WAY behind the times. Minneapolis/St. Paul is the 16th largest metropolitan area by population in the US, and encompasses 13 counties, over 6,000 square miles and 4 area codes. We are consistently ranked in the top spots for art, music. literacy, etc., have countless museums, attractions and cultural events, and major league teams for all 4 major sports…this town could be a tourist mecca as it has everything you could want in a vacation. But it’s a car city…everything is so spread out and other than bus lines which can be a less than pleasant experience, mass transit if almost non-existent. Most stuff isn’t clustered so taking cabs everywhere could get really costly really quick. Compared to other cities that have the kind of appeal that this town has from a tourism standpoint, we should have a system where you can get on just about anywhere, get off just about anywhere you want to go, and with a couple transfers see anything you want to see. That’s how it is in Chicago, or Atlanta, or San Francisco, or Boston…not to mention London or most of the rest of Europe….I go to ANY of these cities, I don’t rent a car, it’s more of a hassle than anything. And we have many of the same traffic issues (to a lesser degree of course), but no alternatives.
We have one high speed rail line between downtown Minneapolis and the Mall of America, which is less than 10 miles. I believe they also finally opened a high speed line to the farthest northwest suburbs just a couple weeks ago. And it took like 35 years of debate in state legislature to get THIS far. In the busiest freeway routes, it can easily take an hour to drive 20 miles, which is not an uncommon commute in a metro area this spread out, due to a combination of congestion and seemingly never ending road construction. There just seems to be an aversion to anything other than rebuilding existing roads here, hell we even had a bridge collapse in rush hour and kill 13 people a couple years ago…a design flaw from when it was built over 40 years ago was primarily to blame, but one suspects if we had spent money on replacing or fixing the bridge rather than just occasionally inspecting it, one might have discovered this flaw before it killed people. And if it snows, forget it, triple whatever your commute is. And now, just like everywhere else, the state is short on money and light rail costs something like $13,500 an inch to lay track, if they’d started building a robust system 30 years ago, it would have cost probably a tenth as much in today’s dollars, gridlock would be non-existent, tourism would be booming and we wouldn’t have people fighting it to this day.