Central Corridor rail: Traffic, parking a game of inches

The titanic shoving match between the University of Minnesota and the Metropolitan Council over the route of the Central Corridor light-rail line appears settled: the trains will run down Washington Avenue through the U of M’s East Bank campus.  Now push is coming to shove over design details of the route along University Avenue.

At one of a series of public comment hearings on Wednesday, the Pioneer Press reports, St. Paul City Council Member Russ Stark argued for sacrificing traffic lanes along University Avenue instead of erasing on-street parking lanes, as proposed.

It’s a game of inches that’s been played — perhaps by necessity — with more finesse along the much shorter but also narrower stretch of University Avenue that the light-rail train will take through Minneapolis.

There, blessed by having slimmer sidewalks than along St. Paul’s stretch, planners and neighbors settled on sacrificing a boulevard on one side of the street and a parking lane on the other to make room for two sets of train tracks down the middle of University.

On either side of the tracks, traffic lanes will weave past protruding turn lanes and bump-outs of grass and trees. But keeping trees on the south side means shifting the entire right-of-way’s contents 4 feet toward commercial property on the north.

That prospect prompted Prospect Park Business Center owner Dave Barnhart to declare, as reported in The Bridge: “I do feel like I’m scheduled for a root canal.”