street concepts like cul-de-sacs, diverters, and “safety walks”, but the only text about streets in neighborhoods is the now-repetitive admonition to route “Major streets around, not through the neighborhood” (emphasis yet again in original).

No room in the budget for industrial brown?

After using all those pages and three full colors to illustrate his concept of communities and neighborhoods, Lawrence Irvin did not yet see fit to actually unveil how it would apply to the actual city.  After reading Minneapolis in the Motor Age you know you’re not supposed to route arterial streets through neighborhoods, but where are the neighborhoods you need to avoid?  Luckily Irvin didn’t wait long, as a couple months later The Official Plan – the city’s first comprehensive plan – was published, and included a map of communities and neighborhoods.

As you can see (if you squint enough to make sense of my terrible scan), Irvin came up with something pretty similar to today’s neighborhoods.  Note that the commercial intersections that heretofore had been the only differentiated points on the map are excluded altogether from the shading that denotes neighborhoods.  Despite the somewhat elaborate setup in Minneapolis in the Motor Age, the neighborhood boundaries weren’t Irvin’s creation but rather mostly reflected contemporaneous attitudes in the planning field.  They certainly had little to do with Minneapolis’ history as a streetcar suburb, and in many cases reflected an aspirational conception of which streets would become arterial (consider the extension of 36th St across South Minneapolis, despite the fact that it is only intermittently a collector east of Bryant and creates awkward boundaries near Powderhorn Park, later rectified).  In fact these aspirations created conflict with other city departments, specifically the transportation department.**

The plan came up with two stated purposes for inventing these neighborhoods – to serve as a conveniently small unit for planning and to be a platform for “citizen action” – that they were to fulfill in the major zoning overhaul that Irvin was shortly to launch, and they still fulfill them more or less to this very day.  And that is how the neighborhoods got their shapes.

City of parkways and freeways

 

*Irvin had a staff that was actually writing these documents, but it’s more convenient to my narrative to attribute it to him – and anyway, he as Director approved the plans.

**As told by Alan Altshuler in his classic The City Planning Process, which I’ve leaned on heavily for the outline of this history

Cross-posted to my blog, Getting Around Mpls.

In the future, robots will create retro-futuristic drawings for us

Much has already been written on the robot car, but streets.mn’s own Bill Lindeke posits that they “will not save us“, citing three problems.  While I agree that we probably can’t be saved (from what exactly I can’t say, there are many options), but in my opinion Bill and other urbanists should welcome the robot car with open arms, or at least, tentative waves.

As I do with each post I write about robot cars, I must begin with two items of preface: 1) I believe the benefits of robot cars will outweigh their drawbacks, but I have reservations about their implementation (not necessarily the concept), and 2) no post about robot cars should neglect to include a link to Brad Templeton’s Robot Car website, who is, as far as I can tell, the grandfather of writing about robot cars on the internet.  Now that that’s out of the way, on to the meat.

In this post I want to respond to the three problems Bill sees with robot cars.  Next time I’ll posit some benefits of robot cars I think he may be overlooking.

Problem #1 – The Automobile System Complexity/Equity

The massive number of cars involved – over 254 million registered – means that any new technology is going to take a long time to get implemented across the country. Think of all the old clunkers on the road. Think of all the cars that don’t receive proper maintenance. They aren’t going away. This doesn’t include the uninsured unregistered cars, which according to some estimates, are16% of the cars on the road and rising dramatically every year. There are cars in my working class neighborhood that are literally held together with duct tape, or where the windows are plastic sheets.

All these facts mean that any change to the US auto system that’s as fundamental as the robocar revolution will not happen quickly or neatly or evenly….Not only will this pose problems for the promise of robocars, dramatically reducing many of their efficiency and safety gains, it will create a deep divide within the social geography of our transportation system. It’ll be a lot like at airports, where you have different lanes for business travelers and the masses. It’ll be like the difference between limos and bus stops.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Bill here, but I don’t agree that this is a problem.  Robot cars will be incorporated into the market slowly.  They will initially operate in mixed traffic and you probably won’t even notice them.  Yes, this will reduce their potential safety and performance benefits (no road trains will happen for a while), but each additional robot car will reduce the likelihood of accidents and increase the opportunity for fuel efficiency and road system performance.  I also think Bill overstates the equity case.  Yes, at first only the rich will have robot cars.  But the rich were the first to have anti-lock brakes, air bags, navigation systems and other safety features on cars.  As technology gets cheaper, more people will have robot cars and the roadways will become safer.  Robot cars also benefit people besides their passengers, because they can more effectively avoid crashes.  Like a pedestrian airbag, the adoption of robot cars by the rich will benefit people besides the rich.

