We are told that for 25 years now, Ramsey County authorities have been planning new transit options for what they call the Riverview Corridor and the rest of us call West Seventh Street. This quarter-century mark is apparently offered as evidence of their tenacity to bring about a streetcar line in the absence of any public demand or need whatsoever.

“The community, especially the younger generation, they prefer rail,” Ramsey County Commissioner Rafael Ortega, who chairs the county’s Regional Rail Authority, told the Pioneer Press in the week before Christmas.

Really?

Joe Soucheray

One night before Christmas, I went to Union Depot to pick up a kid of a kid I used to have. To satisfy some primitive curiosity, he took the train from Chicago to St. Paul.

“How was it?” I asked when he got into the car.

“Ridiculous,” he said, meaning that the trip took almost nine hours, including a kerfuffle in Winona when he was thought to be among a group of smokers who were threatened to not be let back on the train because they were dallying and the conductor got flustered.

Granted, a proposed streetcar system from the same depot to the airport or Mall of America would not take nine hours, but there would be a proposed 20 or 22 stops, depending on the “vision.”

Visions are an important part of being the chair of the Regional Rail Authority, there not being much else to do except put your feet up on the desk and wonder if we could be taken back to about 1950 while calling it futuristic progress.

Because something is going to happen this year. Meetings are scheduled. Committees are formed. Proposals are on the table, two streetcar proposals and at least one rapid bus route, but that bus would stop 16 times between the Mall of America and Kellogg Boulevard. There is already a dedicated bus for this trip, Route 54, the bus vision being the least expensive.

As far back as 2016, the streetcar cost and all the ancillary work came in at a projected $1.2 billion. Heavens, what would it cost today? Why, there are environmental considerations and social justice issues, although Ortega has never explained what that means. This is ridiculous on the face of it. Not one single person in recorded history has stood at, say, West Seventh Street and Randolph Avenue and said, “Well, I guess I’m not going to Los Angeles today. I just can’t get to the airport.”

The money doesn’t exist. We don’t need to become enslaved to another boondoggle that cannot possibly pay for itself. We already have a number of those, chief among them the Green Line.

Good leadership requires minding the public purse. We don’t see that around here, not from the Legislature or the governor or the mayors, councils and commissioners.

The people who pay the bills have a vision, too. We have a vision of sustainability. The public class uses that word in every other public utterance.

Well then, Mr. Ortega, be sustainable, safeguard the purse. You have another option besides streetcars.

Do nothing.

That would be real leadership, heroic in fact, it being so rare. And we will all get to the airport and the Mall of America just fine.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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