"Now Everyone Wants a Train"

Transportation activists often refer to a “congestion tax.” The concept is based largely on studies of major metropolitan areas done by the Texas Transportation Institute, which estimated in 2003 that the typical Twin Cities driver wastes $722 a year in productive time and fuel because traffic isn’t moving at close to posted speeds. “That cost is going up rather than down,” asserts Rick Krueger, executive director of the Minnesota Transportation Alliance, a St. Paul–based advocacy group. Multiply that by an estimated 1.98 million drivers in the seven-county metropolitan area in 2005 and the total bill is $1.4 billion.

More roads, he adds, won’t lower this “tax.” The Metropolitan Council, the state entity that oversees transit planning for the area, projects that by 2030, the Twin Cities region will need to absorb a million more people. “If you’re going to do a million new residents and you’re going to figure out what that will require? First of all, it’s going to require—if one in six of them drive during rush hour, which is about what you’d expect—you end up with a need in the Twin Cities of 37 square miles of additional parking,” says Krueger, who gets his data in part from Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California in Los Angeles who’s written extensively on transportation issues. “Some of that is going to be ramps, with spaces on top of one another, but generally speaking, ramps don’t get real high. It’s not like you can go 50 stories up for a parking ramp. Then you’re going to need 1,400 lane miles of main arteries put in. And you’re going to need 10 times that number for regular streets.”

The estimated cost of that much construction in order to lift the burden of the congestion tax? Here’s just part of the answer. A lane-mile of freeway can cost between $5 million and $10 million, more if land has to be acquired and buildings torn down, which would be inevitable in the Twin Cities area. That brings the cost closer to $15 million a lane-mile. Doing the math, the cost to build those main arteries alone would be $21 billion.

There is no inexpensive way to untangle congestion. The estimated cost of the proposed Southwest light-rail line ranges from $865 million to $1.4 billion, depending on the route that’s finally chosen.

But it would be worth it, say advocates including Dan Duffy, principal with Daniel K. Duffy Architects in Minnetonka, who is the TwinWest Chamber’s representative on the Southwest Transitway Policy Advisory Committee, a group whose members, representing business organizations and municipalities, are developing potential routes for the Southwest light-rail line.

“With more congestion and traffic, businesses would like to be able to help people to get to their jobs, to help businesses move goods through the metro area,” Duffy says. In his neck of the woods, “the public mindset has changed tremendously from the last few years—it’s grown in support for a Southwest Corridor line.”

The congestion tax is one of the main reasons why advocates believe it’s important to fund a faster start-up of the Southwest line—and of the other metro area rail lines that are being proposed (see sidebar on facing page). “We subject our residents, truckers, and other users of our highways to increasing delays during the entire period of postponement—a nontrivial and increasingly costly matter in the region with the second-fastest rate of growth of congestion in the country,” says McLaughlin, citing more Texas Transportation Institute research. In addition, “we risk falling further behind in the growing line of projects seeking federal funds.”