The best laid plans

Last week the Transportationist noted and reposted the Comprehensive LRT System Plan for Hennepin County, a 1988 vintage addition to the Twin Cities’ sky-high stack of written-and-forgotten plans.  This particular collection of fantastical fireplace fuel was posted on the official site for the Southwest Transitway, presumably to display their staff’s inability to use a scanner (a deficit I share as you’ll shortly see).  The Transportationist concluded his post with a call for a map of the routes planned in the “1970s ‘Regional Fixed Guideway Study’”.

At last an opportunity to share the fruit of my many hours of sequestration in the Minneapolis Stewart L. Central Library!  I’m not sure if I have exactly the map he’s looking for, but I do have a few items that likely will be of interest.  The first comes from Rail Rapid Transit, a report produced by Vorhees & Associates for the MTC in 1969.

The other is the Fast Link System, which I got from a doc called Fast Link Rail-Rapid Transit for Minneapolis, produced in 1972 by Don Fraser’s City Coordinator IIRC in a desperate effort to influence the Met Council and the Legislature (aka the decision-makers) to choose a transit policy that would actually benefit the city.

I believe, based on the references I’ve stumbled on occasionally, that the Fast Link plan was the one that had the most support, as opposed to the Vorhees plan.  It’s kind of hard to tell based on the scan that I made a few minutes before the library closed, but most of the Fast Link plan was proposed to be subway, with a few aerial segments.  As the 70s slithered on, this plan seems to have evolved into an option that had PRT-like segments through the downtowns and at the University, and curiously split into two one-way segments in St Paul, one of which was proposed for University and the other for I-94.  This iteration appeared in the Met Council’s 1975 Automated Small Vehicle Fixed Guideway Report along with a more traditional subway plan.

I have to admit that I didn’t have a chance to read through this one in detail, so I’m not sure if these were plans that were being seriously advocated for or if they were merely sacrificial lambs.  This is the report that set high-quality transit back for decades in Minnesota, as it was forwarded by the Met Council to the Legislature, which promptly banned the study of fixed guideway rail transit (as will be seen later).  These rail plans were compared with the Met Council’s adopted transit policy, which favored a network express buses with possible people mover systems in the downtowns.  According to the report, the rail plans would somehow not have serviced non-downtown locations as well as express buses, and the non-PRT plan wouldn’t even have served the downtowns well.  35 years later we know what hooey that was, as anyone who’s attempted to take one of the routes in today’s highly developed express bus network anywhere besides Downtown Minneapolis or Downtown St Paul.  But I concede it’s possible that at the time they really didn’t know that people would be willing to walk a bit further in exchange for reliable, fast, frequent transit, just as they didn’t know that gently suggesting that cities not allow non-sewered large-lot development wouldn’t contain sprawl.  On the other hand, the apparent lack of effort to develop a true bidirectional express bus network for the next three decades is also compelling evidence that this “Report” was utter bullshit, designed to funnel state money into highways.

Anyway, my sense is that by this point transit advocates were feeling a sense of panic and despair comparable to that I imagine is currently being felt by the GOP, at least at the MN level.  This can be gleaned from the timeline provided in the 1988 Hennepin County LRT plan, which I would really love to have been able to just copy and paste:

Planning for a variety of fixed guideway transit systems has proceeded almost continuously in the Twin Cities since the late 1960s.  [Here I would have added "to little or no effect."  -Alex] Some of the major events of that history include:

• MTC sponsored analyses of various technologies, early 1970s
• MTC – Small Vehicle Study, 1974
• Minnesota Legislature prohibition of fixed rail planning, 1975 [! -Alex]
• University of Minnesota Transitway, 1976
• St. Paul Downtown People Mover, 1976-1980
• Minnesota Legislature lifts prohibition of fixed rail planning, 1980
• Light Rail Transit Feasibility Study, 1981
• Hiawatha Avenue Location and Design Study – EIS, 1979-1984
• I-394 High Occupancy Vehicle Roadway, 1982
• University/Southwest Alternatives Analysis, 1985 (draft)
• Metropolitan Council/RTB identify LRT as preferred mode in University, Southwest and Hiawatha Corridors; University is the priority corridor
• LRT Implementation Planning Program, April 1985
• Minnesota Legislature prohibition of fixed guideway planning, 1985 [This is not an accidental duplication - it apparently happened again.  How did this get past Perpich? - Alex]
• Transit Service Needs Assessment, Regional Transit Board, 1986
• A Study of Potential Transit Capital Investments in Twin Cities Corridors – Long-Range Transit Analysis, Metropolitan Council, December 1986
• Minnesota Legislature lifts prohibition of fixed guideway planning, 1987
• Comprehensive LRT System Planning for Hennepin County, 1988

So next time you’re feeling proud of Minnesota’s history of relatively sane governance, remember that the Legislature managed to interfere in what should be a technical decision not once but twice.  And lest you think that these poxes on transit are just a product of overreach by Republicans on the rare occasion that they gain complete power, the 1975 Legislature was overwhelmingly DFL, and Wendy Anderson of St Paul was in the Governor’s Mansion.  Of course, in 1975 it wasn’t necessarily an anti-transit attitude that was prevalent; more likely it was a misunderstanding of the nature of urban systems masqueraded as futurism in the form of People Movers and PRT.  This same Legislature, after all, further empowered the Met Council, which itself is a culmination of the suburban experiment – the failed idea of the Broadacre City, made more palatable in its rationalization of the overdelivery of infrastructure that’s inherent in such an individualistic urban form.

Anyway, in the above timeline is included the 1981 LRT Feasibility Study, which was produced by an apparently repentant (or possibly begrudging) Met Council.  This is available in a form that patrons of the Stewart J. Central Library can check out, which I did last summer, resulting in these atrocious scans:

West LRT

Southwest LRT

University LRT

Northeast LRT

And a summary sheet indicating that the fully built LRT system (including a Northwest line, which I didn’t scan for some reason but was probably pretty similar to the Bottineau LPA) would serve 32,900 more weekday passengers than an existing or minimally improved system, and would actually turn an operating profit of $4.8m a year.

With that, I’ll close the vault for now.  If you liked these and want more, don’t worry – I spend a lot of time at the library, and unlike our transit system, the archive of old transit studies is almost limitless.

To a mouse.

St Paul transferring

Click for high-res pdf

The official plan for restructuring St Paul’s bus routes was presented to the Met Council’s Transportation committee the other day, and while there were one or two surprises, mostly fulfilled my expectations (although it didn’t follow my recommendations).  Accompanying the presentation was an excellent map – showing the new route structure and symbolizing frequency through line width.  Here’s a brief summary of the changes:

As Expected

• The east-west orientation of the network is still intact.  It would have been highly advantageous to riders to change this to north-south to take advantage of the high-quality transfers that would have been newly available on the Central LRT and Fort Rd Rapid Bus.  But the presentation notes that many comments exhibited “Loyalty to existing routes” – change is hard.
• They couldn’t bring themselves to straighten out the kink in the 21 up to the Midway.  I guess the frequency bump to every 10 minutes for the 84 adds up to a hill of beans.
• The 8 has been absorbed.  Everyone saw this coming for this runt of a line.  A bit more surprising is what route absorbed it – more below.
• The 94 will be peak-only and no Midway stops or Capitol service.  Maybe it’s surprising that a government agency wouldn’t want to compete with itself, but it should be expected anyway.
• A new route called the 83 has been added to Lexington to meet the route spacing requirement of a line at least every mile in one direction and at least every half-mile in the other.
• The 63 has been extended to Raymond & University.  They didn’t do it my way, though (that would have been a much bigger change) – they have it dart up Cleveland and over on Summit for two blocks before proceeding up Cretin.  That’s not ideal – it splits the service around St Thomas and thereby dilutes it (which my plan also would have done, but at least I kept one line up the length of Cleveland for legibility, whereas they have the Cleveland bus jut over to Cretin at Marshall anyway) and it leaves Desnoyer Park unserved.
• The 65 has been rerouted to Grand, which makes sense because Selby already has the 21 service.  But it does lead us to our first surprise…

Surprise!