Robot cars may or may not be given separate facilities.  For many years, I think they probably won’t, they’ll just operate in mixed traffic.  Once subscription robot car-sharing services become available, I imagine they will be given special treatment (access to carpool lanes, etc), but why not?  We give these advantages to other transit and carpools.

So robot cars may not “save us” because they’ll take a long time to implement and require special infrastructure.  To the latter I say “they won’t”.  To the former I say, “maybe”.  70 percent of cars are probably replaced after ten years, which isn’t that long in infrastructure terms.  If Bill wants a more cost-effective mode of transport for “the masses”, he should hail the coming of a subscription car service that frees people from the debt, insurance and maintenance costs associated with parking your own individual jalopy outside your house.

Problem #2 – Liability

As Bill correctly points out, in our litigious society, we need someone to blame when robot cars go bad.

But what happens when you take that driver away, and let them start to doze off or read the newspaper or surf the web? Who’s responsible then when something goes wrong? Sure, in a robocar society, accidents will be greatly reduced.

But they’ll still happen! (And, this is what none of the dozen or so robocar articles I’ve read don’t bother to mention.) Something will go wrong. With 200 million cars and millions of other changing variables, something will always go wrong. Nobody who’s ever seen the “blue screen of death” or the “spinning beach ball of stasis” can possibly disagree. (What happens when a robocar system gets too old, and doesn’t get maintained? What happens when a small part breaks, and nobody notices?)

Bill posits that a solution would be something akin to a air traffic control network for automobiles, and he imagines the enormous cost and complexity of this system.  But Google and others have already demonstrated that no centralized air traffic control network is necessary.  Driverless cars can operate in erratic human traffic without any central controller, and have already done it for hundreds of thousands of  miles with no accidents.  To use another airplane metaphor, robots have been landing our planes since the 1960′s.  Yes, there will be accidents.  Brakes can only stop a vehicle so fast, even if a computer is pushing the pedal.  Sometimes computers will have software problems.  But as with automated airplane landing systems, there will be redundant computer systems, and they will be tested and retested to make them safer.

If I had to answer the question today about who will be ultimately liable in the case of a catastrophic robot car crash, I’d say the manufacturer.  As with any other consumer products, they will maintain some liability for the safety of their product.  I’m confident we can figure out a solution that works logically and equitably.

Problem #3 – The Solution That Has No Problem

Finally, Bill says that the future is now (!) and we don’t even need any stinkin’ robot cars.

Maybe the robocar is a solution in search of a problem. If the problem is that our current road system is unsafe, unhealthy, bad for the planet, and incompatible with new technological norms, there are two roads before us. The first is to develop highly complicated new technologies that will “solve” the problem. While I’ve wary of the complexity of the situation, I’m not saying we can’t do this. Computers are amazing, the US is the wealthiest country in the world, with the best engineers and software designers you’ll find on planet Earth.

But for the cost of a single backup camera, you could buy someone a really nice new bicycle. For the cost of a single robo-interchange, you could implement a system of safe and comfortable bike lanes all through an entire city.

This is just one example of the road less traveled. If we go down this road, we start reducing our dependence on technology. Instead of robocars, let’s build cities that privilege people. Instead of thinking about ever more complex ways to depend on the automobile, let’s start thinking beyond it. To me, that’s a visionary future. It might not be as shiny, and it might not be up there with the Jetsons or Norman Bel Geddes’ Futurama, but it’s far more equitable, practical, and affordable than the robocar alternative.

I don’t think Bill’s roads (shouldn’t that be sidewalks?) are mutually exclusive.  We could certainly do a lot more to make our cities more livable, leverage all the benefits of simple, cheap solutions like the bicycle and decrease our dependence on the car.  But we should still encourage and welcome the age of the autonomous vehicle.  We aren’t going to be rid of cars or something like them for a very long time, and I don’t think that’s even the right goal.  Robot cars are not a panacea for what ailes our cities and planet, but implemented properly, I think they can bring many benefits that Bill might like.  And that’s what I will explore in the next post.

The Grand Avenue "student dwelling" where I lived for a few years after college. I paid $200 / month for a tiny bedroom. Because I was dead broke, it was practically heaven.

On the whole, universities are a great thing for cities. They’re like modern day factories. They generate many economic benefits, providing jobs, attracting young people, fostering “innovation”, and other  cultural linkages and synergies. Without its schools and universities (The U, Macalester, St. Thomas, Augsburg, St. Catherine’s, Metro State, and more) the Twin Cities would well on its way to becoming an irrelevant elderly backwater.

