Our (very expensive) trains to nowhere...

 

"As a veteran of somebody who has worked downtown when I was with IBM, I could not be happier to see that concrete jungle suffer a slow death. Everything was a hassle - nothing was cheap, nor nothing was easy. The cobweb of LRT tracks in downtown just added to the dystopian atmosphere. I am happy to be done with that chapter in my life. Now I just want to be done with paying for the trains headed into that dying city."     

At one point in time, the city planners and the Met Council in the Twin Cities had inhaled some Pixie Dust, and their vision became obscured with fantasies of riding a sleek new railroad car to work every morning. Between the Pixie Dust and the Kool Aid, the idea of riding in a train to work rather than rush hour traffic, got derailed. How so? The double-edged sword of Covid mixed in with the lawlessness of the Floyd aftermath and the ongoing "War on ICE", has left the Twin Cities with lots and lots of empty office buildings. So then - why have all these new and unfinished LRT sinkholes terminating in downtown? What gives? Who is behind this nonsense?

Don't look now, but the long (and I mean long) awaited Southwest LRT (Green Line). is finally almost done. WAY over budget and very late to the party, it should be up and running in 2027. At an unbelievable cost of just shy of $3B dollars. And who will ride it? Somali youth trying to get down to the Mall of America. Who else? Good question. Since few people work downtown anymore, is the Green Line going to go the same route as the Northstar Line? If the truth be known, the Northstar Line is still in operation - only not in Minnesota. It now runs down in Texas. What a waste of MN taxpayer dollars!

And now that the Blue Line is still a long way away from being done, some of the big spenders in MN state government are actually getting cold feet on this project. Why? With the huge overruns on the Green Line, that was only small potatoes compared to what the projected bill will be for the Blue Line. Like maybe $3.6B dollars to build another train to nowhere. And now there is a very rare kerfuffle by the different big spenders in state government. Like - who pays for this choo-choo train which nobody will ride. 

What is the future of trains in the Twin Cities? Will they be replaced by Waymo auto cars? Tesla self-driving cars? More at home employment? Many of us who do not live nor work in the downtown area, have zero desire to ride these trains to anyplace. All that money the taxpayers have spent on all these trains, are now just a sunk cost. All this infrastructure will be a monument to pea poor planning by a bunch of unelected bureaucrats.

As a veteran of somebody who has worked downtown when I was with IBM, I could not be happier to see that concrete jungle called Minneapolis suffer a slow death. Everything was a hassle - nothing was cheap, nor nothing was easy. The cobweb of LRT tracks just added to the dystopian atmosphere. I am happy to be done with that chapter in my life. Now I just want to be done with paying for the trains headed into that dying city.