• The 65 will terminate at Grand instead of continuing downtown.  This one perplexes me, as it would have only been another mile to the Smith Ave ramp, which certainly would take riders to more jobs and seemingly would be better for operations anyway.  Maybe they’re afraid that once they’re downtown, they’d have to go all the way to SPUD.
• The 67 will be absorbing the 8.  It makes sense when you consider that these two routes run on about the same latitude.  I’d think that this overserves the stretch of University between Fairview and Raymond, though – using their rough guide for frequency, it looks like the average headway for buses between Cretin and Raymond will be 6 minutes – that’s not counting the train.  Another strange quirk is that they’re routing the new 67 up Riverside for a couple blocks and then back down 25th/26th, presumably to better serve Fairview.
  

  A facelift for the 8

• The West Side branch of the 67 will be shifted to the 62 – a logical choice, although I will they had experimented with a crossing at Smith, which then could have gone up Kellogg and John Ireland to Rice for a quicker crosstown.  Trips to St Paul CBD would have an easy transfer at Seven Corners.
• The aforementioned 83 – the Lexington bus – appears to terminate at Como and Snelling after a short jaunt down Energy Park Dr.  An extension to Roseville via an extensive detour back to Lexington – seemingly designed to deter anyone who wants to get anywhere fast – is penciled in for someday.  Here’s an idea – if you’re going to Snelling anyway, why not go the extra mile and a half to the U of M?  There are actually destinations there besides Nelson Cheese Shop.
• No circle line!  The Central Corridor EIS assumed two changes that didn’t make the cut – one was an extension of the 67 to Fairview, which would have resulted in half-mile grid of service that apparently was considered overkill, and the other was a weird circle line that would have run down Hamline, St Clair, Victoria and University.  Maybe this one shouldn’t be in the surprise category, because that route didn’t make much sense in the first place.

They also provided a table showing the proposed frequency of the 23 affected routes:

It seems like most of the St Paul routes in the study are getting a modest frequency boost – the 65, 67, and 87 are all going from every half hour at peak and midday to 20 minute headways, with more evening runs as well.  I’m a little surprised they didn’t give the 63 a rush hour increase, but maybe since the area is mostly students and shopping there isn’t as much peak demand (they do seem to be boosting it in the afternoon peak a bit).  It’s disappointing that the 62 didn’t merit more service, though not too surprising since it doesn’t have much in the way of a northern terminus.

I’m tempted to say that some of this frequency would be better put to use in Minneapolis, but I’m excited for the opportunity this service improvement provides to St Paul.  It wasn’t the news I was looking for, but the results of the Central Restructuring study are good news indeed.

PS the presentation claims that the study final report is online but as of writing it isn’t up yet.

PPS  The same Met Council Transportation committee meeting has an update on the Midtown Corridor Alternatives Analysis – including this interesting graphic of a proposed Hi-Lake station and how Wellington wants to build apartments on top of the easement for it:

Viva Zoning and Planning!

The May 17th Zoning & Planning committee meeting is packed with some big ticket items.  If you’re like me, you’ll want to get your email pen ready to pester your council member about this stuff (assuming your council member is on this committee, that is – if you live in one of the seven wards whose council member isn’t on Z & P, you don’t get a voice).  Dock Street is once again on the agenda, along with the A Mill, Peavey Plaza, and a certain revolutionary.

Conceptual track/platform configuration from The Interchange Final Study from 2010

Dock Street is the most directly transportation-related of the four items, since the basis for the appeal by Hennepin County and MnDot of Hines’ proposed apartment complex is that the layout will constrain options in the rail corridor currently used by Northstar and proposed for use by several other future lines.  Action has been postponed for more than a month, but the recent Strib story makes it seem like they’ll actually act on it this time, possibly because Hines made a stink about the delay at the last Z & P meeting.  They have a point, as Hennepin County has known since 2006 that the Interchange was their preferred location for the hub of Minnesota’s rail facilities, and MnDot was given the opportunity to comment on the project in August of 2011 and at that time said only “No formal comment.”

Peter McLaughlin called this a “Kmart moment” with some hyperbole; it’s not clear that the apartments and the rail facilities are mutually exclusive, and based on the 2010 Interchange study it looks like the trail would have to cross Washington at grade anyway.  In that case I would tend to favor allowing the apartments to move forward; for me and others who use the trail to access Downtown an at grade crossing at Washington would actually improve the trail, which currently has awkward access to the area.  It seems like only recreational users would suffer from a grade crossing, although that would also make the trail more expensive to reconstruct.  It also seems like the Interchange is barely feasible due to the tightness of the site anyway, so it may be more worthwhile to spend the money that Hines would have extracted for further easements on a new study of passenger rail station possibilities in Minneapolis.

I hope they know what they’re doing – this would have been a great place to drink a beer.

The A Mill project in this initial phase is merely a reuse of a historic structure; this sort of development typically requires a lot of variances because historic structures were usually built before the zoning code was adopted, but since the structures already exist, these variances tend to be less controversial than they would be for a new structure that’s built to look like a historic structure.  From what I can tell from the complicated site plan, only a couple small additions would be made to the existing A Mill complex to accommodate a parking structure that would somehow be wedged into the center courtyard and mostly buried below the existing ground profile.  So here we run up against the City’s annoying practice of not publishing the actual appeal being heard in the Z & P meeting, and our only clue to the reason for the appeal is that the appellant is Kathleen Flynn Peterson.  They tossed us a bone in the form of the Planning Commission minutes, where Ms Peterson complained at length about the City’s process and made no comment on the form or use of the structure, which is the only thing the Planning Commission (or its appellate body the Z & P committee) has any say on.  As I mentioned last week, I have wistful feelings for the potential of past proposals for this site, but the only thing I don’t like about the current proposals are that they seem to waste the commercial potential of the location on the only beautiful street in Minneapolis.  My guess is this appeal will be denied, and the only significant hurdle the A Mill redevelopment will face will be at the Community Development committee meeting where the project’s financing will be debated.

Groovy plaza man

Peavey Plaza‘s last stand will be taken at the May 17th Z & P, where an appeal from Steve Kotke, the director of Public Works, will seek to overturn the Historic Preservation Commission’s decision to delay the demolition of the architectural gem for six months.  It’s sort of ironic that the City is now trying to destroy a historic resource that it claims is too expensive to rehab because it neglected to properly maintain it for decades, basically the exact situation for which the City created the Historic Preservation Commission, obviously thinking only of when slumlords do it, not major corporations/campaign donors.  My guess is that staff is too busy pretending that the bland proposed replacement has anything to do with the serene original to notice the irony.  It may not surprise you that I’m opposed to the demolition, but I expect the appeal to be upheld and our last chance to enjoy Peavey Plaza to arrive shortly.

