In a classic Friday afternoon news dump, Ramsey County quietly killed its expensive and bedraggled Riverview Corridor project. A long-planned connection running from downtown St. Paul past the Xcel Energy Center to the MSP airport and Mall of America, the rail transit project was set to cost at least $2.5 billion and open sometime in 2032. Instead, county officials washed their hands of a project that’s been in the works for 35 years, postponing again meaningful transit investment for one of St. Paul’s most important corridors.
I’ve been following this project for a long time as a St. Paul resident and transit advocate, then as a member of 2017-era Technical Advisory Committee, and finally as part of a recently aborted Community Advisory Committee. It brings me no pleasure to see the project abruptly canceled, but this week, looking at a post-mortem of the line, here are six observations.
1. 30-plus years of impasse
Following the path once known as Old Fort Road, one the metro’s oldest trails, the contemporary history of the Riverview Corridor begins in the late 1980s when the first seeds of rail transit were planted. Along with the Central Corridor (Green Line) and Hiawatha (Blue Line) light rails, the Riverview Corridor was a focus for late 20th century planners. The route would connect one of the two downtowns to the airport, then and now an obvious candidate for large-scale transit investment.
The route turned toward reality in 2000 when unorthodox Gov. Jesse Ventura was doling out a state budget surplus. Struck by its cost effectiveness, he allocated $44 million of state money to the St. Paul’s Riverview Corridor bus rapid transit (BRT) project. (Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $80 million today.)
In typical St. Paul fashion, political leadership never coalesced around the project, especially along West 7th Street, where a whole generation of folks were still agitated by the nearby 35E litigation (another long story). The money was eventually returned to state budget coffers, but if it had been built, the pioneering BRT would have been running by 2004, offering two decades of improved transit for people around St. Paul. Instead, the only benefit was a frequency boost to the Route 54 bus.
Fast forward 15 years, and another fateful decision took place in 2014. At the time, Metro Transit was launching its arterial BRT program and had identified West 7th as an obvious second route to be built after the “A Line” down St. Paul’s Snelling Avenue. The proposed B Line project would have opened around 2015 and, with improved quality and speed, would have likely boosted transit ridership by 30%. Instead, Ramsey County and St. Paul officials voted to turn back the $28 million allocation (about $38 million today) in favor of a vague streetcar proposal. Even looking past the money, the opportunity costs of years of inaction are staggering.
2. It’s way too hard to build a transit project in this country
Compared to most places in the world, it’s extremely difficult to build transit in the United States. As analysts and others have pointed out, labor regulations, consulting costs, intergovernmental complexity, too-powerful railroads, public engagement timelines, litigiousness, and over-built “best practices” combine to make transit expensive and inefficient in just about every American situation. Especially compared to Asia and continental Europe, similar types of projects end up costing many times more and taking far longer. Meanwhile, American government budgets and processes almost limitlessly privilege and subsidize driving.
The local examples of the Green and Blue line extensions are each revealing in their own ways, but they’re relative success stories compared to some other examples around the country. The end result is that climate action is very difficult in U.S. cities, and transportation has proven to be the most intransigent part of the puzzle when it comes to decreasing American carbon pollution.
One interesting thing about the Riverview project is that funding wasn’t its fatal flaw. Sure the project was expensive, but thanks to years of sales tax accumulation, Ramsey County has stockpiled money to pay for transit. In addition, Metro Transit’s recent legislative funding boost gives the agency (distinct from RCRRA, the planning body) a fiscal stability that’s rare in the United States.
Instead, it was a political impasse and lack of buy-in from multiple parties, including skeptical community groups and lukewarm reception from even the most die-hard transit advocates. For example, the Metropolitan Airports Commission’s recent opposition to the project because of vehicle traffic concerns, a misguided stance given carbon impacts, was the last straw for county leadership.
3. The route is a political minefield
Given the destructive history of American transportation planning, it’s hard to get too upset about public engagement for these kinds of projects, at least at the outset. Years ago, I remember sitting through one of the Riverview TAC meetings and first listening to the testimony by representatives of some of Minnesota’s Native tribes who, for the most part, just wanted less infrastructural impact over their sacred Dakota bdote site.
Right away, a list of similar concerns created sticking points for the project, especially for bringing the proposed train over the Mississippi River. Early plans to build a new bridge between St. Paul and Fort Snelling were scrapped, and engineers instead were challenged to use the existing highway bridge right-of-way. Many logistical wrinkles later — personally I thought the single-tracked option would have worked out — it was going to be a very expensive situation that pleased nobody.
The second hurdle was how to get a train with dedicated right-of-way through the choke-point near the intersection of West 7th and Walnut Street, where restaurants and other regional destinations sit near the Xcel Energy Center. To take just one example, most days there’s a queue of cars turning into and out of the constrained Chestnut Street parking lot outside Cosetta’s Italian restaurant. It remains hard to imagine how a mixed-traffic streetcar would have made its way through the vehicular bedlam, and the easiest solution, removal of on-street parking, proved too great a political lift for project leaders.
Finally, there were downtown problems. The original plan had been to “interline” the streetcar with the existing Green Line tracks, something that makes a great deal of fiscal and engineering sense. Metro Transit killed that idea early on because of how a mixed-traffic streetcar impacts reliability, along with other logistical issues. Ever since then, engineers struggled to figure out an easy path through downtown St. Paul, and none of the solutions were elegant.
