Today Minnesotans who care about climate change and want to have decent public transit in the Twin Cites got some very good news. The Southwest Transitway, a proposed light rail line going from Minneapolis to Eden Prairie, received the cost and ridership estimates today from HDR Engineering, a consulting firm. Planners are considering three potential routes for the LRT which you can view here . HDR estimated costs between $1.2 and $1.8 billion and ridership between 28 and 30 thousand per day, about what the current Hiawatha line gets. And keep in mind that most LRT projects beat their ridership projections, Hiawatha did in just three years.
This news means that the 3A route is likely to be chosen. It's very hard to get funding to build LRT without federal funding, to get federal funding currently you need to get a cost per rider (Also known as Cost Effectiveness Index or CEI) of $29 or less. The 3A route currently has a CEI of just $30 which could easily be pared down to $29 while the Uptown route that some have argued for has a CEI of $44 which would mean forgoing federal funding and likely not seeing LRT in the Southwest Metro for decades longer. But with a route (3A) so close to meeting CEI requirements the Southwest Transitway is moving towards it's goal of completion by 2015. Here are the next steps.
-Hennepin County will hold public hearings on the potential routes (details below the fold)
-On Sep. 30th the Southwest Policy Advisory Committee, a group of 15 local officials chaired by Hennepin County Commissioner Gail Dorman, will make a final recommendation on which route to move forward with, likely the 3A route.
-On Oct. 20th Hennepin County will vote on the advisory committee's route recommendation.
-The Metro Council will vote on the recommendation sometime in Nov/Dec.
-The route will also need to be approved by the state legislature and all cites that the route runs through which will likely happen by February at the latest.
-After that if the FTA approves it it will go into preliminary engineering early 2010. If it gets to that point it's likely to make it to operation by 2015.
This is a important project for anyone who cares about climate change, economic growth in the Twin Cites and quality public transportation. It's a critical project that even many Republicans are backing. Today this important project moved one stop forward, and that's good news.
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