A substandard, tax-forfeited lot fit for a founding father

Emiliano Zapata probably isn’t used to being the least controversial one around, but at this Z & P committee he may be.  But don’t worry, Emy, that doesn’t mean you’re the least interesting.  Apparently a statue of the founding father of the modern Mexican republic was donated to Minneapolis by the state of Morelos, home to our sister city of Cuernavaca, but no place was ever found for it and it seems to have languished in a supermercado up till now.  Soon it will join such luminaries as my first love Mary Tyler Moore and popular 19th century violinist Ole Bull and be displayed in a public space, a narrow tax-forfeited lot at 12th and East Lake.  But is .08 acres really enough space for this huge figure in the history of our neighbor to the south?  It seems like this might be the ideal place to create Minneapolis’ first reclaimed street plaza.  12th Ave S has T-alleys on both sides, so car access can still be preserved.  Just use planters to block off the space between the alleys and Lake St and you’ll have something closer to the grand plaza Zapata deserves (but small enough to program the smaller, temporary uses suited to reclaimed space without feeling too empty).

More space to roam for Zapata

Reclaiming street space for recreation and biking and walking?  Sounds like I tied it back in to transportation.  Viva Zoning and Planning!

Those were the days

Invisible Cities

There was a fun surprise in the May 1st agenda of the Community Development committee of the Minneapolis City Council, which is considering a gazillion dollars’ worth of subsidy (edit: that is, subsidy and bonding, see James’ comment below) for a rehab of the Pillsbury A Mill into affordable apartments for elderly diabetic artists or something.

I don’t know if it was a mistake or what, but the Data Worksheet for the project actually featured a rendering of an earlier incarnation called East Bank Mills, conceived of and consumed by the condo craze, which in addition to the rehab would have constructed at least six mid-to-high rise buildings.  Instead, the site was split between two owners, one of which is rehabbing the mill complex and the other of which is building this:

DorAntfarm

I’m not a skyscraper fetishist, but I do have a fervent belief that Density Will Save Us.  Low rise buildings like the ones proposed for the A Mill site are some of the most efficient, if not always attractive, ways to add density, but only if they can be dispersed throughout the city.  They don’t need to obliterate the traditional housing stock, but if sprinkled liberally along bus routes they can provide riders for those buses and justification for transit upgrades, as well as a base of customers for local businesses.

Unfortunately, NIMBY forces have thus far prevented the diffusion of this building type.  Even those corridors that the city identifies as appropriate for low-rise, high-density infill languish under low density zoning.  So growth needs to be maximized in areas that already have high-rises, like this one.  On the upside, these areas also tend to be close to major job centers and the last dying vestiges of urban retail, maximizing walkability.

So while the 300-400 units to be added in the current A Mill proposals should be welcomed, Minneapolis sure could have used the 1,000 units East Bank Mills would have brought.  That project may have been the product of a greed-fueled credit bubble, but it may have delivered something more in the public interest than the timid footsteps of a wheezy recovery.  (Of course, that same credit bubble produced a massive expansion of low-density fringe development, so it’s all random.)

Again, I’m not saying Tall = Good.  I’m saying Tall = Good IF Density = Good AND Density is not allowed in 95% of the city.

You’ve come a long way, baby

Access to the Region’s Chinese/Hibachi buffet

I went to the open house last night on the most recent iteration of the project to add ramps to and from 35W on the north side of Lake St – officially and awkwardly titled I-35W Transit/Access Project, but which I’ve dubbed ARCH (Access to the Region’s Chinese/Hibachi buffet).  Since Minnescraper has tragically fallen into a coma, instead of my typical obsessively researched and revised essays (not that you could tell) I’m just going to post my unvarnished thoughts here .

History Lesson

Hibachi Buffet/Trip Generator

In the late 90s, as the internet was evolving from its primary function as a venue for competitive Happy Days trivia to a multipurpose mass media  celebrity gossi pdelivery mechanism, some entrepreneurs realized that bricks-and-mortar video rental would soon become obsolete, so they approached the City about their idea of eventually replacing a Blockbuster near the 35W/Lake St interchange with the Twin Cities’ premier Chinese/Hibachi buffet.  The City realized that demand for new restaurant would soon overwhelm existing infrastructure, so they teamed with the County, MnDot and a partnership of nearby benevolent corporations to brainstorm ways to accommodate the coming onslaught of buffetgoers.

The old Access project had some grandiose touches

They came up with a modest project that would widen Lake St to add a landscaped center median with plenty of room for turn lanes, crate a full diamond interchange at Lake and a ramp from northbound 35W to 28th St, close the ramps at 35th/36th and add a replacement with a big ole roundabout thing at 38th St, demolish the Metrodome and replace it with a retractable-roof stadium, and if there was still money left over, build a transit station at Lake.  Needless to say, they couldn’t find funding, and the project died as planning efforts shifted to meet the new capacity challenges caused by an expanding chain of suburban Hibachi grill buffets.

Then the dreaded day finally came when Blockbuster closed and was replaced by the future, to which the masses thronged.  Officials could no longer put off the needed upgrades to local crumbling infrastructure and planning for ARCH was rekindled.  And then they had an open house yesterday.

Huh?

No more median on Lake it seems

So I guess the difference now is that the 35/36 exits have been dropped, and I don’t know if the Braid Bridge (where southbound 35W crosses over the northbound 35W exit to Downtown) was part of the old Access project, but it is now.  Also, the idea of widening Lake St seems to have been dropped, which is interesting because I thought that was why they left so much of Lake St unreconstructed a few years ago.  So pretty much all they’re looking at is how many ramps to add to Lake St, whether a ramp should be added to 28th, and what the transit station is going to look like.  At the open house, in addition to free cookies, they had a cool model of the project area, and most portentously an enormous roll-up layout of the option that would include a full Lake St interchange and an exit from northbound 35W to 28th.  I interpreted that as meaning that they will do a full build if they can.

The Transit Station

Perhaps it’s obvious, but I was most interested in the transit station component.  It seems they’ve settled on a side platform configuration, which I was disappointed about because center platforms are much better from a passenger’s standpoint.  It turns out that I wasn’t the only one who was disappointed – the project has an advisory committee composed of a gaggle of local interests, and they came to the conclusion that a center platform was better, too – only to be overruled by MnDot, who decided at some point that they were too afraid of an errant driver entering the station area and smacking head-on into a bus to allow it (nevermind that MnDot has operated a reversible facility on 394 for two decades without a serious incident).  The advisory committee members were understandably irked that they had spent so much time on something that had already been decided.

But after talking with a consultant at the open house, the side platforms make a lot more sense to me.  A lot of buses are going to be using this station – today there are 70-80 buses an hour at peak but it’s being designed for 90-100 buses per peak hour.  That last figure would be a bus about every half-minute on average, and the guy I talked to mentioned that entry gates don’t really work at that frequency, which I believe.  The other advantage to side platforms is they allow for wider lanes in the station (22.5′ each), making it easier for buses to pass each other.  Anyone who’s ridden Nicollet Mall at rush hour knows how important that is.

