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I want my two hours back!

Ok so I left work for a few hours to attend the Open House for the Cedar Avenue clusterfuck they are planning. I’ll discuss my interpretation of it here, but you’ll probably also want to visit their website. There you can enjoy vague non-explanations and bureaucratic double-speak, oh joy!

I attended the meeting, and was a little surprised at the number of people there. Mostly upper-middle age or older. I had also expected to be walking into “the lion’s den”. Because really, who shows up to a transit open house besides people that have some unhealthy attraction to transportation options, and therefore are already set on doing the biggest and grandest option of all (more on that later)?!? As it turns out there were a wide mix of people (also more on that later).

Interspersed amongst us, and quickly interjecting themselves into any conversations approaching critical thought, were the “blue badges”. Basically these were the people that planned this event and project and were there to answer questions. Problem being that, answers were often evasive, or they just indicated I’d have to ask someone else. Financial details weren’t even worth discussing, because most avoid the question entirely. While some did give evasive answers, even as vague as they were, some contradicted others answers.

Despite all that it was a mild surprise, that the crowd varied from openly hostile to just plain confused and bewildered. I met one lady who could have boiled water at 100 feet, once she found out that her house is all but destined for demolition. Others plainly stated that this plan had not been thought through very well. Others, oddly enough, indicated they felt someone was “lining their pockets” or “making a few extra bucks” off these concepts. That last group shocked me a bit…how did I find people more cynical than I am?!?!?

But I should get to meat of the issue…

Ok basically here’s the premise, Cedar Avenue is packed….or at least it will be. And even though two-thirds of it is local traffic, somehow we’re basing our choices around the people that want to go straight through Apple Valley to…..um, Iowa?? Oh course they won’t be paying for it, we will. That’s the breaks folks.

So the traffic levels are going to grow until the fate of the free world is threatened by the congestion on 12 miles of Cedar Avenue in Minnesota, USA. Ok I might be exaggerating a bit there. We have to expand it, and we were given three different options.

And the 20,000 feet difference between 2 and 3 is the Apple Valley City Council needs to decide what their vision of Cedar is going to be. To which I would have to point out that the AV City Council doesn’t have a frigging clue what it’s doing, so asking them that is a rather tall order. As evidence of that I present the “Cobblestone Development”….if you live in this area you already know what I’m talking about and probably already hate it.

Anyway, onto the options….

Alternative 1 – Do Nothing

Basically they make maintenance and safety improvement, otherwise do nothing. And according to virtually every “blue badge” there, if we choose this option, our children will rot in eternal transit hell where animated traffic signs will beat them bloody with traffic cones.

Which altogether sounds like a bad thing. Plus I’m realistic enough to accept that yes traffic levels will increase, something needs to be done. So Alternative 1 is probably not really realistic, as nice as it sounds.

Alternative 2 – Suburban Highway

Basically Cedar Avenue remains functionally the same. They’ll take out a few stop lights, they’ll make a few modifications to medians and such. But the bulk of the work is that they’ll add an extra lane in either directions which will be reserved for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).

Ok fair enough, I don’t have an extreme problem with that. I guess I’m not entirely comfortable with the additional right-of-way they’ll have to acquire. Most of the commercial district of AV butts right up to Cedar, and I’m underwhelmed at the thought of that going away, especially my local watering hole. Plus I don’t like the possibility of them potentially condemning the school (Cedar Park Elementary) that is basically in my backyard….not because I particularly like the school, but mostly because I particularly don’t like another school levy to build a new one.

Oh this option will cost about $100 million….which in reality means about $210 million.

Alternative 3 – A Friggin Trench….No Really! A God Damn Trench

Wow…this is apparently the option we’re supposed to pick if we aren’t particularly against a freeway going through Apple Valley. Only they upped the ante on the freeway by adding a friggin trench. Seriously.

Take Cedar Ave and dig a four-lane trench down the middle of it. Then put 3 lanes, turn lanes, trees, medians, retaining walls and sidewalks on either side. That trench, goes from north of 140th street to south of 160th street….it’s basically an 12 mile expressway through Apple Valley to…..um, Arkansas??? And the intersections will be replaced with intersections basically suspended over this trench.

And really my description doesn’t do this thing justice. They had huge aerial photos of Apple Valley/Lakeville there with superimposed images of the 3 alternatives on them. When I looked at the map for Alternative 3, it occured to me that I’ve seen that before….except it was wrapped around the Death Star.

