Central Corridor

Twenty years ago, a dream of being inside a movie-studio limousine when revolution breaks out made filmmaker Michael Moore swear off limo rides. It was a similar wrong-place, wrong-time nightmare that led St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman to swear off gubernatorial pursuits. ”I had a vision of me at a bean feed somewhere while the Central [...]

“Shaken.” That’s a word Mayor Chris Coleman used to describe St. Paul during today’s State of the City address. “A near-collapse of financial markets” has already forced to make “significant cuts,” Coleman said. But he reminded citizens that CIty Hall was built during the Great Depression and promised that even in “excrutiating times,” St. Paul would continue to “refuse to be ordinary.”

R.T. Rybak boasts of his access to the Obama administration, but can Minneapolis’ mayor really expect to bring more federal spending on transportation infrastructure to the Twin Cities?

“Houses near Railroad Tracks, Northeast Minneapolis” (detail) by Michael Banning, courtesy The Groveland Gallery

Rail transit will pass through Northeast Minneapolis but won’t deliver the kind of urban neighborhood redevelopment that’s already seen along the Hiawatha Light Rail line and that has been ballyhooed for other planned light rail lines that will connect downtown Minneapolis [...]

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 [...]

The current state of the Central Corridor light rail transit debate: Mix half-baked engineering with overheated funding threats and watch as public opinion congeals around a premature choice. Both dailies ran editorials Sunday extolling an at-grade Washington Avenue route and excoriating the University of Minnesota for insisting on taking a hard look at alternatives to [...]

A plurality of Minnesotans want funding for the Central Corridor light rail line back in a bonding bill vetoed last month, a KSTP/SurveyUSA poll found. The poll, conducted Thursday and Friday, found that 48 percent supported reconsideration of the Central Corridor funding, while 42 percent opposed the idea. And it wasn’t metro area residents showing [...]

Snelling and University is the busiest intersection in St. Paul, according to a study by St. Paul’s Department of Planning and Economic Development. The study explored the options for possibly expanding capacity at the intersection, which is an Environmental Protection Agency hot spot because of the heavy traffic.

Three main solutions were presented in the study: [...]

The McKnight Foundation, the F.R. Bigelow Foundation and the St. Paul Foundation have given more than $1 million to the city of St. Paul for the Central Corridor light-rail project.

The grants will allow the city to hire a consulting firm to lead the planning and design work. The city will also be working with another [...]