Twin Cities Streets for People

Getting that Old Transit Religion

Slowly, Minnesotans are catching on to the new realities.

By Steve Berg

For a while in the 1980s, Minneapolis was nicknamed the Minne-Apple, a droll reference to locals' New York-like passion for theater and other artistic pursuits. But in planning terms, the Twin Cities area has always more closely resembled Los Angeles than New York.

Doubt it? Just take out your road atlas and compare the metro maps at the back of the book. Look first at eastern cities like Boston and Philadelphia, where the freeway spokes parallel commuter railroads and river valleys. Look next at western cities like Denver and Dallas, which also grew along hub-spoke patterns. Minneapolis and St. Paul look nothing like any of them.

The closest match is Los Angeles, which has no sharply discernable center. Like L.A., the Twin Cities scrapped an extensive street railway system in the 1950s and built freeways on a giant grid that made the downtowns irrelevant. The freeways ran in straight lines, ensuring that the car would be king.

But change is in the air. Minnesotans are finally beginning to accept the reality that the era of auto dominance is ending. There's no better sign of that than last year's dramatic legislative passage, over Gov. Tim Pawlenty's veto, of the state's largest ever transportation bill. The measure included a sales tax hike to expand the metro area's lone light rail line into a full-blown transitway system with rail and rapid bus options.

The first commuter rail line will open this year, and a second light rail line is expected in 2014. Others will follow. But the fight has been long and harder than anyone imagined, given the cities' reputation for good planning.

Sprawl capital

In planning circles, the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area has long seemed to do everything right. In 1967, the state legislature created the Metropolitan Council of Minneapolis-St. Paul, which used its powers over sewer extensions to guide suburban growth. Later, in passing a "fiscal disparities" agreement to share tax revenues, the council proved to everyone the advantage of pooling metropolitan area resources.

For years, local residents generally felt immune from the crime, poverty, and failing schools that beset other older northern cities. When those problems finally surfaced in the 1980s and early '90s, pushing tens of thousands of middle-class families to the suburbs, the shock was palpable. The Met Council struggled to cope as sprawl leapfrogged beyond its original seven counties and as the six new metro counties (two in Wisconsin) declined to join the regional planning enterprise.

By the late 1990s, the Twin Cities ranked among the nation's fastest sprawling areas, as measured by the Brookings Institution. Between 1982 and 1997, the region added urbanized land at more than double the rate of its population growth. Traffic congestion grew faster than any place except Atlanta, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. With the Twin Cities metro population expected to grow from three million in 2001 to four million by 2025, it became clear that something had to be done about transportation and land use.

Other metro areas with similar problems had begun to act a decade or two earlier, beginning with Portland's growth boundaries and light rail system. San Diego, Sacramento, St. Louis, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City had all made a commitment to light rail. "What happened to you?" asked G.B. Arrington, then head of Portland's transit system, when I visited Oregon in the late 1990s.

What happened was political and cultural paralysis.

In denial

Even as the Twin Cities suburbs became the state's most potent political force, suburbanites were ambivalent about issues like traffic. Many residents had roots in rural areas and preferred to think of their suburbs as independent places, not part of an interconnected metropolitan area. Many considered transit a social service for the poor, something only for big cities. To put it bluntly, many residents seemed to be in denial about their own metropolitan geography.

The whole topic was bound up with politics. Candidates vowed not to raise taxes for transit, forestalling any progress on the issue. Even many progressives associated with the region's vaunted civic and business leadership — the Citizens League, for example, and the newspaper editorial pages — campaigned against light rail as an unnecessary, inflexible, and too-expensive version of the bus. The petty rivalry between Minneapolis and St. Paul didn't help, either, as the cities fought over the potential location of a rail line. Efforts by rail advocates failed repeatedly to overturn a 1985 legislative ban on rail transit in the state.

Compounding the problem was a smug, exceptionalist attitude embedded in the Minnesota culture. To some, other cities' success with light rail was seen as irrelevant to its workability in the Twin Cities. Critics scoffed at the idea that rail transit could more efficiently reshape development. The term "smart growth" was so ridiculed that proponents stopped using it.

For years, the lack of consensus paralyzed the Met Council's transit agenda, but things improved in 1998 when the council chair, Curtis Johnson, decided to back light rail. To make any progress at all, he says today, "we had to do something dramatic, and rail brought the kind of impact to change the public mindset."

That same year, the unexpected election of Jesse Ventura, the wrestler-turned-governor, gave rail a bigger boost. Although hardly an urbanist, Ventura loved trains and vowed to begin building a light rail system, starting with a line running through the old south Minneapolis neighborhood where he grew up. To accomplish that task, he tapped Ted Mondale, son of the former vice president, to chair the Met Council.

Unlike his more timid predecessors, Mondale was an aggressive politician who openly advocated smart growth and forged a coalition of environmentalists, business leaders, and progressive municipal and county officials from both parties to work for a sustainable metro area. A light rail line from the International Airport and Bloomington's Mall of America into downtown Minneapolis was key to the strategy.

The proposed Hiawatha Line would run 13 miles, mostly along a corridor reserved for a freeway that was never built. In 2000, after a tumultuous campaign, during which the line was ridiculed as a "choo-choo to nowhere," the state legislature passed the project over protests from opponents, including Gov. Pawlenty, who was then leader of the state house of representatives.

"It was not an intellectual discussion," Mondale recalls. "It was a political fight. It was war."

