Green Line Extension - Southwest LRT

[grant1simons2]

Kenilworth bridge concepts presented.

http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts ... ins/de9f59

I really like the steel and concrete one but the thin deck really doesn't look like it will fit well and looks like it could fail easily maybe. But I like them! The steel one, at least in the rendering, has a really cool design in my opinion.

[MNdible]

While I prefer #2 (concrete), I'd also be fine with #3 (steel piles).

Anything but #1. So overbearing.

[kirby96]

I like how they make the train barely visible in each one. I'm guessing that was intentional.

[David Greene]

Arched pier FTW. The other two are just...is ridiculous the right word?

[David Greene]

I like how they make the train barely visible in each one. I'm guessing that was intentional.

From a canoe, given the bike path on one side and the freight on the other, the LRT *won't* be very visible. Seems like a realistic rendering to me.

[MNdible]

Arched pier FTW. The other two are just...is ridiculous the right word?

The arched pier option is visually heavy, faux-historic, and utterly unoriginal. Why should a bridge in this location be designed to match the standard freeway overpass?

The other two options are visually much lighter, expressive of the materials they're using, and unique for this location. Not ridiculous.

[David Greene]

Skewed piers, just because? At least the arched pier attempts to match the other railroad bridges in the area.

[MNdible]

Skewed piers because that's actually how bridge supports get built in poor soils.

The big concrete member at the water line in the arched pier design is likely capturing the actual piles that you can't see.

Anyway, it's hard to convince somebody to like something that they clearly don't like, but as I stated above, this is a unique bridge in a unique location being built in 2014 (nay, 2017 -- the future!), so I'd rather see something funky and different that does a little to celebrate that fact, rather than trotting out Ye Olde MNDOT Bridge Trimmings once again.

[EOst]

we're just waiting to see how the park board's lighting on fire of money they supposedly don't have goes. crying poverty on basic park upkeep but then spending hundreds of thousands on studies to appease rich constituents.

Unsurprisingly, an email to my park commissioner to question it a few weeks went entirely unanswered. But I guess it's probably asking too much for elected officials to be responsive to their constituents.

[talindsay]

While I prefer #2 (concrete), I'd also be fine with #3 (steel piles).

Anything but #1. So overbearing.

Completely agree, but people like how "tidy" those huge concrete bridges look. If you look at highway construction, there's been a move away from the simple steel construction, toward things that look heavier but "cleaner". I think we'll get #1.

[talindsay]

Arched pier FTW. The other two are just...is ridiculous the right word?

The arched pier option is visually heavy, faux-historic, and utterly unoriginal. Why should a bridge in this location be designed to match the standard freeway overpass?

The other two options are visually much lighter, expressive of the materials they're using, and unique for this location. Not ridiculous.

Yup.

[David Greene]

I learned something about construction. Good. I honestly wasn't thrilled about any of them but #2 and #3 just seemed so contrived to me. I like #2 better than #3 because #3 looks kinda garish to me, but maybe the render of that one isn't really capturing what it'd look like. I still think #2 and #3 try to hard to be something they're not (wood).

Yes, #1 looks like a highway bridge. That was my first thought as well. If you could thin the pillars and deck a bit I still think #1 is the best. Can they not just build something aesthetically close to the Dean Pkwy bridge?

[RailBaronYarr]

Question (maybe aimed specifically at David Greene who might know the answer):

I was perusing the SW station area plans again, and something really struck out at me. Areas around Golden Triangle, Blake Rd, and Shady Oak stations are the ones with a ton of jobs today, many of them industrial/similar. These are the type of job sites touted for low-wage workers to reverse commute to.

But the planning call for an almost complete re-tooling of the areas to mixed-use or dense multi-family, some office. Which is what one would expect given a high amenity transit facility coming into the neighborhood - high uses for high land values, easy commuting into Mpls, etc. I'm all about it, but was this even a consideration when talking jobs? Will N Mpls resident feel like they got the bait & switch when jobs suddenly disappear (my guess is to areas further out along new 212 interchanges in Chanhassen/Chaska/Carver)?

[David Greene]

It's a good question. There are such jobs at Beltline and Wooddale too. One of the issues transit equity folks have had for a long time is that there hasn't been a systemic study of job skills vs. job locations and how to get there. Harrison did such an inventory some years ago and it turns out a lot of the job skills in the neighborhood match up with jobs in the corridor. My memory's a little fuzzy but I think medial was a big chunk of that and I don't see that moving away from the corridor (Methodist hospital comes to mind as does Park Nicollet).

