Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Should the Twin Cities Have a Subway?
For streets.mn, Scott Berger goes to great, great lengths to make the case that yes, we should. Why refill the I-94 trench with dirt and concrete, he asks, when it could house the region’s first heavy-rail subway line?
“This line doesn’t need twenty stations. It needs the right ones,” Berger argues, making the case for a limited-stop subway that would connect downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul. His vision is for a kind of “seamless connectivity” between the two, an “end-to-end, SUV-beating” rail option that’d function much faster than the existing/crawling light rail line.
As it is, he writes, downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul function as totally distinct entities. What if it was easier and quicker to get between the two? What if you didn’t need to worry about parking to do so? What if we could leverage the underused Union Depot? And while Berger doesn’t estimate how much such a project would run us, he does point out that we would avoid the largest cost of a subway: excavation…