The $715 million line opened in 2004, with double the expected ridership. Since then, more than 8,000 housing units have been built along the line, although the financial meltdown of recent months has taken a toll. The signs are the craters and empty lots of two dozen abandoned condo projects in downtown Minneapolis. Dozens more are on the drawing boards, ready to proceed.

Even with the Hiawatha line's popularity, additional lines have been stymied by the lack of a funding stream. Unlike Denver, Dallas, and other cities, Minneapolis-St. Paul was trying to build a system one line at a time, posing a disadvantage in competing for federal matching funds. The feds preferred dealing with cities that had money lined up.

'Whoever pays controls the system'

Last February's legislative initiative paves the way for a new system. A quarter-cent hike in the sales tax will allow five of the seven inner metro counties to build — and to govern — the new "transitway" composed of light rail, commuter rail, and bus rapid transit lines. The emphasis on governing is important because it shifts power away from the Met Council and toward the metro counties.

Why the shift? Because the Met Council, while planning additional transit lines, never agreed to pay for them. As an arm of the governor's office, the council carries out a governor's policy. If that policy prevents transit funding, then lines don't get built.

"They were just lines on paper," says Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin, the principal strategist behind the Twin Cities' transitway effort. "If we [the counties] are going to supply the money," he says, "then we should control the system."

On a white drawing board on his office wall on the 24th floor of the Government Center in downtown Minneapolis, McLaughlin has plotted the evolution of the transit lines over the last 12 years. "I'm tickled with the progress we've made," he says. "We're very close to having a system."

Regular bus service will remain under Met Council control, although funding is in doubt. Bus operations are expected to run a $40 million deficit this year despite a boom in ridership and a recent fare increase. Now a political fight is looming over whether to poach money for buses from transitway construction coffers.

"There's a line of thinking that we need to slow down transitways and shore up the bus system," says Peter Bell, the current Met Council chair. Bell also worries about a lack of geographic balance on new rail lines. Market forces dictate that most lines will be built in the West Metro (Minneapolis), which could lessen support for the new tax in St. Paul and the east. It's the curse of rivalry.

A live-work-shop world

In spatial terms, the proposed transitway network lays a new hub-and-spoke pattern over the freeway grid. The idea is to offer a choice to commuters — both in travel and in neighborhood type. Auto-bound suburbs will remain tied to the freeways. But the transit spokes and hub will become a parallel universe — a live-work-shop world where the need for cars is minimized. At least that's the vision.

"There are huge shifts taking place," says Bell. Traditional two-parent households with children have declined to about one-fifth of all metro households. Attached housing constitutes more than half of all new construction. Infill development is gaining popularity. The downtown residential population is rising. Most significant: Transit ridership is at a 25-year high.

The metro's central transit hub is forming on the west side of downtown Minneapolis adjacent to Target Field, the new Twins ballpark that is set to open next year. That's where the North Star commuter line, scheduled to open this year, will connect to the Hiawatha Line. It's also the point from which the Central Line will head east to the University of Minnesota and downtown St. Paul in 2014 and the proposed Southwest and Bottineau lines will eventually extend to the southwestern and northwestern suburbs. In addition, bus rapid transit and high-occupancy auto toll lanes will run to the west, south, and southeast.

Meanwhile, St. Paul is envisioned as the terminus for future high-speed rail service to Chicago and for rapid bus transit connections to towns in the St. Croix River Valley.

Decades may pass before the network is up and running. The bigger problem is retrofitting the city itself — from the current, wide-open, auto-only regime toward a more integrated, efficient, and balanced metropolis. Outdated zoning laws, municipal codes, parking rules, and street guidelines are problems, of course. But even more daunting is finding a way to change the minds of local residents who are hardwired to the old ways.

That retrofitting could start with downtown Minneapolis, which in many ways resembles a suburban office park. Giant parking decks and eight miles of privately controlled, glassed-in skyways have created a climate-controlled second-story city, one that's extremely popular with office workers and noontime shoppers.

The downside is that the skyways promote a bifurcated social atmosphere: office workers and shoppers above; vagrants, petty drug dealers, and bus riders below. Even the once-glamorous Nicollet Mall, an open-air pedestrian promenade, is struggling to hold its retail clients. Altogether, it's a terrible fit for a transit hub and a bad design for a city hoping to remain vibrant in a new century. Jan Gehl, the noted Danish urban designer, has gone so far as to declare downtown Minneapolis obsolete. "I feel sorry for Minneapolis," he told me in 2007.

City Hall has responded with a new transportation plan that tries to inject "community" into downtown. The plan emphasizes transit, walking, biking, and two-way auto traffic. And it hopes for a prettier atmosphere at street level, one, perhaps, that approaches the beauty of the city's parks, lakes, and picturesque residential neighborhoods.

No solution to the skyway problem has yet emerged, however, and the city still has an autocentric mentality when it comes to urban design. Witness the sleek new Walker Art Center designed by the prizewinning Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron along a busy thoroughfare. There's plenty of accommodation for cars but no transit stop. To find your way inside, you must discover a side street, enter a giant underground parking garage, and look for an elevator, which becomes in effect the museum's main entrance — hardly the stuff of walkable, human-scale design. It's a testimony to the Twin Cities' steep learning curve in creating true community spaces.

But people are finally beginning to catch on. More and more, they understand the point of the sign on an apartment complex along the region's busiest freeway segment: "If you lived here, you'd be home by now." Proximity is truly the best possible solution to our transportation and energy problems. As Marshall McLuhan might have put it, transportation is land use.

Steve Berg is a writer and urban design consultant in Minneapolis.