After some eight years of debate, Ramsey County officials have canceled planning for the Riverview Corridor, a potential streetcar to connect downtown St. Paul to the Mall of America in Bloomington.
The 12-mile corridor had drawn increasingly vocal opposition from property owners along West Seventh Street, including many who raised concerns about crime and public safety or said businesses that had barely re-emerged from the pandemic would not survive two years or more of heavy construction. Planning had also split transit advocates, some of whom felt that efforts to install a streetcar — with a $2 billion price tag — were undermining the cheaper and more readily attainable pursuit of arterial bus rapid transit, which could more easily operate in mixed traffic.
“Ramsey County has made the difficult decision to end our work and cancel any future meetings on the Riverview Corridor project,” reads a written announcement posted Friday to the county’s website.
“This decision was based on feedback gained during a comprehensive public engagement process with community, businesses and partners. Some were very supportive of streetcar, and some were very supportive of a bus alternative. During engagement sessions, issues were raised about potential construction impacts, safety and security concerns facing transit and communities overall, among other issues.”
Reaction
Pat Mancini, proprietor of Mancini’s Char House on West Seventh Street, served as a business representative on the Riverview Corridor advisory committee, which had planned a final vote on whether to adopt a streetcar option in late October.
“I think in the end the community stepped up and really raised their concerns about construction on the avenue,” said Mancini on Friday. “I was really an opponent of going into it blind, and not knowing whether cars were going to be forced to park in the neighborhood. There were just a lot of things that weren’t thought out clearly enough. They just kept saying ‘we learned a lot from light rail construction on University Avenue, and we won’t make the same mistakes.’ There was nothing formal I could look at and really grasp for discussion.”
St. Paul City Council Member Rebecca Noecker, who had leaned in favor of streetcars, called the lack of advance communication around the county’s “sudden unilateral decision really surprising.”
She said other efforts around street improvements — from road resurfacing to pedestrian bump-outs, trees and lighting — had been effectively put on hold while discussions around transit planning continued for the better part of a decade.
“We had been tying that to whatever funding source would ultimately support the transit,” Noecker said. “For a process to drag on so long, and then come to a sudden stop, doesn’t feel very respectful to all those who have been putting in these hundreds of hours of time and serving on committees, expressing themselves and waiting for something to happen.”
County Commissioner Rafael Ortega, a leading proponent of the proposed streetcar, said the tipping point for him came this summer when the Metropolitan Airports Commission raised red flags over a streetcar accessing the same track as the Blue Line light rail, as well as necessary road improvements approaching Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Ortega, the longtime chair of the county’s Regional Rail Authority, said he held a workshop about two weeks ago and it was clear that while members of the Riverview planning task force were on board with a streetcar, county staff felt they would be unable to sway MAC officials.
“The board was super supportive of Riverview to a person,” Ortega said. “But MAC sent that letter because of the road leading into the airport. … Staff tells me they’re not going to bridge with MAC a solution. (We would) spend more money and staff time to end up in the same place as we are today.”
Building a streetcar corridor could be a $2 billion project, but if the federal government stepped up, that would cut the local funding requirement in half, Ortega noted.
“It has nothing to do with financials at all,” he said.
During a meeting of the MAC planning and development committee on Aug. 5, a MAC representative predicted “intolerable delays” for thousands of drivers daily around two of four access points to Terminal 1, especially along 34th Street.
20 years of planning, but no bus
Asked if the county would pursue installing an arterial bus rapid transit route down West Seventh Street, Ortega said BRT — a project more typically led by Metro Transit and the Metropolitan Council — had been included in planning largely for comparison purposes to two leading streetcar options, and was otherwise not the county’s priority.
Efforts to rally business owners, lawmakers and the general public around the Riverview Corridor have moved forward in stops and starts for more than 20 years. Formal studies led by St. Paul, Metro Transit or Ramsey County rolled out in 1998, 2000, 2012, 2014 and again in recent months, with the county’s Regional Rail Authority taking the lead.
In 2002, state officials took back $40 million dedicated to corridor planning in light of community concerns that dedicated lanes would eat up space for travel and parking.
Construction of the Green Line light rail on University Avenue helped reignite discussions around 2013, when the St. Paul City Council formally asked the county to revisit the Riverview Corridor as a streetcar or BRT route, as opposed to a heavier light rail line.
Metro Transit had once begun lining up funding with the goal of installing BRT on West Seventh Street by 2016. Instead, Ramsey County took the lead.
In 2020, the pandemic slowed but never completely derailed planning, which has gained steam over the past four years. Three options unveiled this past March showed travel times from downtown St. Paul to Bloomington for a bus rapid transit project to be only two or three minutes faster than the existing Route 54 Metro Transit bus. Travel times for two street car options could be one to three minutes slower than the Route 54.
Calling time comparisons misleading, streetcar advocates noted that the train, unlike the bus, would travel to both MSP Terminal 2 and Fort Snelling. Cost estimates, they said, were inflated by the projected price tags for roadwork on West Seventh Street and a new bridge over the Mississippi River, two projects that will eventually have to move forward regardless.
Metro Transit officials had no immediate response on Friday to the question of whether the public transit authority would revisit BRT planning along West Seventh. A spokesman released a statement reading: “We appreciate all the hard work Ramsey County has done on this project and look forward to continuing to partner with the county and community leaders to meet their transit needs.”
In a Friday evening social media post, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter seemed to welcome the agency’s collaboration on BRT.
“I stand committed to advocating for Bus Rapid Transit and pedestrian and bicycling connections on the corridor. We’ll waste no time in working together to create and advance this vision,” Carter wrote.
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