Does Anyone Know What's Up with the Nicollet Streetcar?

[Jay Leno voice] You heard about this? You know about this?

The Nicollet Streetcar: you may remember it, but I’m not sure what’s going on with it lately. The idea was that there would be a streetcar, running in traffic (i.e. you can drive a car on the tracks) from the St. Anthony Main area in Northeast Minneapolis down to Lake and Nicollet.

You’ve maybe seen the map:

Is someone working on this? I haven’t really heard anything about it for (five? six?) years, except in situations where the idea of it has become a problem for some other thing—more on that in a minute. The mayor implied that it could potentially be dead shortly before taking office in 2018.

There were a bunch of studies and reports and meetings in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which led to the City of Minneapolis adopting a “locally preferred alternative” of “modern streetcar” for the corridor in 2013. This was long enough ago that it’s a bit hard to piece together the exact timeline and find the right documents. But, notably, it was after the Metropolitan Council had completed its own study of “arterial transitways” where they were thinking about improving bus service. You may recognize that as what led to the A Line on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul and the C Line on Penn Avenue in Minneapolis, which I’ll refer to as BRT lines for simplicity’s sake.

There was some inter-agency turf war-type stuff between the Metropolitan Council and Minneapolis, as the former is the one who would probably end up actually operating the streetcar, through Metro Transit. The Wikipedia page for the Metropolitan Council heavily implies that they’re the ones who are supposed to be planning the region’s transit network, though it’s not like that’s stopped the counties from doing it, too, and—er, nevermind. Judging it on its non-jurisdictional conflict merits, I didn’t think the streetcar was a good idea at the time and still don’t, for the most part.

One interesting thing is that when Minneapolis put their plans for building a streetcar in writing, they got the state legislature to authorize a “value capture district” to fund their portion of it. Property taxes from several redeveloped downtown blocks and a couple others are going into an account (I imagine this to be a Wells Fargo Way2Save® savings account) even now. By itself, LPM—the glassy green apartment tower in Loring Park the A-Gays often post from—is paying over a million bucks a year into the district. The local (from the City) contribution was supposed to be something like $60 million out of a $200 million total project cost in 2013, but given how these things work, I would have to imagine the total cost at this point would be safely in the mid nine figures.

More recently, the Metropolitan Council has continued to chug along with planning out the BRT network, and the D Line on Chicago Avenue and Emerson/Fremont in Minneapolis was fully funded by the state legislature last year. That’s supposed to start construction this spring, which is cool. The B Line on Lake Street was also fully funded. After B, it sounds like we’re doing E, on Hennepin in Minneapolis down to Southdale. The B, D, and E Lines are all supposed to be wrapped up by 2024, allegedly.

I’m a big fan of making the buses better. We’ve blown and are continuing to blow just a gigantic amount of money in the Twin Cities on transit projects that are half or all the way bad, and the BRT lines seem like a really great way to take what’s already working and make it work better. The streetcar would be slow and expensive and not really much better than a bus.

As of right now, the Metropolitan Council is holding off on advancing transit improvements to the Route 18 bus on Nicollet until the situation with the streetcar is figured out one way or the other.

Schieferdecker posted these slides on Twitter and I can’t seem to find the actual presentation they were in but I can’t imagine he just made them up?

One thing we could think about doing, if we wanted to be real creative, is use the money (value) that’s already been collected (capture) in the account (district) to fund improvements to the Route 18 bus. The state law authorizing the district is written as such:

(a) In addition to paying for reasonable administrative costs of the district, the city may spend tax revenues of the district for property acquisition, improvements, and equipment to be used for operations within the project area, along with related costs, for:

(1) planning, design, and engineering services related to the construction of the streetcar line;

(2) acquiring property for, constructing, and installing a streetcar line;

(3) acquiring and maintaining equipment and rolling stock and related facilities, such as maintenance facilities, which need not be located in the project area;

(4) acquiring, constructing, or improving transit stations; and

(5) acquiring or improving public space, including the construction and installation of improvements to streets and sidewalks, decorative lighting and surfaces, and plantings related to the streetcar line.

Each of the items on there reference the streetcar pretty specifically, except for #4, which I’m guessing was written more generally because you might have had to mess with the existing Nicollet Mall light rail station, and you wouldn’t want to have to pass a whole new law for that. What you could maybe do, though, is interpret “transit stations,” which doesn’t have a specific definition in the law, to include the stations for a Nicollet BRT line, and put that money that’s already stowed away towards that. As of press time, I’m not licensed to practice law in the state of Minnesota, but I think we’ve seen weirder arguments.

The BRT lines are pretty cheap compared to building bridges through marshes in Eden Prairie, and you can definitely slap a number of these babies along Nicollet Avenue with $10 million.

The total project cost of upgrading the whole stretch of the 18 route to BRT-level service from downtown Minneapolis to Bloomington is estimated at about $67 million, which isn’t too far off Minneapolis’ estimated $60 million contribution to a streetcar that would get stuck behind a Toyota Matrix and end at Lake and Nicollet. Very interestingly, Metro Transit projects that giving the 18 the BRT treatment would actually make money for them (page 43) as so many people would ride it that fare collection would more than cover operating costs. This does not very happen often in public transit.

In any case, regardless of what happens to the money in the account, it does seem like we need to figure out if we’re building the streetcar or not? Are we building the streetcar? If we’re not going to build the streetcar (I don’t think we’re going to build the streetcar) we should probably just kill the project on paper and let the Met Council make the bus better.

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Note: You may have noticed this in the slides, but St. Paul did the same thing as Minneapolis by nerfing improved bus service on West 7th Street in favor of a streetcar that will run in mixed traffic in St. Paul before going into a tunnel under Fort Snelling that will open in 2048 at a cost of at least $6 billion. They were even second in line for the bus improvements at the time. Was supposed to be the B Line, which is why we went from A to C with the first two. Lake Street in Minneapolis will get the B Line now. Very cool stuff.