Transit so frequent your trees turn translucent

So I’ve been won over to side platforms for this station, although I still am opposed to making that the standard.  Certainly there needs to be a lot more study of Freeway BRT networks before we can choose a station design based on a freak accident that may or may not ever happen.  Considering our griddish freeway network, it seems likely that transfers are going to be crucial in a built-out Freeway BRT network, and crucial to transfers are center platform stations.  It may be that dual-side door vehicles will be needed for this reason – someone at MnDot or the Met Council needs to get off their ass and commission the study of the transit technology that they killed heavy rail transit for in the 70s, but haven’t even gotten around to thinking about yet.

The 28th Street Exit

28th Street must have some friends in high places in order to be considered for an exit.  The only point along its length where it sees more than a handful of cars a day is just east of 2nd Ave S, which is basically an extension of the exit from 35W.  If I were in charge, I’d ask for a promise of expanded employment before I built an exit there, since it seems just as easy to handle those cars on Lake St and then any of the major arterials that are spaced every 1/8th of a mile east of 35W.

26th and 28th run through some of the densest neighborhoods in town, and don’t come anywhere close to needing the capacity they’re built to.  They could each be converted to two-lane two-ways with left turn lanes at intersections and center turn lanes in the busiest segments with no loss of parking and using existing curb geometry.  The City has been ignoring the neighborhoods’ request for two-way conversions for years.  I get that in projects like ARCH the large institutions will get their way, but when they build that 28th St exit for Wells Fargo and Allina, they better build it in a way that can accommodate a two-way conversion.

24th St/Braid Bridge

1st google hit for “minneapolis skyline” is taken from the 24th st bridge

Way up on the northern fringe of the project runs 24th Street, which at 35W becomes a narrow pedestrian bridge that is the source of approximately 97% of pictures of the Minneapolis skyline.  This bridge isn’t necessarily involved with the ARCH project except that any funding for ARCH will also likely include funding for the Braid Bridge, which is pretty thoroughly ancient and also is maybe sort of awkward to merge with (source?).  The big roll-up layout of the proposed full bridge moves the Braid Bridge slightly to the north, which frees up some possibilities with 24th St that according to the consultant I spoke with have barely been explored thus far.

One possibility I heard mentioned more than once at the open house, though, was to replace the Franklin overpass with upgraded pedestrian facilities and then not replace the 24th St pedestrian overpass at all.  That would be a terrible idea.  Fair Oaks and West Phillips are two of the densest neighborhoods in the city, and they’ve been separated by a freeway for decades.  They need every bridge they can get.  I’m not aware of any standards on pedestrian bridge spacing (of course, even though we have extremely detailed official standards for slant parking).  I would say that in this kind of setting, 1/4 mile is the minimum spacing for pedestrian crossing.

Will this thing ever end?

I think the ARCH project – like the 35W Access Project that proceeded it – is one of the most interesting projects around.  Balancing the needs of basically every type of mobility in the heart of a neighborhood that’s been ravaged by past government actions, it requires sensitive proceedings of whatever government agency is unlucky enough to take it on.  And for the most part they seem to be delivering.  They say they’ll be at 30% design for the project by the middle of 2013, which means the construction will be complete in approximately 2999.  We’ll see how the project will have changed by then, after many more open houses to come.

How the neighborhoods got their shapes

In an undated photo from the HC Library, Herman Olson makes a convincing case for tearing it all down and building a freeway

Once upon a long, long time ago, Minneapolis didn’t have any neighborhoods.  Well, of course the city had neighborhoods, but they were the sort of organic shorthand referring to important intersections, like Cedar-Riverside or Chicago-Lake, you know, the kind of place that in the old world would have been called a square and given its own name.

In this amorphous pre-neighborhood era, all planning was handled by a grumpy old man named Herman Olson.  He spent his time thinking about where to put public markets and how to cram more cars into the downtown, but no one really put much stock into his recommendations, because no one could remember why he was qualified to say where stuff should go except that he had worked for the city for decades.  Since the City had plenty of other employees who’d also worked there for ages, Olson was frequently ignored.

And, in the late 50s, he was finally replaced.  The colleges of the day were churning out urban planners and giving them a scientific veneer and an interest in something called comprehensive planning, and Minneapolis received a typical product by the name of Lawrence Irvin.  No one really knew what comprehensive planning was, but the new planners were very insistent on doing it, and they got cracking by working on the Official Plan that was to be published in the fall of 1960 and to be heavily dependent on the concept of neighborhoods.

The earliest introduction to Irvin’s conception of neighborhoods that I can find is in a document with the amazingly dated title Minneapolis in the Motor Age, basically a book-length argument for why we need to subvert our lifestyles to accommodate cars.  He* starts with the reasonable observation that streets can “unify or divide related activities.”

Blobs are the answer

The idea that streets can unify or divide seems a platitude when you consider that depending on placement, any physical object can unify or divide any number of other objects.  So it’s a pretty big leap when on the next page Irvin declares that one of the “functions of importance” of streets to land use is to “provide a means to define Neighborhoods” (emphasis in the original).  What he’s after is the consolidation of vehicular traffic onto arterial streets, and he uses a cool chart to attempt to portray the severity of the problem of car-choked side streets:

Not too different from today, with our freeway, lower population and higher motorization rate

Irvin goes on to explain that arterial streets should not go through communities and neighborhoods because neighborhoods and communities “must not be divided by major physical features in such a way as to prohibit effective internal circulation” (emphasis again in the original).  Besides its circularity, this argument is notable because, in the midst of a document that proposes building wider and faster roads to accommodate the needs of the motor age, Irvin is acknowledging the ways that roads actually inhibit mobility.  But hey, he comes up with a far out map of a “hypothetical” community to illustrate his point:

North Anywhereville

Finally, Irvin drills down to the level of the neighborhood, sketching a almost kibbutz-like concept that can “support”  (he probably means justify) an elementary school and a park within a half-mile walk, includes a few stores but “separate[s] residential and non-residential districts.”  There’s a conceptual neighborhood drawing, too, but greyscale this time.  It shows street concepts like cul-de-sacs, diverters, and “safety walks”, but the only text about streets in neighborhoods is the now-repetitive admonition to route “Major streets around, not through the neighborhood” (emphasis yet again in original).

No room in the budget for some industrial brown?

After using all those pages and three full colors to illustrate his concept of communities and neighborhoods, Lawrence Irvin did not yet see fit to actually unveil how it would apply to the actual city.  After reading Minneapolis in the Motor Age you know you’re not supposed to route arterial streets through neighborhoods, but where are the neighborhoods you need to avoid?  Luckily Irvin didn’t wait long, as a couple months later The Official Plan – the city’s first comprehensive plan – was published, and included a map of communities and neighborhoods.

As you can see (if you squint enough to make sense of my terrible scan), Irvin came up with something pretty similar to today’s neighborhoods.  Note that the commercial intersections that heretofore had been the only differentiated points on the map are excluded altogether from the shading that denotes neighborhoods.  Despite the somewhat elaborate setup in Minneapolis in the Motor Age, the neighborhood boundaries weren’t Irvin’s creation but rather mostly reflected contemporaneous attitudes in the planning field.  They certainly had little to do with Minneapolis’ history as a streetcar suburb, and in many cases reflected an aspirational conception of which streets would become arterial (consider the extension of 36th St across South Minneapolis, despite the fact that it is only intermittently a collector east of Bryant and creates awkward boundaries near Powderhorn Park, later rectified).  In fact these aspirations created conflict with other city departments, specifically the transportation department.**

The plan came up with two stated purposes for inventing these neighborhoods – to serve as a conveniently small unit for planning and to be a platform for “citizen action” – that they were to fulfill in the major zoning overhaul that Irvin was shortly to launch, and they still fulfill them more or less to this very day.  And that is how the neighborhoods got their shapes.

