Twin Cities: Southwest light-rail gripe session stirs some anger

[marmar]

(Star-Tribune) Stalled and stung by critics, planners of the most expensive light-rail line in the Twin Cities area resumed efforts Tuesday night to sell the project to a skeptical public.

They got help from a consultant who organized a gripe session for 200 people in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis, where some residents oppose running the Southwest light rail through a recreational corridor near their homes.

“There is a lot of anger, a lot of mistrust,” said consultant Dan Cramer, whose firm is being paid $22,000 by a public agency to help calm critics.

He has a ways to go.

The session began with a dozen group meetings around tables in the Kenwood Community Center gym, where participants were encouraged to talk about specific elements of the light-rail project that irked them. But people at some tables focused their ire instead on the Metropolitan Council, the agency running the project and studying its impact on nearby lakes. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.startribune.com/local/239188231.html

[KamaAina]

1. I hope Lydia Leftcoast sees this

DU's most prominent transit advocate in "the Cities" (they never say "twin" ).

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. There are some real problems with the proposed line

For one thing, it seems mostly designed to carry exurbanites back and forth to Minneapolis and has almost no well-populated stops within the city of Minneapolis.

For another, all the alternatives through the suburb of St. Louis Park either raise NIMBY hackles or are terribly expensive.

This is sad, because such a line has the potential to serve two areas that are already transit-oriented development, only without the transit: Excelsior-Grand and Hopkins.

However, it is going to terminate in a nowhere section of the Sprawlsville suburb of Eden Prairie.
.
If I were Transit Czarina, I would start the line in the largely African-American neighborhood between Plymouth Avenue and West Broadway on the Near North Side before sending it through downtown. Then, instead of going south to Eden Prairie after Hopkins, I would send it west to Excelsior, a once-independent town that has a compact core.