4. Streetcars were a middling trend
I’m not a pedant when it comes to transit terminology, and the difference between a streetcar and a light-rail is a fine line. They’re both vehicles on rails, after all, and both can run singly or in “trains” connected together. That said, the insistence by project planners on thinking of the Riverview Corridor as a “modern streetcar” at every turn proved to be a poor instinct.
I chalk it up to the streetcar trend that swept the U.S. in the early 2000s, thanks largely to the success of Portland, Oregon’s Pearl District line. Over the next decades, planners all throughout North America thought they’d discovered a transit “silver bullet” with urban modern streetcars, and many were planed and a handful were built.
Locally, for example, Minneapolis funded, and never built, a streetcar on Nicollet Avenue; the money is still sitting around in the city budget somewhere, helping shape things like the Lake Street Kmart land acquisition. St. Paul commissioned its own streetcar study in 2014, identifying a few potential lines, including West 7th. Elsewhere, there were plenty of streetcars built around the country in the first decades of the 21st century.
I’ve ridden modern streetcars in Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Tampa, Detroit, and elsewhere, and none of the projects offer great transit. Most of the time, you’ll find single-vehicle streetcars putzing slowly around downtowns because they lack dedicated right-of-way. That makes them mediocre on one the most important measures of a transit system: moving people quickly and efficiently through a city. The Kansas City streetcar, on which the Riverview Corridor was modeled, is not much of an exception, though it has proved popular enough to merit an expansion (now under construction). Even there, the fares are free, speeds are pretty slow, and ridership is limited.
In its final streetcar form, the project was going to run one-car trains that sat in mixed-traffic at their most congested points, from downtown through the West 7th restaurant area. Those limitations would have made the transit advantage pretty small for situations like big crowds — say an Xcel concert — where rail transit normally shines. For transit advocates, the fact that speed projections showed that the billion-dollar streetcar would be both slower and less reliable than the existing 54 bus made it a difficult project to support.
5. West 7th remains ripe for transit improvement
In the big picture, the fact that West 7th Street’s street design still prioritizes fast automobile travel is ridiculous given how over-built the corridor is with highway alternatives. Interstate 35E, finally completed in 1990 after decades of neighborhood litigation, gives drivers a fast freeway option to the airport or the mall via its connection with Highway 62 and the Mendota Bridge. Alternately, there’s Shepard Road, a four-lane divided highway running along the Mississippi bluffs that sees far less traffic than warranted by its expense and scope.
All of these routes traverse roughly the same corridor, delivering you from the Xcel Energy Center to MSP Airport in around 12 minutes. To transform West 7th, the neighborhood commercial street, into a place centered on transit and walkability should be an easy decision. Instead, crossing West 7th Street remains a dangerous hazard, where speeding cars make anyone on foot feel like the frog in Frogger. Drivers speed and weave down the street, and some of the metro area’s least pleasant bus stops can be found along its noisy, polluted shoulders.
Meanwhile, the street is rich in historic walkable fabric, mixed-use buildings and small fine-grained shops that would thrive if given great transit and comfortable sidewalks. While it’s nearly impossible to convince small business owners that transit is more important than parking, if done right, I’m confident that a street reconstruction around transit would have helped the neighborhood thrive.
6. A lot of time, money, and political capital was burned up into nothing
Over the last few months of Community Advisory Committee meetings I attended, I never failed to notice how many staff would be on the call. Each meeting the moderator carefully introduced everyone, and there would be a dozen folks doing communication or management or engineering or engagement.
This is to say that the only real winners of this whole process were the teams of highly trained folks working for HNTB, AECOM, 4RM+ULA, Kimley-Horn, or a string of similar consultants. All together, this was 10 years of work to do quite fine-grained planning, including reams of detailed engineering diagrams of station areas, rights-of-way, many renderings, historic surveys, and the like.
And for what? I wonder if anyone will ever calculate the price tag for transit planning for this nonexistent transit project over the years. It’s at least eight figures.
The news is another exasperating development for downtown St. Paul and the east metro, which has received a steady stream of grim tidings over the last year. For streetcar boosters, the appeal of the project was that it would inscribe a rail connection between downtown and the airport, putting St. Paul’s struggling downtown office district on symbolically equal footing with Minneapolis. The project would have also prompted the reconstruction of a key commercial street, one of the handful that’s attracted housing investment and businesses near the downtown core.
Now, there’s none of that. The best case scenario is that Metro Transit adds the West 7th corridor to its BRT planning process as soon as possible, just like it did over 10 years ago. If put in the funding queue immediately and, in theory, it could start running after the H Line sometime around 2030. (Might it be the J or K Line?)
That project wouldn’t reconstruct and re-shape West 7th Street, and it likely wouldn’t deliver much new Federal funding to the East Metro. But it would make bus stops, ride quality, and speeds better for the people trying to get around St. Paul.
That’s the only thing that was really important in the first place. For the riders who actually use the crowded bus system, perched at a bare concrete pad next to high-speed traffic, 30 years of waiting for transit improvements is far too long.
Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
