opinion

Mike Meyers' recent commentary ("Light rail: Popular -- and a boondoggle," May 16) attempts to rekindle a decades-old fight about bus vs. rail. This is an unproductive distraction. The real question before us is how our transportation investments can create thriving, healthy communities in our region and state. Leaders in other regions, including our economic competitors, know that both bus and rail have key roles to play.

Most important, light rail, more than the bus, has the ability to encourage compact development, just as the streetcars did decades ago in communities across the metro area. Compact development enables some trips to be made without a car and allows our state to get more use out of its capital investments -- everything from sewers to roads to schools. The increased value of property along the Hiawatha Line reflects the appeal of living close to transit service. The line is a public investment that pays dividends in increased private-sector development and tax revenue to local units of government.

Meyers suggests that Minnesota is building transit because the federal government pays half the cost. He fails to mention that the federal government pays for 80 percent of the cost of highways and that federal road funding comes without the stiff national competition and approvals that rail projects must secure. Roads have had a massive federal subsidy since the Eisenhower administration. That is why there is a push in Washington today to level the playing field by changing rules that currently favor highways over transit.

While the capital cost of light rail is substantial, so is the cost of highway projects. The Twin Cities region will spend more than $300 million on the Wakota Bridge project; $170 million on reconstruction of the interchange of Hwys. 494 and 169, and potentially $700 million on the proposed St. Croix River crossing. Another parking ramp that the Mall of America wanted several years ago was estimated to cost $172 million. The Met Council's 2030 Transportation Policy Plan forecasts that if we continue our highway-heavy approach we will need $40 billion for highway expansion (which would require a gas tax increase of more than a dollar per gallon starting today).

The transportation money that has been hardest to come by in Minnesota is funding to expand the bus system and operate both bus and rail. The state's bus systems have hardly grown in a decade due to a shortage in operating funding. The Metropolitan Council's plan to double transit service is a decade behind schedule. The state budget deal cut last weekend will chop operating support for metro-area transit by another $10 million in fiscal 2011, while funding for state roads remains whole.

So, let's have a debate about the future of transportation and patterns of development in Minnesota, but let's put all the cards on the table, not just pit bus against rail. Do we want more and bigger roads, more costly subsidies for parking and more families stuck with the high expense of owning multiple cars? Or do we want a region that offers more transportation choices, including public transit, bicycling and walking, and gives priority to fixing the roads we have rather than to road expansion?

We think more transportation choices offer Minnesotans a healthier, safer and more affordable future.

Barb Thoman is acting executive director at Transit for Livable Communities in St. Paul.