Mayor R.T. Rybak. Photo: Studio 306

“This is working out exactly as I would want it,” Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak said by phone from Washington, D.C. last Thursday.

Rybak, along with nine other mayors, was invited to President-elect Barack Obama’s address on the economy on Jan. 8.

“I have very good access to the Obama administration. It makes me a better mayor and able to bring more back home,” he said.

Obama pushed transportation infrastructure in his speech, but can Rybak expect to bring more of that home to Minneapolis? After all, the city was among very few to win massive federal Department of Transportation funding through its Urban Partnership grants for bus lane improvements downtown and a new toll lane on I-35W. And then there was the new I-35W bridge.

“We absolutely can ask for more,” Rybak said, citing U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar’s chairmanship of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure as another factor in the city’s favor.

The mayor scoffed at Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s response last week to the prospect of $10 million in federal aid for state infrastructure projects.

“The first words out of the governor’s mouth were ‘Minnesota may not want it,’” Rybak said. “My message was very different.”

Rybak, a very early Obama backer, said he has no interest in a job with the Obama administration, and instead looks forward to working in Obama’s America back home – the precise definition of which seemed to slip between city and state as he talked about changes Obama might bring. (Rybak has said he’ll decide soon whether to run for governor).

One project that has appeared in lights on both the state’s and the city’s marquees is the I-35W bridge, which Rybak said fit Obama’s vision for a new generation of infrastructure projects that have green components — in 35W’s case, the capacity to handle transit that Rybak insisted on.

“Obama was very careful to say this cannot have earmarks [for] this project or that project,” Rybak said. But the mayor makes no bones about having a wish list for Minneapolis.

“Probably the biggest one on my list is to do mitigation for Central Corridor, to make a ring road around the University [of Minnesota] campus.”

A ring road is needed because trains running on the future Central Corridor light-rail transit route will take up all of Washington Avenue, a main Minneapolis campus artery, Rybak explained. Locals have feared that digging a tunnel for the trains to travel under Washington Avenue would jeopardize — you guessed it — federal funding.

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 with St. Paul and with the southwest metro suburbs. That’s because the Northstar Commuter Rail, which is set to connect downtown Minneapolis to the northern exurbs one year from now, will have no stops in Northeast as it travels between downtown and the Fridley station that the Star Tribune profiles today.

Fridley saved its Northstar station from federal cuts, but Minneapolis’s plans for a station outside of downtown never got far enough to get cut by the feds. Even so, the Northstar commuter line, which travels on heavy rails otherwised used by freight trains, has largely supplanted in planners’ minds a proposed Northeast Corridor light rail line that would have served, instead of merely cutting through, Minneapolis’s Northeast neighborhoods.

There’s irony in rail transit passing Northeast by. It’s a part of the city that traditionally has held a disproportionate share of Minneapolis’s factories, bars and working class immigrants, and while that economic and demographic profile has evolved somewhat, Northeast’s abundant railroad trackage has stayed put. Yet as rail-rich as Northeast is, a busway seems the most it can hope for, and other areas are ahead in line for even that level of transit.

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.”

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 closing the busy cross-campus thoroughfare to all traffic. The opinion leaders led with the same foot and danced the same steps, with small differences. The PiPress chose an odd metaphor that required picturing the U of M driving a gold stake through its own heart, while the Strib  urged the U to hurry up and get “comfortable with the only real option that remains.” 

The tug of war between the university and the Metropolitan Council over the route has played out behind the governor’s game of chicken with the Legislature over Central Corridor funding. Longtime residents who know the area best have made reasonable arguments for and against the closure of Washington Avenue SE. But after last week’s revelation that engineers mismeasured the route’s length in the university area by 1,300 feet, residents are understandably resistant to glib guesstimates that yet-to-be-determined mitigation will take care of any problems created by forcing 20,000-25,000 vehicles per day onto neighborhood streets not built for speed. Memories of choked local roads after last year’s I-35W collapse (pictured) are far too fresh for campus-area denizens to simply swallow the Strib’s assurance that “a plan is in the works to cushion the surrounding neighborhood from ill effects from the diversion of auto traffic.” 

Last week Gov. Tim Pawlenty got an LRT committee’s final decision delayed by seven days to give the university one last chance to fall in line with “the creative thinkers in charge of the Central Corridor line,” as the Strib calls them. High noon for the U will come at 1 p.m. Wednesday when the Central Corridor Management Committee convenes a special meeting in the Metropolitan Council’s chamber. Three hours later the Met Council gathers in the same room, with “Central Corridor Light Rail Trail Alignment” on its agenda.

Three main solutions were presented in the study: move turns away from the intersection, make it a one-way pair (eastbound traffic would be diverted south one street), or have north-south traffic pass underneath University.

The study did not recommend one solution above the others and said that the intersection could stay as it is, but that any decision ideally should be made before the light rail designs are completed for the central corridor down University. The study assumes that the LRT will proceed as proposed down University. Allen Lovejoy, with St. Paul PED, said, “LRT would have minimal impact.

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 consultant firm to create precinct plans along University Avenue.

The grants will also allow the establishment of a Central Corridor Communications and Planning Office, and translation for a multi-lingual website in English, Spanish, Hmong and Somali.

“These grants will be very helpful in our efforts to do the necessary planning and outreach for developing the Central Corridor. Building light-rail along University Avenue and down Cedar to Union Depot involves a lot more than just laying the tracks,” St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman said in a prepared statement.