But universities also generate tensions, particularly for the areas surrounding campuses. These “town/gown” issues are familiar to anyone who’s ever lived in a near a college. Complaints over hegemonic institutional expansion, student noise, or density are as old as Harvard. The latest such battle happens to be in St Paul surrounding the University of St Thomas, a medium-size, private, historically Catholic University located in one of city’s nicer neighborhoods (right near the fancy homes along Summit Avenue and the Mississippi River). St Thomas has become the flash point for a really interesting battle over student housing.

The issue dates back a few years. Some time ago, particularly during the real estate bubble, homeowners near the school noticed increasing numbers of homes being converted from “single family” homes into homes occupied by university students. The way I understand it, sometimes a student’s parents would buy the home and let the student rent it out to some of their friends. Other times, a landlord would buy the home and rent it out to students looking for affordable housing near campus. Either way, homeowners started complaining to their City Council Member, who eventually passed a temporary “moratorium” on new student housing pending a city study to be presented to the Planning Commission. (Note: I am a member of the St Paul Planning Commission as of January.)

Presently, the issue revolves around St Thomas student behavior, and the idea that students inherently cause problems. As the city staffer explained it the public presentation, there are many lifestyle differences between the “typical family” and a home of students. While a typical family house has 2 adults (with 2 cars), a student house has 3-4 adults (with 3-4 cars).* Likewise, in a typical family house the “comings and goings are at regular hours,” while for a student house the coming and goings “are more likely to have a schedule of later nights.” Finally, there is the issue of alcohol and merriment, which should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a college film. Everyone who lives anywhere near St Thomas (or near any university) will have a story to tell about something stupid happening.

After the moratorium was passed, the city has finally completed their study:

The city's process.

 

The final proposal by the planning department involves a “student housing neighborhood impact overlay district,” which would do two things never done before in St Paul or Minneapolis. First, it would define student dwellings: a “student” is an “individual who is enrolled in or has been accepted to an undergraduate degree program at a univeristy, college, community college, technical college, trade school or similar.”

The city has never tried to “keep track” of students before, but will to begin doing so, in order to identify  ”student dwellings”, or  homes “in which at least one unit is occupied by three or more students.” (From my understanding, this would involve actually going door-to-door and asking people if they are students or not.)

Second, the overlay district requires that any new student dwelling be at least 150 feet from the next student dwelling, creating a buffer between student-occupied homes. In theory, this would spreading them out through the neighborhood, making the experience more tolerable for neighbors.

 

The map of student dwellings, according to two preliminary studies.

 

The planning commission is hearing public testimony on the overlay district at the next meeting on May 4th. But in even just releasing the  study for public comment, there was debate over the potential impacts of the ordinance. As described in the Highland Villager, some commissioners (myself included) raised questions about whether the study was rushed,  the “grandfathering in” of existing student homes, about pushing students farther away from campuses, bad north-south transit, and the lack of student participation in community processes. It became clear that the city is acting more quickly on this process than they normally would for something with such broad impact.

As I’ve thought more about this issue, the proposed ordinance appears troublesome within the larger context of the Twin Cities. As reported in a few different places this month, we have some of the lowest rental vacancy rates anywhere in the country. Rental housing is difficult to find, and very expensive. Meanwhile, proposed apartment developments (particularly in areas with single family homes and/or political connections) are fought by neighbors. Any developer attempting to increase density must prepare themselves for a contracted battle over parking, noise, property values, blotting out the sun, or general agoraphobia.

On top of that, restricting rental housing in favor of “single family”  lifestyles doesn’t fit with long-term demographic trends. Check out the MetCouncil’s latest report. For decades, demand has declined for traditional nuclear family homes. More people are single, and people have fewer children. Empty nesters want smaller simpler housing options. Traditional single family homes are not the future of the Twin Cities, and we should think twice about placing blanket restrictions on density.

For me, though, the main issue is whether or not it’s ethically acceptable to legally limit where a certain types of people can live. Just because students are an “unprotected class” who are “generally transient” (as the city planner informed the commission), doesn’t mean they’re not equal citizens, and aren’t entitled to the same rights as anyone else. The whole thing reminds me of some of the more shameful moments of US urban history, things like restrictive covenants and redlining. There’s no way that we would single out a group of people according to race, class, religion, or sexual orientation, limiting where they could live. Why is it OK to do this with students?

I’m all for the enforcement of noise ordinances, and the city should be working on issues of housing maintenance (e.g. trash in the yard, height of the grass, etc.). I just don’t think the city should be involved with policing people’s lifestyles. Should St Paul be a city where going to sleep at 10:00 is written into the city code?