City of parkways and freeways

*Irvin had a staff that was actually writing these documents, but it’s more convenient to my narrative to attribute it to him – and anyway, he as Director approved the plans.

**As told by Alan Altshuler in his classic The City Planning Process, which I’ve leaned on heavily for the outline of this history

Cross-posted at streets.mn.

Do Bloomington, don’t mind the Pedestrian Barriers

Bloomington is feeding Boehner ped-bashing fodder

John Boehner’s recent transportation reauthorization bill was quickly shrouded in a toxic vapor of controversy around elements such as eliminating dedicated transit funding, killing experiments in merit-based funding, and (not) paying for all of it with expanded oil drilling.  One of the first explosions of hate against this bill, though, came from its proposed elimination of Transportation Enhancements funding, which united bike/ped advocates with archaeologists and preservationists in a sort of hurricane of people with cool majors.

Transportation Enhancements (TE) has all sorts of cool effects, from bike lanes and crosswalks to billboard removal and railroad museums.  But like any good drug, it can be abused.  So it is with sadness that I must report on the use and abuse of TE funding in Bloomington, where the the funds meant for “Provision of facilities for bicycles and pedestrians” are being used for features labeled as Pedestrian Barriers.

Forced march

The Barriers are part of a project to build an enclosed pedestrian bridge across Killebrew Dr on the southern perimeter of the Mall of America.  $1m of the $3.6m project cost is being funded by federal Transportation Enhancements funds.  The renderings show a classy-looking skyway-like bridge that connects on one side to the new Radisson being constructed on a former mall parking ramp.  Regardless of how you feel about skyways downtown, this mall-oriented neighborhood cut through by massive six-lane divided roads seems like a pretty good spot to spend a big chunk of dough to allow pedestrians to cross over all the at-grade traffic.  Ok, but what if I don’t wanna?

The secret evil hidden in the skyway project is around 1000 feet of concrete walls referred to as Pedestrian Barriers that will close the two existing at-grade crossings of Killebrew and force pedestrians to go out of their way to use the skyway.  This means that the net effect of the project is to decrease mobility – instead of two options for crossing, pedestrians will only have one.  Applying the simple mathematical principle that one is less than two, we find that this project will require most pedestrians to walk further.

It'll never work - where are the pedestrian barriers?

Aw who cares?  No one walks in the suburbs anyway right?  I won’t disagree with you, but I would think that Bloomington would care, considering it’s trying to develop an area around the mall as a neighborhood they call South Loop.  Plans call for the neighborhood to “transform… from suburban to urban” with “mixed land use that supports additional streets to enhance circulation; higher densities of jobs and homes close to four light rail stations; and sustainable development practices that save money and support growth.”  Mostly missing from the copious planning documents for the area are walkability goals or attention to pedestrian travel, although the South Loop’s primary residential development, Bloomington Central Station, places some emphasis on walking.  Still, considering the plan’s frequent use of the word sustainability and desire to become urban or even a “third downtown,” the implication is that people will walk there.

Even Bloomington’s official definition of sustainability avoids mentioning sustainable transportation, but the city is engaged in encouraging “active living choices” for its residents through a Blue Cross Blue Shield-sponsored program called do.town, featured prominently on the municipal website.  Ironically, the do.town page features a quote from Edina Mayor Jim Hovland, who notes that “barriers to healthy living are everywhere.”  I fumbled my way through an attempt to ask do.town staff whether the Public Works dept consults them before erecting Pedestrian Barriers or making other plans that would have an impact on the ability of Bloomingtonians to live actively, but I did get a nice thorough description of the benefits to pedestrians of the skyway project from engineer Julie Long:

Benefits of pedestrian bridge include a reduction in pedestrian exposure to vehicles while providing for uninterrupted flow of pedestrians across the roadway.  Currently about 110 pedestrians cross the six to eight lanes of Killebrew Drive during the Saturday p.m. peak hour.  On numerous weekends, during the holiday shopping season and during special events the Bloomington Police Department staffs the intersection of 20^th and 22^nd Avenues with Killebrew Drive to ensure that vehicles and pedestrians can move through the area safely.  The Bloomington Comprehensive Plan shows growth in the South Loop District which will correspond to an increase in both motorist and pedestrian traffic.  It is expected that as the traffic grows in the area this would need to be a more frequent occurrence to facilitate safe passage in the area.

Concern also exists with illegal mid block crossings observed because they violate what the motorist is expecting and increase the risk to the pedestrian.  This is especially a concern given many drivers in the area are not as familiar with the road system since they may be from out of town and can be focused on trying to see where to go instead of watching for pedestrians.  Also, motorists using the exit ramps have just left the freeway environment where they were traveling faster and may not have fully adjusted to driving slower and looking for pedestrians.  The pedestrian bridge provides for separation of these conflicting movements.

The project also includes the installation of a pedestrian barricade to help reduce the number of illegal mid block crossings and encourage use of legal crossings at 24^th Avenue and the pedestrian bridge.  The pedestrian bridge will be a covered walk way that protects people from the elements.  The bridge will also moderate the temperature outside by approximately 10-20 degrees so that it will be a little warmer in the winter to cross and a little cooler in the summer to cross, but it will not be a fully heated/cooled space like a skyway would be.  The City has also heard from a handicapped user that he believes this facility will help him more safely cross Killebrew since it is fully ADA compliant.  In his wheelchair he is lower than a pedestrian that is standing so sometimes motorists do not see him as he is crossing.  Another component of the project includes additional signage to not only direct pedestrians to the new pedestrian bridge, but also to facilities like the Mall of America Transit Center which is located in the east parking ramp of the mall.

Sure, all of those things are benefits, but the only one contingent on closing the grade crossings is the savings of staff time for traffic control.  I don’t disagree that there are benefits to a skyway for pedestrians in wheelchairs, but most pedestrians will see little or no benefit to crossing above the street, and if instead of building a skyway they had used the $3.6m to make Killebrew more pleasant to cross, many more users would have seen a benefit.  Killebrew Dr is an enormous road with three lanes in each direction and several turn lanes at each intersection, so this project is basically turning a quasi-freeway into a de facto freeway.  But there are also intersections around every 500 feet – comparable to a long block in Minneapolis – so it’s never going to be a “easy” drive.  Despite the extreme congestion described in Julie’s comments, Killebrew only handles around 20k cars a day, but less than half of that continues past the mall.  It seems like $3.6m would have bought a lot of medians to distinguish turn lanes and to refuge pedestrians, as well as contextualizing features (i.e. colored pavement at crosswalks or possibly street parking with bump outs) that would help drivers adjust to the fact that they’re no longer on a freeway.

The pedestrian-removal Transportation Enhancement skyway project is actually Bloomington’s second strike in the area.  Last year the state gave them $15m for Phase 1 of the Lindau Lane Complete Street project.  Sounds nice except Phase 1 is actually the construction of a quasi-freeway of Lindau Lane on the north side of the Mall of America, which means that Phase 2, the version of Lindau Lane to the northeast of the mall, will never work.  Think about it – if a car is going 50 mph west of 24th Ave, how included will bicyclists and pedestrians feel sharing the portion of Lindau east of 24th with that car?  If the eastern portion of Lindau is ever funded it will be a perversion of the concept of complete streets and evidence A for the case that complete streets are greenwashing.

