"Now Everyone Wants a Train"

So for now, more of the area’s commuters are jumping onto buses. “In the past three years, we’re up over 50 percent” in ridership, says Len Simich, CEO of Southwest Transit, which provides bus service from the southwestern suburbs to downtown Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota. “It’s been incredible growth.” About 4,000 people ride Southwest Transit’s posh buses daily. “On an average day, we’ll beat a car by 15 to 20 minutes” because buses can use “sane lanes” and shoulders, says Simich.

He’s been involved in the planning committee for the Southwest light-rail line and acknowledges that if it’s built, it would require his bus company to “retool a little bit,” altering its routes. And more buses would be needed. No one seems to believe that simply building a light-rail line will be a panacea for the southwest metro’s transportation problems.

“There are still a lot of people that are relying on 494 and a few other roads to get to their jobs. And there’s virtually no mass-transit service or cross-commute services between Bloomington and Eden Prairie and Eden Prairie and Plymouth,” Lindahl says.

In other words, a light-rail transit line, however helpful, can’t stand alone. As TwinWest’s Flohrs observes, it’s not the ridership numbers on any particular route that matter. The question is “what kind of new ridership are we going to attract and what kind of vehicles are we going to take off the roads when you have Southwest, when you have Central Corridor, when you have the Red Rock Corridor [a heavy-rail commuter line that would run between Hastings and downtown St. Paul], and you can actually go somewhere in the Cities?”

The Hiawatha line has been a catalyst—a good start, in Flohrs’s view: “Right now, if you’re living in Minneapolis and you want to go to the mall, great; or if you’re flying in and you want to go to downtown, good. But it’s not a system yet.”

And to get from one line to a system—of trains and buses—billions of dollars will be needed.

Finding the Juice

Last fall, Parsons Brinckerhoff, the New York engineering firm that Hennepin County hired as a consultant for the Southwest line, estimated a price tag of $1.2 billion for route 3A, based on completion in the mid-2010s. An allocation of half a million dollars to draft an environmental impact statement and do preliminary engineering for the line was made part of a bonding bill that was vetoed May 1, and no other money is earmarked for the project.

Last November, Minnesota voters gave transportation funding a big boost by approving a constitutional amendment that would dedicate all state motor vehicle sales taxes to transportation purposes. Previously, only about 54 percent of this revenue went directly toward transportation. Under the new mandate, all of it will gradually be shifted to transportation by 2011—60 percent to roads, 38 percent to Twin Cities area public transit, and 2 percent to outstate transit.