These issues aren’t just a problem for St Paul either. Neighborhoods around the University of Minnesota are  notorious for opposing students. The Marcy-Holmes neighborhood association has some very strict restrictions on who can participate in their community meetings, and the Prospect Park neighborhood has gone to great lengths to attempt to control where “density” will be built along University Avenue.

As a former and current student, and as someone who has spent years teaching undergraduates, I know that most undergraduates are worried about their future. They’re taking out big loans, and the last thing they need is higher rent located farther from school. Meanwhile, students are an easy target. They don’t go to community meetings, and if the Voter ID amendment passes, they’ll find it difficult to vote.

At Streets.mn, we’re trying to figure out ways to create better urban environments, to foster a city with a diverse commercial corridors,  good transit, street life, and density. It’s not helpful when apartments are expensive, restricted, and difficult to obtain. If rents here are the same price as rents in Chicago, how many potential Twin Cities young people are going to opt to stay? How many young, creative people will leave the Twin Cities behind, in search of a city that doesn’t zone their lifestyles out of existence?

 

 * Incidentally, I’m not sure that the assumption about cars is true. The large majority of my graduate student colleagues do NOT own automobiles. Most undergraduates probably don’t have cars either. Lots of students take the bus, bike, or walk to where they’re going. And that’s really good for cities, for transit, for density, for healthy lifestyles, etc. The proposed ordinance would seem to make it more difficult for people to choose a car-free lifestyle.

The City of Minneapolis is promoting Streetcars in a number of corridors, including one in North along Broadway to compensate for the rerouting of Bottineau LRT to avoid North. Promoters of Minneapolis Streetcars, including Mayor R.T. Rybak, are engaged in magical thinking in their assertion that streetcars will have transformative effects.

Famously, Minneapolis and St. Paul saw their streetcars bustituted by 1954, and many mourned their loss. But Minneapolis and St. Paul were not alone. Streetcars were obsoleted worldwide. We don’t go to London to visit their famous double-decker streetcars (at least not since the 1920s). We don’t see them in New York or lots of other world cities. There are reasons for this.

Streetcars are overall a less effective means of transportation than buses.

That is, centrally-powered steel wheels on steel tracks in the middle of traffic are less efficient across most dimensions than self-powered rubber tires on streets in the middle of traffic.

Oh, I can see the streetcar advocates foaming to say why streetcars are better:

• They have lower operating costs for both energy and labor per passenger and lower emissions
• They have a smoother ride
• People know where they are going
• Developers believe in their permanence, and will make commitments. As the Oakland promoter says ” Unlike buses, streetcars have had a measurable impact on property values due to their permanence, connectivity, and marketability.”

Let’s go at these in reverse order.

The simple fact that after 1954 there were no more streetcars in the Twin Cities belies their permanence. Yet on almost every former streetcar route, today we see continued bus transit service indicates that it is the service that is permanent if the demand is there, not the physical instance or particular technology. We can further look at the built form of cities which have made significant commitment to bus rapid transit (Ottawa, Curitiba) to see evidence of development following the service, not the technology. BRT of course is more comparable to LRT if it runs in its own right-of-way. Arterial BRT is more like streetcars. According to a report published by the Transportation Research Board, the link between land development and streetcars has not been substantiated by empirical evidence. Most of the evidence that does exist comes from project promoters or advocates, who obviously have a stake in the outcome.

In the 1880s and 1890s when the first generation of streetcars were built, they provided a huge increment of accessibility over competing modes (walking, horse). Today, they provide no increment of accessibility over cars and buses. They allow no one to get anywhere faster than before. The entire argument rests on qualitative improvements.

The navigability problem with streetcars is solved by the oh-so-attractive wires in the air and tracks on the ground, which tell you where the service is going. Buses on undifferentiated blacktop have no such obvious signals. In one sense this is correct, Twin Cities buses are not obviously navigable, and I have railed at this before. But again, this is easily solved with better signage, and more importantly, tall lights with “T” on them as in the adjoining images from Vancouver and Stockholm, lights which can be seen from several stops away.

The ride quality issue I think is more one of new infrastructure than of streetcar infrastructure. In the waning days of streetcars, people praised the new buses (presumably on relatively new streets, for from what I can tell, almost nothing in Minneapolis has been resurfaced since the middle of the last century) for their ride quality.

