Mess Transit

 

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"

Albert Einstein

There is an old saying, you live where you like to live and work where you want to work. That is the story of my working life. We have always lived north of the cities and most of my jobs have been south of the cities. The drive had to give. Over the years, I put on countless miles and spent hundreds of hours in traffic, mostly in rush hour.

For a variety of reasons, mostly financial, I have tried to carpool, van pool, or take public transportation wherever practical. That being said, most of my miles over the decades have been in a car pool consisting of me, myself and I. While sitting in gridlocked traffic, many times I would have this recurring thought - "How did our transportation system get so bad?".

During my first job, I carpooled with two other men who also lived in the northern suburbs. It worked out just fine. After the OPEC oil embargo in the seventies, MTC started a van pool program. A bunch of us from the north country signed up for it and it worked out just fine. In 1980, I accepted a job with another company located very close to my former company. Because it was close, I could stay in the van pool. About three weeks into my new job, my boss called me into his office and closed the door. He told me he liked my work, but I needed to drop out of the van pool. When asked why, he replied "It will be career limiting for you". The next day, I left the van pool. My car pool or van pool days were over for the rest of my working career.

My options for mass transit have always been limited. There is no mass transit of any kind anywhere close to where I live. Later in my career, when I had clients downtown, I would occasionally take the bus. However, I had to drive 15 minutes just to get to the closest transit hub. Once on the bus, it worked okay for me. It was crowded, uncomfortable, sometimes unreliable,  but it usually got me from point "A" to point "B". If I had clients that were not downtown, I drove. There was no other option.

My last job was in St. Paul. Getting from where I live to St. Paul using the bus system was daunting at best. The last bus would leave St. Paul to head to the north country at 5:05 and if you missed it, you were out of luck. A few times I had to walk out of meetings as I had less than five minutes to catch the last bus. After awhile, to protect my career, I quit taking the bus and drove myself every day.

So where is mass transit in the Twin Cities today? Nowhere. It is more like "mess transit".The Northstar works for a small group of people who happen to live by the line and work in Minneapolis. As the scheduling is very limiting, if you miss the last train in the afternoon, good luck. Also, if you don't live by the Northstar route, what good is it to you? It costs a whale of a lot of money, serves very few, and is hated by many.

How about LRT? Again, it works fine if you live by the line and work downtown. For people in the suburbs, the LRT does no good what so ever. It is expensive to build, expensive to operate, and the current line is not self sustaining. It is estimated the second line nearing completion will also have cost overruns. Meanwhile, the expected number of cars to be taken off the roads once the LRT was built never materialized. We have taken valuable transportation dollars and put them into trains and bike trails. Meanwhile, the majority of people who will never use LRT or the Northstar continue to sit in gridlock traffic.

I live in a large suburb of over 30,000. We have never had mass transit and there are no immediate plans to add it. We have the privilege to pay for a mass transit system that most will never use. Our central planners have really screwed this one up. Some say the utopians on the Met Council did this on purpose to force more people into vertical living downtown. However, knowing that most will not be able to use mass transit, dollars should have been allocated to update our aging highway system. Our transit system is not just a mess, but a hot mess indeed.