If these megaprojects come through, Bloomington is going to have to build a lot more pedestrian barriers

But Bloomington will have to figure it out sooner or later.  Right now the Mall of America is the only land use intensive enough to generate enough pedestrian traffic to justify spending big bucks to remove them from the roadway.  But Bloomington has big plans to become the third downtown mentioned above, so their pedestrian problem is only going to get worse.  The Senate just passed a transportation bill with Transportation Enhancements intact, giving the program a good chance of survival, but there is only so much money in the pot for pedestrian barriers.  The South Loop is a great candidate for a third downtown – it’s relatively central and has a spectacular location on the bluffs of the Minnesota – but so far Bloomington is headed more for Downtown Disney than any real downtown.

Penn-ed in

How many bikes will Penn collect?

About 65% of Minneapolis residents have lived in their current dwelling for less than 10 years, according to the Census Bureau.  After 30 years, 89% of the city’s dwellings will have exchanged occupants.  Why then, is the design for a facility that will last for at some 60 years determined by the whims of the immediate neighbors?

This is exemplified by the Penn Ave S reconstruction planning process, which may be about to jettison meaningful bike facilities to placate neighbors’ insatiable demand for parking.  Penn is a test for the freshly-pressed Bike Master Plan, which identifies Penn as a collector bikeway south of 54th St (the reconstruction project extends north to 50th).  The plan does not specify the type of facility needed for collectors, but the implication is that it should be something more than a sharrow or signed route, which many cyclists decry as ineffective.

Bike lanes were squeezed onto even the narrow northern segment of Penn in the initial proposals

The first proposals for Penn included options for bike lanes for the entire length of the project.  Apparently due to concerns about parking at business nodes, bike lane options were nixed, and have now been replaced with an option that would build a two-way cycle track along the westerly sidewalk for the entire project length.  When I saw the cross-section, my mind went to the closest thing we have to this cycle track concept – the hated Hennepin-Lyndale Bottleneck side path.  Reuben has compared it to a side path of the type commonly found in suburban areas and suggested that a better alternative might be a combined bike/ped fully separated facility similar to what exists on St Anthony Pkwy east of Ulysses St NE.  In a comment Shaun Murphy seemed to stick to his guns about the appropriateness of the proposed cycle track, but conceded that “proper treatment at intersections” – i.e. “bike stoplights, colored conflict zones, and raised trail crossings” – “are key”.  In the same breath, however, he says that those details won’t be sketched out unless the cycle track option is chosen, and indeed the published layout of the cycle track option does not include any intersection treatments.

The two-way cycle track option

The City is basically telling cycling advocates to trust them on a potentially substandard design or get nothing.  The alternate option includes bike lanes for two blocks between 60th and 62nd, but otherwise would include no more substantial bike facilities than sharrows.  Notably, both exceed Public Works’ typical design disdain for transit – exemplified by their refusal to include bump-outs at bus stops – by actually including one or two bus bays!  (the anti-bike layout includes one that conflicts with the two-block bike lane; the cycle track layout includes two bays)  This from a city that is supposedly trying to encourage transit use.

Detail of Hennepin County's Bike Plan showing facility on Xerxes/York

There is ample reason to include a high-quality bike facility on Penn.  Little ole Penn may seem like a sleepy little street, but it carries a lot of cars – around 8k/day on the north end and up to 15k/day near Hwy 62.  If they ever hope to collect cyclists on this street, they’re going to need to provide some separation.  As you can see from the excerpted Bike Master Plan map above, Penn is also the only real bikeway going north-south in the area until Bryant almost a mile to the east.  To the west lies Edina, which has designated France as a primary cycling route, which means that lanes are recommended.  But France is a county road, and Hennepin County doesn’t include France as a bikeway on its bike plan, instead designating Xerxes.  Unfortunately, even when jurisdictions agree on something it can be hard to get them to do anything about it, so when they disagree there is even less hope.  Minneapolis has no one to argue with on Penn so it should take advantage of that rare situation to get something done.  Moreover, while Richfield has not yet finished its bike plan, it includes Penn as a candidate route and identified Penn as a “Future Bike Trail” on its comprehensive plan (on the other hand, Penn is also a county road in Richfield, and also not on the county’s bike plan).  Depending on the direction their plan takes, Penn seems likely to be recommended for bike lanes, since its four lane configuration is overkill for the level of traffic it actually sees, north of 77th anyway.  Regardless of what type of facility Richfield chooses for Penn, its usefulness will be diminished if Minneapolis doesn’t include anything on its side of the border.

Last Bridge over the Minnehaha - how's that going to work?

Personally I like cycle tracks, although I prefer one-way cycle tracks along the roadway in each direction.  This segment of Penn is a good candidate for a two-way track, though, because of a number of long blocks on the west side.  However, it makes most sense to coordinate with Richfield, and it seems like it would be difficult or at least expensive for them to continue the facility past the intersection with 66th St, at the northwest corner of which is a parking lot that is a decent height over the roadway, held back by a retaining wall (or was, anyway; I haven’t seen it since they built a CVS in that strip mall).  In addition, the bridges over Hwy 62 and Minnehaha Creek could be considered fatal flaws for a cycle track option; since they won’t be reconstructed bike traffic would have to share the sidewalk with pedestrians at that point.

For these reasons, I think that bike lanes are the best option for Penn Ave S.  It stretches credulity to suggest that there is a parking problem along Penn Ave S; even at the business nodes there is tons of space for parking along the intersecting streets.  None of the nodes stretch more than a few buildings in from the intersection, so there is no room for complaining that customers would have to walk any further than they do in a Wal Mart parking lot.  Perhaps somewhere north of the Minnehaha Creek bridge it could transition to a two-way cycle track, although I can’t imagine how that would work.  Regardless, bike lanes are ideal for the majority of the segment because it’s unlikely a comparable facility will be built in this area for quite some time and because it’s unlikely that a two-way cycle track could be extended very far into Richfield.

But it doesn’t matter what I think – Betsy Hodges’ opinion is what really matters here.  Understandably, she will likely base her opinion largely on the attitude of her constituents (see Linden Corner), but bringing it back to paragraph 1, Penn Ave S will still be here after 89% of those constituents have moved away.  That’s why cities create policy documents – it’s an attempt to steer the conversation a little further out than being uncomfortable parking across the street from your house.  Councilmembers are also policymakers, but in Minneapolis they are allowed to cavalierly ignore the policy they just made, which in this case could easily refer to ignoring the Bike Master Plan by rebuilding Penn without bike facilities.

Don’t let Penn become another Nicollet.  Reach out to your councilmember, copy CM Hodges, remind them of the city that exists outside of a narrow parochial strip of Southwest, the city that wrote the Bike Master Plan, the city that bikes, walks, and doesn’t mind parking across the street from their destination, and the city – not to be too grandiose here – remind them of the city of the future.

More Stadium Stuff

A region of spacetime from which nothing can escape

My Rybak post the other day, though intended to be less about the stadium itself and more about what what we would be better off building instead of a stadium, prompted me to think a bit more than I wanted to about the Metrodome site for a new Vikings stadium.  Specifically a revelation about the plan to capture parking meter revenue prompted me to write a whole new post for this, but there are a couple other pieces I’d like to cover as well, and hopefully this post will prompt a catharsis that will put the whole topic out of my head.  Bear with me, please.

