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Editorial: Light rail -- Going for the federal 'gift horse' Sunday December 7, 1997
© Copyright 1997 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

As Hennepin County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin sees it, the possibility of obtaining
a $200 million federal grant next year for a light-rail transit line along Hiawatha Avenue is
a "gift horse" into whose mouth the 1998 Legislature should not bother to look. "There is
an opportunity here," says McLaughlin, ". . . of finally getting some real money invested in
the transit infrastructure of this region."

Well, he's right about that. With $200 million in federal money, another $106 million that
the Legislature will be asked to include in the state bonding bill, $37 million already
accounted for and $63 million to be requested from local sources, a whopping $406
million would become available for construction of a light-rail line connecting downtown
Minneapolis with Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and Bloomington's Mall of
America. Which is good, because that's how much the project would cost.

It's also almost 100 times more than the comparatively paltry $4.7 million the 1997
Legislature was willing to provide in additional funding to upgrade the existing Metro
Transit bus system over the next biennium. It may be that light rail is the only transit form
sexy enough to persuade politicians to spend the really big bucks needed to reverse the
long decline in transit ridership.

Still, every time the light-rail horse lets out a whinny, a few shadowed teeth show up that
bear checking out. In the case of the Hiawatha corridor, there's even a question of
whether the nag is where it ought to be vis-à-vis the cart.

So before legislators bow to McLaughlin's ask-no-questions urgings they ought to ask
some questions. A good one to start with is what would $406 million spent on light rail in
the corridor buy that would be 20 times better than what could be achieved with the $20
million it would take to build exclusive high-speed bus lanes along the same route? And
shouldn't the less-costly bus-lane alternative for Hiawatha be explored first in any event?

The Hiawatha corridor does offer a unique opportunity for the Twin Cities area to test
out light rail. Planners say it's the route where light rail would do the most to relieve
automobile congestion. It's also the route that would most directly link downtown
Minneapolis with the airport. And with much of the needed right-of-way already in public
ownership, a light-rail line presumably could be built along Hiawatha at less cost and
with less disruption than on other routes.

But $406 million for a single light-rail line on Hiawatha is almost as much as Hennepin
County once predicted its planned three-pronged system would cost in its entirety. And
ridership projections for the line have said it would carry about 18,000 people a day,
many of whom would be people who already ride the bus.

None of this is to say that the Twin Cities area shouldn't go after federal transit money, or
that the 1998 Legislature shouldn't invest $100 million of its own toward better transit.
But before making a commitment to spending all that cash on just one transit route,
someone at the federal or state level ought to consider how much more might be
accomplished if it could be spent a different way. That is, by building -- at $20 million or
so per transit corridor -- a regionwide network of exclusive, high-speed bus lanes of the
kind McLaughlin and others say they would settle for along Hiawatha as a second choice.
In this horse race, that would seem to be the better nose on which to bet.

© Copyright 1997 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

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