One of my big beefs with transportation planning is that we look for where people are going today rather than looking at where people would go if they could get there. There's some of that WRT large job centers but there's not a focus on it. Thus we're left in the dark on questions like whether the C line should serve the Penn SWLRT station. No, there aren't many trips from there westward today but there's also practically zero bus service going that way. Given what I know about job skills and opportunities in the SWLRT corridor I'm led to think such a connection would be beneficial.

I think the redevelopment question is one of watchful waiting. All of those station area plans are pie-in-the-sky right now. They will drive zoning decisions and it will be important going forward to look at the corridor as a whole and evaluate zoning and development decisions within that context. This is why continuing to be engaged on things like the CAC is still very important even though most of the capital decisions for the line have already been made.

[mattaudio]

[quote="David Greene"One of my big beefs with transportation planning is that we look for where people are going today rather than looking at where people would go if they could get there.[/quote]
I know what you're getting at, but I don't necessarily agree. Our current strategy is to make it easy to get from everywhere to everywhere blazingly fast (by car, of course) no matter the cost. Under that regime, it's irrelevant (at least to our pols and dot folks) to plan for specific future needs because they're planning for all hypothetical origin-destination pairs (by car, of course).

Yes, that system is failing us. But we don't need to replace it with a system that assumes people are static. The cheapest, greenest, most efficient mile is the mile not traveled. People could move closer to these jobs in the burbs (especially as some suburbs become more legitimate places) or the jobs can move closer to the people. We're already seeing that in some sectors of the economy, where companies are rethinking their suburban growth plans because their employees or prospective employees just don't want to work in that type of place.

[Anondson]

Not sure I'd consider Blake as one that is losing job creating sites because of redevelopment for LRT that North residents would commute to. Cold Storage is being torn down because the watershed district bought it and want to use the land to repair problems with creek drainage.

[David Greene]

I know what you're getting at, but I don't necessarily agree. Our current strategy is to make it easy to get from everywhere to everywhere blazingly fast (by car, of course) no matter the cost. Under that regime, it's irrelevant (at least to our pols and dot folks) to plan for specific future needs because they're planning for all hypothetical origin-destination pairs (by car, of course).

I guess I had an unstated assumption that I had transit planning on my mind. But even with roads I think we are starting to see more targeted projects. Are those projects really in the best places to increase access to opportunity? We don't know because we don't ask the right questions.

You point about location efficiency is a good one. Of course that's a rather large can of worms but you are correct that it must be opened.

[David Greene]

Not sure I'd consider Blake as one that is losing job creating sites because of redevelopment for LRT that North residents would commute to. Cold Storage is being torn down because the watershed district bought it and want to use the land to repair problems with creek drainage.

There's also plenty of retail and service near Blake. Not everything has to be manufacturing and light industrial. Of course those jobs pay less so as in everything, moderation and diversification are important.

[gpete]

Unsurprisingly, an email to my park commissioner to question it a few weeks went entirely unanswered. But I guess it's probably asking too much for elected officials to be responsive to their constituents.

I heard back from my commissioner. Not very satisfactory. His entire response:

The Park Board has a legal rights and responsibilities to protect parkland even if it is not pristine wilderness. This is not an effort to stop LRT. The Met council determined that there were feasible alternatives, but chose not to concern itself with federal requirements to mitigate or reduce harm to parkland.

If I wanted to stop the LRT, I would have waited until the end of the process and been able to provide a strong case that the project could not move forward because of the Met council's inability to meet 4(f) requirements. Both this line and the Bottineau line impact parkland. None of the rights and responsibilities concerning Federal protection of parkland have been included in the discussion of the current plan. The failure of the Met Council to do its due diligence or even acknowledge that protections of parkland exist has led them away from actually looking at all feasible and prudent alternatives.

As an elected official, I can't pretend that there isn't a Federally mandated framework that I must follow. From my understanding of the legal implications, I can't sign off on this project without consideration of all feasible and prudent alternatives.

If you want to get really nerdy and do some more research, he's referring to section 4(f) of the Department of Transportation Act of 1966, which deals with minimizing "harm" to public parklands by federally-funded transportation projects. Here's a helpful link: http://www.fta.dot.gov/12347_2232.html

[mattaudio]

Yet MPRB staff response to me indicates that they don't hold the same standard elsewhere, since they won't consider planning for the eventual removal of the Cedar Ave Bridge over Lake Nokomis (I think I've posted staff response elsewhere on the forum).

Thankfully my commissioner voted against this SWLRT legal spending. And she's also open to discussing the future of the Cedar Ave Bridge, even though her hands are sort of tied on it right now.