Meter madness

Minnescraper user newsole pointed out that it appears that only parking meter revenue from days with Vikings games would be dedicated to the stadium.  The plan doesn’t explicitly say that, but it does say that in the first year $842,500 would be raised from “1,000 Meters at $25 Plus 1,975 Meters at $30 each”, which newsole mathed out to “1000 meters x $25 + 1975 parking spots x 30 = $84,250 per game.  10 home games = $842,500 the first year.”  Convincing, but it does raise even more issues in my head.

Treasure Map

First, the cost of operating parking meters is not nothing.  Since this plan uses almost half the meters in the system, it presumably would represent almost half the daily cost of running the system.  (We’ll ignore the fact that these should be some of the more expensive meters to operate; since they are some of the highest-demand meters they are the ones that will offer the highest ROI for enforcement, so the city should also be spending more time enforcing them.  I don’t know if it actually does, though.)  However, the plan dedicates all of the revenue from these meters to the stadium, leaving other meters to cover their cost.  This is probably a relatively small cost, but it does remove revenue from other meters that would otherwise go to the general fund, so effectively more meters than the plan states will be going to stadium costs.  Presumably this is omitted from the plan out of laziness more than deceptiveness.  It’s not clear that the meter revenue is an attempt to present a veneer of user tax, and if it is, a bit more thought will show that to be untrue, as my next point may indicate.

Second, if 2,975 meters are dedicated to the stadium, some of them are going to be far enough from the stadium to be unintuitive for use as game parking.  Assuming 14 spaces per block face without curb cuts, the 227 block faces east of Marquette and north of 11th would account for 3,178 spaces, so presumably that’s the approximate area being considered for revenue capture.  But it’s hard to imagine someone cruising past all those ample lots in East Downtown still looking for a meter.  Because of the huge numbers of meters involved, this is going to be true regardless of where the line is drawn.  Many of these areas are nonetheless high-intensity destinations, and thus likely to suck in parkers despite the distance from the stadium.  But is it realistic to expect full occupancy all day?  Which brings me to….

Third, football games seem interminable to me, but my understanding is that in reality they only last 3 hours.  In some cases, people will arrive early and stay downtown all night before driving home.  These party animals may pay for a full day’s worth of parking, although my guess is that it would be rare for them to arrive at 8am, and those football fans that stay past dinner will be the exception.  I don’t know what the specific pricing plan is, but the current max rate of $2 per hour would net $30 per day if it were in use for the longest meter time, 8am to 11pm, currently only applied in the Warehouse District.  To get $30 per day for a more realistic estimate of a typical Vikings fan’s visit, say 6 hours, the rate would have to be $5 per hour, more than double the current highest rate and five times more than current rates around the dome.  Maybe people would pay – I don’t think that’s any higher than event parking in lots, and it would offer the advantage of not having to wait in line to exit the lot.  But it still seems unrealistic to expect the full daily amount at almost 3,000 spaces on every game day.  To get that, we’d probably need a Vikings team that’s a lot better than we’ve seen in a while.

Going with the wind

Will East Downtown get this...

Someone needs to tell Ted Mondale or R.T. Rybak the old proverb about the devil you know, since the vagueness of the East Downtown proposal seems giving birth to monsters in the minds of key stakeholders.*  This problem is compounded by the fact that the Metrodome sit has gone through several cuts of revisions, to the point where it makes up at least 6 mostly contradictory entries on Bill’s Top 19 Renderings list, the most recent of which I think is #19 on this list, summarized by the author as “I have no idea what is going on with this. Are those trees?”

This key stakeholder confusion bubbled over into an even more obfuscatory Star Tribune article about how some local counties’ morgues might merge and how mad Rich Stanek is about it, or something.  Anyway, the story reports the Emperor Mondale offered the county morgue as tribute to the Vikings in the form of a plaza.  If the team magnanimously accepts this offering and Hennepin County’s petty objections can be pushed aside, it would create a plaza of around 6.5 acres.  Apparently added to that would be the balance of the Metrodome’s footprint after the new stadium was built to the east but overlapping it to some unknown degree.

...or this?

For comparison’s sake, Elliot Park is 6.44 acres.  Plazas of that size are usually described as barren and windswept.  The U’s West Bank has been described as such despite having much smaller contiguous open spaces.  Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, however, is about the same size and has been often praised, but has the benefit of being more park-like, with rows of trees and shrubs breaking up the space.   We don’t have many clues as to what kind of plaza we’ll get, but the existing nothingness of East Downtown’s** streetscape prejudices me into the assumption that it will be more Tienanmen than Millennium.

11th hour for 11th Ave

Reuben discussed the fate of 11th Ave S on streets.mn recently.  The pliability of this street is apparently responsible for the feasibility of the Metrodome plan, as by sacrificing itself it allows the Vikings to avoid playing at the U of M while the new stadium is under construction.  But, as with the possible proposed plaza, details are scarce on just how 11th will be plied.

11th Ave Complete Street Tunnel

Reuben’s discussion pretty much nailed my concerns about the physical result of tussling with 11th – closing it would further isolate the already freeway-carved neighborhoods, there is a danger of severing or rendering less useful the crucial bike route, and decking the new stadium over 11th would probably accomplish those things and create quasi-freeway conditions that would endanger the usability of the street beyond the covered segment.  My concern is more about the process – while 11th Ave doesn’t have metrowide significance, it’s pretty damn important to the neighborhoods it runs through.  If the worst boogiemen are realized about the stadium plan, and 11th ends up tunnelized or severed, this will have been a significant change to local infrastructure that was initiated with almost no public input.  I believe that EISes are usually waived for sports palaces like these, and I’ve heard no sign that the public will even be able to see the plan before it’s finalized, much less comment on it.  Probably the most galling thing about it is that this type of top-down democracy is coming from touchy-feely democrats like Mark Dayton and R.T. Rybak.  (The latter has been quoted as refusing to hold a referendum on the plan, saying “The referendum is when I stand for re-election.”  The Mayor has that right, at least.)    Mark Dayton, of whom I’m a huge fan, keeps rattling on about a “People’s Stadium” but has forgotten to invite the actual people.  It’s amazing the hypocrisy that is exposed when a popular millionaire asks for a handout.

Are you done yet?

Whew.  I hope that’s all I have to say about this stadium for a while.  Hopefully you found something more interesting to read before you got to this part.  If not, I promise not to do this to you again until at least 2016, when we all will start getting Stadium Investment Capture taxes deducted from our paychecks.

*I faintly remember a blissful time in my life before I was aware of the word stakeholder.

http://www.minnpost.com/two-cities/2012/01/council-members-balk-current-minneapolis-stadium-plan-most-are-staying-flexible

Rybak to the Future?

Two quotes from recent Star Tribune articles:

In 2007, the city estimated that a West Broadway streetcar line would cost $154 million.

-Minneapolis considers ways to get North Side rolling

Under the preliminary deal, the city would contribute $150 million in construction costs to the downtown Minneapolis project.

-Tentative Vikings stadium deal is set

Not even the Mayor can make it across Mpls' traffic-choked streets

Mayor may not be good

R.T. Rybak hasn’t been a bad mayor.  I voted for him in 2009, when no one ran against him.  I also voted for him in 2005, because Peter McLaughlin, the better candidate, can do more as a Hennepin County Commissioner than as Mayor of Minneapolis.  I didn’t vote for him in 2001, although in retrospect he may have been the not-baddest candidate.

