Say what you will, but those unforced project management blunders plaguing the Southwest Light Rail Transit (SWLRT) project will have minimal impact on the system's long run operating performance or trackside economic development. Neither the unnecessary and outrageously expensive "shallow tunnel" through Kenilworth nor the overdone $93 million "crash wall" near downtown Minneapolis will keep SWLRT trains from running at their design velocities and meeting their service objectives, while those remote and inaccessible Penn and 21st Street stations can always be closed when their lack of use becomes apparent.
In reality, very little has happened to corrupt what matters — the line's inherent, shortest path, geographic advantage, and its exclusive, off-street, high-performance right of way between downtown Minneapolis and Eden Prairie.
SWLRT trains will still move between these endpoints over a pathway that is 15% shorter than the competing street/freeway grid, and at 30 mph, nearly twice the effective velocity of Green Line trains fighting street traffic along St. Paul's University Avenue. Private-sector developers have responded accordingly by investing billions into SWLRT station area residential and commercial projects.
This performance-driven mobility advantage could well propel SWLRT ridership to levels exceeding even pre-pandemic expectations. Patrons making bus-rail transfers onto the system at Target Field, including most north Minneapolis riders, will marvel at how much of the southwest metro area will come within the reach of a typical 40-minute travel window.
Imagine what nearly an hour saved per round trip will mean each day to a transit-dependent essential services worker traveling between the North Side and a southwest metro workplace. That is serious mobility, and from it comes transit-driven equity — all made possible by a light rail line unimpeded by street and pedestrian interference.
This is what Met Council still gets right about the 30-mph SWLRT — and what it now gets wrong about placing its Bottineau Blue Line Extension onto 8 miles of traffic-clogged north Minneapolis streets and northwest suburban arterial medians.
At 15 to 20 mph, including station and traffic stops, the relocated Blue Line Extension will trundle up and down West Broadway no faster than Metro Transit's revamped express buses will run nearby on Penn and Fremont Avenues. Few, if anyone, using this streetcar wannabe will get anywhere any faster than they do today. That is fake mobility and, because of it, fake equity.
Nor will anyone merely interacting with this system get where they are going as safely as they do now. Bottineau-on-Broadway trains will likely collide with pedestrians, cyclists and motorists at rates comparable to similar systems in Seattle and Los Angeles. If so, expect a couple of North Side fatalities per year and several collisions per month. There will be no marveling over that.