Obviously this idea attracted alot of attention. With most people rather shocked by it. When asked if anything like this had ever been done anywhere, the long-coming answer was basically no. When someone pointed out that it snows and rains in this state, Mr Blue Badge admitted that posed problems, but they were pretty sure they could handle it. I remain skeptical. If you think my skeptical attitude is overblown, I present Exhibit A : MNDOT.

I notice in all their literature the width of Alternative 3 is obscured and unreadable, unlike Alternatives 1 and 2. When I finally cornered a Blue Badge on this, he reluctantly admitted it would be about 120 feet wider than option 2. For reference, option 2 is 172 feet. You’re almost doubling the width of Cedar Avenue.

Now one of the reasons they didn’t go with a freeway option is because it cuts off access to local businesses….so they went with this trench option instead. Which I guess solves a problem. You definitely still provide access to local businesses, you just have to bulldoze all of them to do it. That strikes me as kind of like treating heart disease by removing the heart.

Oh and the cost for Alternative 3? $200 million, which means probably closer to $500 million. Oh and according to their data on expected average speeds and time, there is almost NO difference between option 2 and 3, except for that one third of the traffic, which obviously gets through Apple Valley alot quicker.

So basically in summary Alternative 3 takes up twice as much space, costs twice as much, bulldozes the entire commercial district of AV, uses a God damn trench nobody else has tried, for no net benefit except for the small number of people that don’t even want to be in Apple Valley, aren’t paying for it, and are simply in a hurry to get home to milk the cows or something.

Misc

Ok yeah, I had lots of other comments which didn’t really fall in any of the Alternatives above….

Financials – Yeah, getting Blue Badges to discuss the financials was like awful. It would have been easier to ask for the nuclear launch codes. One selling point they kept pushing was this idea “has guaranteed federal funding….that’s money already in the bank”. Sorry buddy, I’ve been around the block a few times. My bullshit indicators just assploded. There is no such thing as guaranteed federal funding. And there is no “money in the bank” at any level of government. Plus if you cornered them on exactly how much, not only was it a very small amount, but it was likely to dry up and go away pretty soon anyway.

BRT – Okay…I don’t have a problem with BRT in particular. My problem is with the financials of it. Once again it’s another transit system for which I, John Q. Taxpayer, pay a vast majority of it’s costs, whether I ride it or not. Tonite when I found myself talking to a Blue Badge that obviously was one of the BRT “experts” I mentioned that to him that I hated that user fees only accounted for a very small portion of the expenses. His honest response was “Well, but that’s the case in all transit systems”. Yes, but that doesn’t make it right does it?!?? Why do you insist upon repeating what has been tried and failed elsewhere?!?

Plus who the hell decided that the one common feature of all the options was BRT?!?! Basically regardless of what we pick BRT is gonna be a fact of life.

Highway 77 – Ok north of 140th Street, Cedar is better known as Highway 77. One of the big problems already is that while Cedar is 3 lanes in Apple Valley, it shrinks to two lanes when it turns into a highway….but then magically opens back up to three lanes a few miles up the road (at Diffley). As a result in the morning you have a bottleneck of traffic as we merge.

I mentioned to one of the Blue Badges, that presumably that was something that was going to be fixed?? Well, not necessarily. There is no guaranteed that MNDOT will do that. Oh they’ve mentioned it to them, but as we all know MNDOT has a huge backlog, and there is no guarantee that that will happen. So potentially we’re redoing all of Apple Valley, but it’s all gonna be negated by the same bottle neck we already have.

Bigger Bottleneck – Speaking of bottlenecks. Right now we have a bottleneck of three lanes to two lanes. Fine, it’s a pain, but it’s manageable. With Alternative 2, we make it worse….now it’s a bottleneck of four lanes to two lanes.

Even worse…Alternative 3, we’re now merging five lanes into two lanes and remember that two of those five lanes are coming out of a damn trench, so they have zero visibility. Even if MNDOT gets on the ball, we’re still going from five lanes to three. Congrats we just spent $200+ million dollars to build an even bigger bottleneck!! Aren’t we proud of ourselves.

Okay so that’s that….I’m unimpressed. I have fears of spiraling property values. I have visions of driving down Cedar Ave, and looking over and seeing Luke Skywalker fly past me down the trench on his way to prove that blowing up a space station is just like shooting Womp Rats. At about that time, some guy looking like Porkins rear-ends me because I just had to stop for the bottleneck.

[Crossposted at True North]