The problem with calling Rybak a good mayor is that he really hasn’t done anything good.  Looking closely at his accomplishments, you find that they are really more not-failures.  A lesser mayor might have fumbled the city’s finances, as happened to municipalities around the nation.  A lesser mayor might not have won the pension fund fight.  A lesser mayor might not have picked up the Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program handed to the City on a silver platter by Jim Oberstar.

Rybak would to have to be high to say no to free money for bikes

Not doing anything good doesn’t mean he’s done anything bad, but neither has there been anything that has noticeably improved quality of life in Minneapolis – nothing Rybak can really take credit for, anyway.  Sure, crime has plummeted, but that has been mirrored by a nationwide decline in crime.  Ok, there has been renewed investment in multifamily housing, but that is also a nationwide trend, and isn’t anything that hasn’t been seen in previous decades.  Cool, new bike lanes, but should Rybak be lauded for not rejecting free money from the Federal government?

Doing good things costs money, and Rybak has clearly chosen a cautious fiscal path over signature projects.  The problem is that not spending money can have a cost also – how much does it cost the city to lose Target IT jobs to Brooklyn Center?  To have flat population growth?  To have no change in the share of residents driving alone to work?  Most Minneapolitans have sat on our concerns, not really interested in arguing against fiscal stability in a time of recession and red ink.

Wintertime for the wise ant

Stop that dog! She's got Mpls' only revenue stream!

But now, it seems, Rybak has admitted that we do have some money to spend, which he is proposing to spend on a playground for millionaires that will be vacant 345 days out of the year.  My disposition is in favor of large public works projects, but after a decade of frugality, there are about a million things I’m ready to splurge on before a stadium.  MPR has the most details I’ve seen about the proposed financing plan, which apparently has a $55m hole.  I have to admit that I’m a bit puzzled by the documents provided by 35W Financial, but I think the hole is in up front costs (the city’s $314m contribution would be $164m in capital costs and the rest in operating, I think).  Still, one detail jumped out at my tiny brain:  around $31m over the 30 year life of the plan would come from parking revenue.  I’ll explain why that sounds familiar.

Around 50 years after the City’s Public Works Department decided that the area’s low-density development patterns did not “warrant the capital investment in a fixed rail rapid transit system”, they’ve decided to study fixed rail after all, albeit not rapid transit.  In Minneapolis streetcars are on the drawing board rather than on the street because the city sat on their preliminary planning efforts in the belief that there were no funds available, thereby missing all the free money that started raining down in 2009, when the federal money in programs like Small Starts, TIGER, and Urban Circulators was awarded to better-prepared cities.

Transit or stadiums?

For the most part, the feds dole out matching grants, so there needs to be a local source as well.  In addition, only capital costs come from Washington, so the City looked into sources of operating funds.  In various funding scenarios, the City looked at capturing $350k-665k per year from parking meter revenues, which the report implies would be 25-75% of a 25% increase in meter revenue.  Meanwhile the stadium plan captures 100% of revenue from 2,975 meters – almost half the City’s 6800 meters – at $25 and $30 a day, a 25-50% increase on the current max rate of $20 a day.  It seems unlikely there would be anything left for streetcars.  (Edit:  Minnescraper user newsole and commenter Brad below have both pointed out that it’s likely that only game-day revenue from the meters would be dedicated to the stadium.  That means there would likely be something left for streetcars.  However, there are still several problems with the plan to capture meter revenue for the stadium, and I’m collecting them into a miscellaneous stadium post that if you’re lucky I’ll never get around to actually posting.)

I’m not necessarily in favor of streetcars.  Although there are certainly some routes that would justify them, it seems likely that a wiser move would be to spread streetcar money out to a wider range of routes using much cheaper Baby BRT improvements.  (All the Minneapolis segments of the proposed Rapid Bus routes could be built for $145.6m, coincidentally close to the West Broadway streetcar estimate and Minneapolis’ contribution to the stadium capital costs.)  In addition, I’m skeptical that a short segment of streetcar would draw many users, or if implemented mostly in the Downtown Fare Zone it would generate as much revenue as a bus.  The point is that transit improvements are much more desperately needed in Minneapolis and would be a much bigger benefit to the city than a stadium would be.  Certainly building a stadium would be a huge and visible reminder of Rybak’s legacy, but he faces a tough job convincing Minneapolis voters that the Minnesota Vikings need to be paid for by Minneapolis.

Trouble, more trouble

Stolen from the NY Times

Besides, there’s another huge and visible reminder of Rybak’s legacy, although it’s one that he’d like to forget.  North Minneapolis was in rough shape before Rybak was first elected, of course, and he has made both visible and holistic efforts at addressing the area’s pervasive and unique problems.  But it was also on Rybak’s watch that the neighborhood lost 10,000 residents, suffered thousands of foreclosures (6,243 from 2006 to 2011, 45% of the city’s 13,842 total in that time frame), and consistently and deeply declined in median income.

I’m not so petty as to blame Rybak for market conditions that created ample credit or lax regulation that allowed mortgage brokers to stoop to new lows of fraud and discrimination.  And I’m not aware of any city that took matters into its own hands by creating its own loan modification program to assist underwater homeowners.  But there’s no question Minneapolis could have created such a program, at least after 2009, when restrictions were lifted on the sales tax that is now being proposed for use on a fancy playground for the Vikings.

Are the stars out tonight?

Minneapolis already dabbles in the mortgage game through the Minneapolis Advantage program, which was created in 2008 to create an incentive to buy homes that are “foreclosed, vacant, or in a high foreclosure-impacted neighborhood”.  This program is now funded by HUD Neighborhood Stabilization Program 2 funds and may be considered a success, in that it’s assisted almost 350 home purchases, presumably some of which wouldn’t have happened without the program.  In that case it would be a small success, notable if you compare those 350 purchases to the total number of foreclosures listed a couple paragraphs up.

A longer-standing program is the City Living program, a more complex program that provides both interest rate subsidy and second mortgages in Minneapolis and St Paul.  It’s hard for me to say for sure without more details than I can find on each of these programs, but it’s likely one or both could have been modified to provide refinancing to homeowners at risk of foreclosure, although probably at greater expense.  Home values in North Minneapolis dropped by at least 50% (probably more), which is a substantial amount for the City to make up.  But almost $30m a year of the sales tax would be diverted to Palazzo Wilf, so even if the City were eating up to $40k per mortgage, more than twice as many homes could be salvaged per year than the Minneapolis Advantage program has affected in its lifespan.

The sense of an ending

Why not let a city that can afford it pay for a stadium? Enter the SouthDome!

A big question with a City-sponsored mortgage modification program is whether the banks would participate; several have resisted a federal-level program with the cowboyish reasoning that modifications would encourage more widespread default.  I mention this to emphasize how many of the forces that have resulted in Rybak’s meh mayoralty were beyond his control.  One thing that is not beyond his control, though, is whether to spend the City’s long-awaited fiscal freedom on a sports facility that at best debatably benefits the city.  As a cynic, I can only assume that he thinks he can get the stadium built against the will of most Minneapolitans, then park in the mayor chair until a statewide office is up for nomination, which he’ll then use his Stadium Builder legacy to win.  He may be right about the third part of that plan, but he shouldn’t assume that he will be mayor by default.  A majority are against using city money on a stadium in the first place.  When they realize what they could have had, it seems likely that most will pass on their fourth chance to vote for him.