“Clang, clang, clang” went the trolley “Ding, ding, ding” went the bell “Zing, zing, zing” went my heartstrings For the moment I saw him I fell

“Chug, chug, chug” went the motor “Bump, bump, bump” went the brake “Thump, thump, thump” went my heartstrings When he smiled, I could feel the car shake

He tipped his hat, and took a seat He said he hoped he hadn’t stepped upon my feet He asked my name I held my breath I couldn’t speak because he scared me half to death

“Buzz, buzz, buzz” went the buzzer “Plop, plop, plop” went the wheels “Stop, stop, stop” went my heartstrings As he started to leave I took hold of his sleeve with my hand

And as if it were planned He stayed on with me and it was grand Just to stand with his hand holding mine All the way to the end of the line

The Trolley Song speaks to the smoothness of the ride. For a young romantic, even a bus can be idealized. For the regular commuter or the harried shopper, bump, bump, bump is far from romance.

The operating cost question is partially correct. Clean electricity powering a streetcar will save energy and reduce environmental impacts compared to a diesel, or even an electric, bus in traffic. We do not have clean electricity (yet) in the Twin Cities in general, so while the energy claim may remain, the environmental one is weak at best. The labor argument may also hold if you have a long streetcar that carries more passengers per driver than a bus. Germany has double-decker buses that hold 128 passengers (wikipedia), while streetcars by Skoda hold 157 (wikipedia), as with all things, it depends on configuration, but it is not the knock-out punch. And it is only critical on routes with that level of demand, at times with that level of demand. And if to achieve that demand, you lower frequency, you are worsening service.

Offsetting the operating cost advantage is the major capital cost disadvantage. Buses can effectively free-ride on streets paid for out of property and gas taxes, while streetcars are responsible for their own tracks (and BRT on exclusive right-of-way similarly are responsible for their own pavement). Does the $100 or $200 million dollars spent per line garner any new passengers? Are the existing passengers qualitatively better off in a way that they would actually pay for? Is the trip any faster? If the service is indeed better, it should be able to charge a premium and retain its customers.

Further offsetting this is scale economies. We have, and will long have, lots of buses. At best we will have a few streetcars. The buses will have lots of people working on them, a collection of spare parts, expertise, and so on to keep them maintained efficiently. Streetcars will, especially at first, be rare, without the library of spare parts, without the staff maintenance expertise, and without any of the other advantages of buses. Either costly redundant vehicles will need to be provided, or the system will be “out” more frequently than buses. The Twin Cities in the last decade has invested in two new rail technologies (commuter trains and LRT), neither of which are cheap. A third seems to add to the system complexity with few advantages.

Like magicians, streetcar promoters are engaging in diversion and distraction, attributing all success to streetcars and covering up the mistakes. The benefits of streetcars are illusory, the costs are real.

The Twin Cities does like its toys: new stadiums, trains, convention centers, and the like are the most egregious examples. If money were free, this would not be a problem. Where I live, money is not free.

View UMN intercampus streetcar line in a larger map

Many people in the Twin Cities are familiar with the University of Minnesota bus transitway connecting its Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses (the latter actually being in the suburb of Falcon Heights). Since the 1990s, its exclusive access has allowed buses to shuttle quickly between campuses—parts of it also get used by buses to the Minnesota State Fair each year.

There was also a piece of dedicated track for getting to the St. Paul campus by streetcar between 1914 and 1954. A special “Inter-Campus” route shared track with the “Como-Harriet” streetcar line between Minneapolis and Saint Paul, though there were private extensions to reach each campus.

Students boarded at the traffic circle at Pleasant Street and Pillsbury Avenue on the Minneapolis campus, and the streetcar headed north on 15th Street to reach Como Avenue, which it followed until reaching Eustis Street in Saint Paul.  The line then turned north along Eustis before heading east at what is now Idaho Avenue in the small suburb of Lauderdale. From there, track was laid in an exclusive right-of-way which ran just north of Folwell Avenue to reach the campus. Streetcars ran along the south edge of the agricultural test fields before curving around the east side of campus and ending up near today’s St. Paul Student Center.

The line was unique among streetcar routes in the area because had a connection with the freight rail network and was used for small deliveries to the St. Paul campus, including coal for a campus power plant. The connection was a short piece of track which ran west of Eustis (across what is now Minnesota State Highway 280) to connect with the Minnesota Transfer Railway (now the Minnesota Commercial)

The Inter-Campus line was one of the last two streetcar routes in operation in the Twin Cities, and was replaced by buses on June 18, 1954.

Some remnants of the old private right-of-way still exist, though it is deteriorating. The main pieces still visible include a retaining wall, a staircase coming down from Folwell Avenue, and a few old concrete platforms for former stops. (Unlike today’s transitway where there aren’t any intermediate stops, the streetcar line did make stops along the way.) Here’s a slideshow of photos I took there a couple of weeks ago: