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GARY EICHTEN: Four or five years from now, it is possible that you will be able to ride a light rail transit line between downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul, with intermediate stops at the State Capitol, the Midway District, and the University of Minnesota.

Minnesota legislature is considering a proposal to spend $10 million to help pay for final engineering studies on a light rail transit line between the two cities. If the money is appropriated and if all goes according to schedule, construction on an 11-mile LRT line between the two cities could, at least theoretically, begin in 1996, with the first train leaving the station four or five years from now.

Total cost of this Central Corridor Line, as it's called, is expected to total about $500 million, 700 million if a tunnel is built for LRT through downtown Minneapolis. Now, whether this is good news or bad news, I suppose depends on your perspective.

Supporters say that LRT is long overdue. It will help relieve traffic congestion, improve air quality, conserve energy, spur economic development in the central cities. Opponents say it will do little to relieve congestion, will undermine the bus system and ultimately cost far more than it's worth.

However, it looks like after years of discussion, some kind of a decision on light rail transit is at hand or close to being made anyway. So joining us here in the studio to share their thoughts on this subject and answer your questions are Bill Dean and Lyle Wray.

Mr. Dean is the chairman of the Minnesotans for Light Rail Transit. And Mr. Wray is the executive director of the Citizens League, which is opposed to the light rail proposal. Mr Dean, why should we build this light rail line between Minneapolis and St. Paul? Why do you think it's a good idea?

BILL DEAN: Gary, there have been people asking that question for the last 20, 25 years in the Twin Cities area. And the answers remain much the same as they have during that entire period. rail transit reduces congestion. Its capacity for carrying people is far greater than the same amount of space on a given length of freeway.

For that matter, a bus would be-- it actually improves transit service by providing a spine at high speed around which buses, which in many cities that have adopted light rail have actually been redirected so as to improve, not only the bus service but feed the light rail.

So it improves transit service for almost everybody by freeing buses that might normally operate on spine routes or arterioles to serve areas that before that couldn't be very well served by transit.

Compared with other modes of transit, light rail is cost effective. Despite what the Citizens League is likely to tell you, we believe that a case can be made that light rail transit, in the long run, is far more cost effective than investing in HOV lanes, buses, and more automobiles.

Light rail transit is environmentally friendly compared to either motorized vehicles or bus transit. It costs less because it's more efficient to operate from an environmental standpoint, pollution generation.

Light rail strengthens economic development. In many North American cities that have adopted light rail, economic trends have been changed. One example might be useful here. In the city of Portland, just one year after installing its first light rail system, business in the downtown business district increased by more than 25%.

So it reinvigorated a dying downtown in Portland. And if downtowns are important to us and there are people probably would argue that they're not, but I think for most of us, we want to keep a healthy downtown. It strengthens and it has significantly done so in a number of cities.

Finally, perhaps a less important item, but we've invested a lot of money in convention centers in the Twin Cities, both in downtown St. Paul and more so in Minneapolis. Light rail provides a high capacity system for assisting when special events are hosted by a city.

One of the reasons that Minneapolis, St. Paul did not get the 1996 Olympics was because we did not have a fixed guideway transit system and Atlanta did.

There are many other reasons, but I think in summary, that's why Minnesotans for Light Rail think that the time has come. In fact, the time has passed. We should be doing it. We should have done it five years ago. But it's never too late to correct a past mistake.

GARY EICHTEN: Sounds like a great deal, Lyle Wray. Why is the Citizens League opposed to building this line between Minneapolis and St. Paul?

LYLE WRAY: Well, it's a bit like the game Jeopardy. The answer is LRT, what was the question? And we'd suggest that the starting point is not really whether we should argue about LRT, but what we're trying to get done in transit.

And the league has studied transit on and off for a number of years and basically concluded a number of things that first off, our patterns of the way the city has been growing, the metropolitan area has been growing, don't correspond to the hub and spoke system that LRT, even if fully implemented at a $1.6 billion price tag, would not provide the kind of needs that are emerging in the area, for example, suburb to suburb transportation, getting core city people out from the core cities to the suburban growth job areas.

So the first point is LRT doesn't really map very well with what's going on in the needs of emerging transit. Second, the proposal that's before us right now is one of those good news, bad news ones. And that is to link the two core cities. That is a very successful transit corridor today. It works quite well with buses.

And despite the fact, there may be some criticism of buses, the ridership projections show a very, very small increase in transit ridership between the two core cities when the LRT line is built at the cost of 10 metrodomes. Which is a lot of money to put a little Minnesota coinage on it.

So the second point is the addition of the LRT line to the central corridor will not do very much to add value to the transit functions in that area. Third, the issue is we're going to be getting congestion in the metropolitan area. 35W and other areas are congested.

LRT doesn't really respond to those as currently designed. And we think that they're much more important for things that can get done. And finally, we think that one of the most important problems about LRT is what it will take attention away from or funds away from.

Mr. Dean referred to the fact that we might have done this five years ago, when there was federal money. You've seen proposals from the federal administration to reduce transit support that may or may not ultimately get put into place.

The point being that we're going to have substantial competition for money. And everyone knows that LRT consumes a great deal of money. And if there's a fixed amount of money, we strongly believe that the money will come out of the hide, frankly, of bus ridership, which we believe is a flexible system and one that we should be putting more emphasis on.

And finally, we're not really, in my view, anyway, pushing as hard as we can on somewhat less sexy but very workable solutions. High occupancy vehicle lanes such as van ridership. Other issues of reverse commuting to get people from core cities out to suburban jobs.

We're just not putting the kind of effort in there. And it's because they don't have a large funded advocacy group that's pushing them, but no one is really pushing very hard on these other very vital options that would cost a fraction of what the proposal on the table would do. So it's not so much that LRT is a bad idea in itself. It's how does it fit into the whole transit picture. And our view is it doesn't fit in very well.

GARY EICHTEN: A couple of other ground rules or bits of information before we go, start with our listeners here. Now, are the cost estimates-- was I correct about 500 to 700 depending on whether you put a tunnel underneath Minneapolis? Is that about right? Does everyone seem to agree on that?

LYLE WRAY: Those are conservative.

BILL DEAN: I think it's slightly overstated, but we could argue that without result.

GARY EICHTEN: So if it's on the one side too low and the other side too high, it's probably about right. And then 10 to 15 metrodomes, give or take. And then where does the-- a lot of the money is-- about 2/3 of it is supposed to come from the federal government to actually build this line. Where would the state money come-- state and local money come from? How would that be raised?

BILL DEAN: Well, there are a number of ways that are being talked about, but ultimately, it would be bonded for. How the bonds would be paid back is probably where the debate would center, whether there would be some kind of a special additional tax or exactly how those bonds would be paid back, is something the legislature will have to deal with.

LYLE WRAY: The last proposal was a 1% sales tax. So the T word is-- the core word here it's coming out of taxes of some sort or another, unless we invent new sources of revenue.

And the concern is not just building it. You mentioned it's also operating it. Most of them will operate in a major loss. And we have to fund the loss and operations as well as refunding the capital bond.

BILL DEAN: Well, I don't think that we should leave that statement without emphasizing that the alternatives will also cost tax money. Whether we build a busway, a fixed guideway, a special guideway for buses, I should say, or in terms of operating costs, light rail transit systems cost less in terms of farebox recovery than buses, nationwide.

And that's well documented. In other words, you put a light rail system in, it will do better in terms of supporting its own operating costs than buses will.

GARY EICHTEN: Our guests today are Bill Dean, who is with the Minnesotans for Light Rail Transit, and Lyle Wray, who's with the Citizens League. And what we're talking about today is a proposal to build a light rail transit line between the two downtowns-- Minneapolis and St. Paul.

And there is a proposal at the legislature right now to appropriate $10 million to essentially finish engineering studies for this line. The project is well down the road. And it is conceivable, at least, that sometime before the end of this decade, we could have a light rail transit line between Minneapolis and St. Paul. The question is whether or not we should do that. Let's take our first caller. Hi

SPEAKER 1: Hi. I'm what you'd characterize as a tax and spend liberal, but I'm strongly opposed to light rail. It just seems like it's going to fail to answer the needs of the people. It's going to be inconvenient. It's going to be a huge, bulky, very expensive system which when built isn't going to do anything.

And my question to the proponents of light rail is what's going to happen 15 years from now when all the resources for mass transit have been used up and it's demonstrated that something like personal rapid transit is a much more efficient way of moving people around the city?

GARY EICHTEN: Mr. Dean.

BILL DEAN: Well, the caller suggests, first of all, that light rail is inconvenient, and secondly, that it's huge and bulky, and that it somehow will become a white elephant. I think it's instructive to look at what's happened in other cities, where those same arguments were presented a few years ago or a few years during the period that those projects were being debated.

St. Louis is a good example. St. Louis went online last year. The most optimistic projections for daily ridership were about 13,000 riders per day. In fact, the St. Louis system is averaging about 23,000 riders today. It has gone way beyond the expectations of planners.

People who never dreamed of using transit before are using it on a daily basis. Something like 70% of the riders are brand new transit riders. So I think the premise that the caller starts with, that light rail be isn't going to work and is going to be a white elephant is wrong. It has not happened that way in other cities.

There are a few examples where perhaps a line was placed inappropriately, where projections have not been met, but in most cities-- Portland, San Diego, and so on. St Louis, the most recent example, light rail transit, has exceeded expectations and is doing very well.

GARY EICHTEN: Mr. Wray.

LYLE WRAY: Can I just jump in here because I think when you look behind and talk about the details, the St. Louis LRT system has been thrown up as a new example of success. And we really don't have enough time to go over the failures of promise of both heavy and light rail around the country because there's an awful lot of them. But let me just talk about St. Louis.

The reason many people believe that system works is that one of the major river crossings is horribly congested there. And you go from a 30-minute car trip down to a four-minute LRT trip. Just to give you a little perspective here, in other words, that's a 27 minute saving to get across a river. That's an incentive.

Here, we expect no more than a three-minute difference between buses and LRT. Three minutes. Is that worth 400 million bucks? Three minutes is a very, very small amount of time per commuter to save for a $400 million expenditure, which we think will be, I think, a very bad investment.

So you have to look behind the details. St. Louis, it saves you basically half an hour to get across the river. Here, it will save you three minutes for $400 million. That's a high price tag.

GARY EICHTEN: Mr. Dean, who do you think would be using this system? Now, I could see people who live along the line. Would it be great to have the LRT system run past your business, or your house, or within a block, or two, or thereabouts? Do you anticipate other people using the system as well, this line?

BILL DEAN: Well, first of all, you have the University of Minnesota on the route, which is a huge transit generator. And of course, the core cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul still contain the most numbers of jobs, something over 100,000 jobs in Minneapolis and around 50,000 in St. Paul.

So right there, you've got major concentrations of population. And where light rail works, light rail depends upon major concentrations of population to generate traffic. But beyond that, I think we have to talk about the central corridor light rail line, not in and of itself as a single entity but as the start of a system.

A system of light rail that will eventually connect both the cities of Minneapolis, and St. Paul, and a number of suburban areas, which again frees up buses to serve the suburban areas in an intra-suburban mode, rather than running buses on parallel routes to the proposed light rail routes.

So the core city connection, the central corridor, yes, it's true that it doesn't-- it's not exactly analogous to St. Louis or Portland for that matter or San Diego, but it's the start of a system that ultimately would be analogous to those cities by providing the first link in a system.

GARY EICHTEN: Now, this first link, is it just the first link? Is it a demonstration project of sorts? I mean, will it automatically follow that if this first line is built that the rest of the system or much of the rest of the proposed LRT system will be built? How is that going to work out?

LYLE WRAY: Well, that's one of our big concerns is that, in fact, this be a demonstration project and see if it works? We can get on a slippery slope here to a $1.6 billion expenditure, the largest public expenditure in the history of the state, very, very easily.

And I think that we needed a number of assurances that there will be an appropriate evaluation to make sure this is not a so-to-speak greased tracks to a $1.6 billion system, let's see if it works, because I think there's lots of concerns.

Many citizens don't want to leave the convenience of an express bus and now-- which they have now and get on a bus, transfer to an LRT stop, and then get an LRT and go downtown. Where I live, I have a 9 minute commute now. It would take longer to take LRT through bus systems than it would to drive my car.

So I think we have to make sure that this demonstration project is really that by prohibiting construction of additional lines until the specific costs and benefits are really worked out thoroughly. And limiting financing so that we have a fail safe in there, that, in other words, the money doesn't start running in the direction of funding the whole system until we've evaluated it.

And remove the downtown Minneapolis tunnel feature. We think that's vastly overbuilding if you're not going to build the whole system. That's $200 million in its own right. So we think you need to do a number of things to control it. So it really does turn out to be a pilot project.

BILL DEAN: Well, the Minneapolis tunnel is not part of this proposal anyway. What are you removing? It's not on the proposal. There are some people that would like to see that, but it's already been determined that it's too expensive.

And in most cities that have started light rail systems, they have not started with tunnels. And it has not proven to be something needed over the long term, for example, in Portland.

GARY EICHTEN: Isn't there a sense, though, in downtown Minneapolis, at least among some business interests, that if you're going to build this, make sure you put it underground or don't build it at all?

BILL DEAN: Yes, that argument has been made. And I think that there's some validity to the argument. I happen to personally believe that having ridden a number of light rail systems and seen them in operation in other cities around the country, that surface light rail downtown works just fine. It does not cause the problems that people would like to have you believe that they would be the result of a downtown surface system.

GARY EICHTEN: Lots of listeners on the line with questions about light rail transit. Let's go back to the phones. Hi.

SPEAKER 2: Yes, am I on?

GARY EICHTEN: Yes, your turn.

SPEAKER 2: Yes I would like to have further the expansion in studying the light rail, not just to the United States but if you look at Europe and other larger countries. I've traveled over there myself. And the convenience and the easability of getting from point A to point B is all based on a central light rail system.

In fact, coming into the airport, the first thing that you are greeted with are trains. And it is so easily grasped where you have to go to and where you have to travel to from the airport, even to the trains, to your hotels, et cetera.

And I think that we are so backwards here. And that we're not considering light rail. In fact, I also would have you look at history, how the streetcars at one time serviced all these areas until somebody had the abominable notion to tear them all up.

And we've had so much trouble with the buses. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that, frankly, people don't like the buses as well because of the fumes, because of what it does to the environment.

And I know you have to look at the financial aspect, but you have to also look at the big picture. And in the long run, what will turn out to be the most economical. I just think there is just no doubt that we have to have a light rail system.

And I also don't think you have to put everything underground because as a traveler you'd much rather see some scenery. In fact, you can elevate some of the rail and not have it cost so much.

GARY EICHTEN: All right, Mr. Wray, what about that? I mean, obviously, the front end costs of building this first line are pretty heavy, but then, of course, as more lines are built, the incremental cost seems to go down. And certainly over the long run, it would seem like you'd get that investment back.

LYLE WRAY: Well, I think there's an analogy here to the old joke about what you're losing in individual sales, you make up in volume. I mean, these systems cost a lot of money to operate. The comments have been made about capital, but they cost a lot of money to operate, as do freeways and as do other kinds of systems.

BILL DEAN: But less than buses.

LYLE WRAY: But to make-- not the capital cost but the operating cost. But the point the listener made about going to Europe-- and I'm an incorrigible traveler is quite true. I mean, you get off the airport in Amsterdam and get on a train and go downtown. It makes a lot of sense.

We have, for whatever reasons, chosen to build our cities in a very different way. They have very tight land controls. They're high density cities. And you can see, from the airport, the line-- in the airplane, the line in the green belt and around the cities where it stops and development ends.

We don't do that. We have an area that is sprawlier than Los Angeles per capita. People forget that we have an area that is more diffuse, more sprawled out, and it doesn't fit a core hub and spoke model.

So the point that our listener is making, I think, is that high density cities, Los Angeles is not one of them, Minneapolis is not one of them, can, in fact, work with respect to heavy rail. And she's talking about heavy rail in Europe, not so much light rail or as both, but mostly heavy rail, large underground subway systems.

The point we're making here is that this does not fit the reality of the Twin Cities today or in likely future. Some of our major issues are suburban, suburban to suburban commutes, getting people out to jobs, and congestion. And this line will not address that issue.

And we'd all like to believe that there's a technological solution that will make everything well and fine, but we think that it's very, very clearly a doubtful proposition that $400 million of investment to increase ridership 1% in the core between the two core cities is a good investment. And I think there's just simply no way of getting around that.

GARY EICHTEN: Long term, would it help rebuild, essentially, the central cities so that you control urban sprawl that way and get the metro area to start looking inward again?

LYLE WRAY: I think we've long since had the horse go out of the barn on the metropolitan area. I mean, Minneapolis as a core city is one sixth of the Metropolitan population, which is one sixth of the entire population base. It's a very small chunk.

And yes, it has a good chunk of the jobs, but most of the growth is south suburban. Southwest and southern suburbs are moving ahead much more quickly in terms of new jobs. So the future problems are going to be somewhere else.

Now, that isn't to say that there might not be any justification for it. We're simply saying the costs don't justify the expenditures of $400 million up to 1.6 billion.

GARY EICHTEN: Mr Dean, care to reply before we go to--

BILL DEAN: Yeah, I don't think that-- I mean, we could talk about the projections that he indicated, a 1% change in ridership from LRT compared to an exclusive busway. Those projections are nothing more than-- nothing more than that, projections. They're guesses.

And in fact, the projections that have been used in other cities have been generally far below what actually happened. So to talk about a 1% is more or less meaningless.

The Federal Transit Administration requires a projection be done. And the rules for making those projections are very narrow. And you're not allowed to speculate on certain changes in patterns when you make those projections. So I really think that the projection argument can be tossed aside.

Lyle brought up Los Angeles in the density of population and the urban sprawl in Los Angeles. Listeners ought to be aware that Los Angeles has made a major commitment to switch from more freeways to light rail, as well as heavy rail and commuter rail. And have just recently opened the Los Angeles Blue Line. The Green Line is coming online soon.

Because of the earthquakes, trains literally saved a lot of commuters on the so-called Santa Clarita Metrolink Line, which had been attracting about 1,000 riders a day and now is attracting over 30,000 a day.

People in Los Angeles are beginning to realize that no matter how many freeways you build, you're not going to reduce congestion. Building more freeway lanes simply attracts more automobiles. And that's happening here.

And if we don't make a change, we're going to end up-- just here's a fact to consider. Minneapolis St. Paul is the largest, I think, it's the second largest urban area in the industrialized world without a fixed guideway transit system.

One of the others is Detroit. And if you've been to downtown Detroit recently-- and you know, of course, about the automobile industry's influence over policy in the state of Michigan. Have you been to downtown Detroit recently? You could see what can happen in a city that makes no commitment to fix guideway transit.

LYLE WRAY: Maybe just a quick follow up. I've been on the LA system before it opened and looked at that pretty thoroughly. You got to remember that there's also a difference of scale here.

Los Angeles has-- the greater area has 2 and 1/2 times the population of the state of Minnesota. So we're not talking apples to apples here. This is a very different system. This is the combined population of Wisconsin and Minnesota is smaller than LA.

BILL DEAN: Well, you're the one that brought up the analogy with Los Angeles.

LYLE WRAY: But the point being that we're a smaller city, but we have even less density than LA. And I think the issue of how you fit transit to the realities is very important.

BILL DEAN: Well, let's use Calgary, for example.

LYLE WRAY: Yeah, that's near my hometown.

BILL DEAN: The least dense area and the most cars per capita of any city in North America. And at the same time, one of the most successful light rail transit systems.

LYLE WRAY: Because they decided not to invest in highways and forced people to use light rail. They had no choice. People had a gun to their head. And we're just not going to do that here. In other words, Minnesotans want--

BILL DEAN: Are you suggesting that people don't like it in Calgary?

LYLE WRAY: I'm suggesting that Minnesotans are not willing to put up with not investing in freeways and be forced onto mass transit? That's a choice that people are making democratically.

BILL DEAN: Then why do 70% of the people in Minnesota on polls say that they want light rail? You're presuming to guess what Minnesotans want.

LYLE WRAY: I think the choice of having forced use of mass transit versus freeway access in their car is a different kind of question. If you ask them if you want a choice of being on mass transit or you want to be forced to use mass transit, I think that's a different kind of question. You get a very different answer.

BILL DEAN: Well, the woman who just called sounded like she would make the choice for light rail as what would I and a great many of the 20,000 members of Minnesotans for Light Rail Transit.

GARY EICHTEN: Let me ask a dumb question here before we go back to the phones. In layman's terms, for a transit neophyte, what is the difference between heavy rail and light rail?

BILL DEAN: Yeah, I can answer that. Light rail does not mean lightweight. Light rail means lighter capacity. And it was coined as a way to distinguish light capacity fixed guideway systems from so-called heavy rail, which are larger, not necessarily heavier vehicles on the tracks, but carrying heavier capacity loads, for example, the New York and Washington subways and the Atlanta system would be heavy rail.

Whereas a system, which is a little more like what people remember is the streetcar, although it doesn't necessarily run on the streets is a lighter capacity, but not necessarily lighter weight.

The third element, by the way, is commuter rail, which is essentially traditional trains as like an Amtrak train, for those who remember the days when we had passenger trains. These are heavy, capacity vehicles that run on traditional railroad lines.

GARY EICHTEN: All right, let's go back to the phones, take another caller. Hi.

SPEAKER 3: Hi.

GARY EICHTEN: Go ahead.

SPEAKER 3: I just was going to give my experience from riding the public transportation system in Sacramento, California. I live part of the time here in Minnesota. And we have a light rail there. And I can get out from the central city out to suburbia, even with having to ride my bicycle. I ride it one mile, get on the light rail, and then get off the light rail and ride it one more mile.

And I can get there faster than when I take my car, even though most of the time in the car, I would be on the freeway. But downtown, it doesn't go so fast. I mean, you can almost-- if you miss it and you're on your bicycle-- if I were a little younger, I'm 55, I would be able to catch it and get on at the next station.

But one of the major advantages to me of the light rail is that not only does it-- did it free up buses, the buses now run on time. Any bus that crosses the light rail route is almost always on time now because you see they need to make these connections. So that has really helped the whole system.

GARY EICHTEN: Ma'am, I'm wondering, people in Sacramento, your experience, are they willing to get on a bus, drive-- take the bus to where the LRT comes, get off the bus, get on the LRT, and vice versa?

SPEAKER 3: Oh, yes. And then we have-- out in the suburbs, we have all these parking lots. And people will drive and leave their cars and then get on the light rail for the trip downtown. So that works pretty well.

And the cars are packed at rush hour. And of course they can add and take off cars as needed, which is--

GARY EICHTEN: Do you have to stand?

SPEAKER 3: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Lots of times I've seen people standing on there. But then there's the main disadvantage that I've seen is just all the crime that can happen related to light rail. I mean, we've had two murders that I know of at the stations.

One of them was a disappointed panhandler. And nobody really knows what was the other. And there's also a lot of crime on the light rail because there's no driver you see on each car like there is on a bus.

So there's drug dealers with beepers. And I've seen guys trying to get people to do gambling games. And we've had kids skateboarding down the aisles, when you go up on the elevated sections.

And then we've had-- one time when I was on the light rail, someone threw a rock through the window at the overpass. And it shattered the window. And that poor guy that was sitting in that seat, he just hit the floor.

GARY EICHTEN: OK, well, thanks for your call. OK, what about the security issue? Because it does seem to be a problem, I think, for a lot of people who might otherwise use the bus today, that they just don't want to put up with the hassles.

LYLE WRAY: I don't think it's much different between the two. I think that there's a real need for public perception of good security in our mass transit systems. And I think there's no surer way of killing our downtowns or killing our mass transit systems than having the public perceive that they're not safe. And I think we both agree that that's not really a different issue.

BILL DEAN: Yeah, I would also say that it's essentially a societal issue. It relates to transit from time to time, but it relates to almost every other public policy issue as well. And I don't think that should be a criterion for deciding for or against either a bus or a light rail system.

GARY EICHTEN: Any other thoughts on what she had to say about the Sacramento experience?

LYLE WRAY: Well, I've been on it as well. And I think that the fact that there are anecdotes that LRT is neat and it's fun to go out to the suburbs really shouldn't be a sufficient basis for spending half a billion dollars. We think, yes, there are some benefits to it, but the costs, we believe, far outweigh the benefits that are obtained.

It's not that these systems don't have function. Of course, they do. They have served and served reasonably well. The question is, is it the best cost option for transit? And that's where we disagree. Not that there's no value to these systems. Of course, there is.

BILL DEAN: Well, I think over the long haul, one of the callers indicated that over the long haul is what you really have to look at. And I would agree-- I would agree with Lyle here that the central corridor in and of itself is not particularly cost effective.

I've always felt-- having ridden the Portland, and the San Diego, and the Sacramento systems, as well as the new Baltimore system, and the St. Louis system, that it's very, very important that a first line also contain a suburb to core city element.

My hope is-- and this is a personal opinion, not necessarily reflecting the policy of Minnesotans for Light Rail. But my personal opinion is that the one line should not be done in isolation from the other.

That if the central corridor line goes in, the 35W line should follow very shortly thereafter. A central corridor line probably will be a loser to start with. It has to be operated in conjunction with a high density or reasonably high expectation of ridership, suburb to core city route as well. And the two depend on each other for cost effectiveness over the long run.

But we've got to start. And the way to start with the amount of federal money that's available for this central corridor in our judgment is to start with the proposal that's on the table now. It's been studied for over 20 years. And this is the best proposal that the collective wisdom of all of the Twin Cities governmental agencies have come up with.

LYLE WRAY: I think the technical term is political logrolling between the two cities.

BILL DEAN: I think I would agree that that's been the case.

LYLE WRAY: You've basically just made my point. This isn't a very good place to start. And it's very expensive. We're going to lose money. You're saying, well, let's go into part two where it'll really work.

And just coming back to one quick point about projections. You were mentioning the numbers of 1% not being very good. If you look at all rail projections, all fixed guideway systems that have been built since the Nixon administration, yes, projections have been wrong. But they haven't been wrong in the direction you're talking about. Many of them have failed massively. Miami and many others.

BILL DEAN: Well, Miami is not a light rail system.

LYLE WRAY: I'm talking about all rail systems. The projections have often been wrong, but they've been wrong in the other direction of wild optimism. And many of these systems are massive, massive financial debt sinkholes. And that's a significant issue. So I agree with your point that this is not necessarily the best way to start. And it's a political decision.

But our point about this is when you look at the very broad picture, we think that the Metropolitan area as it is now, could benefit far more from four or five other transit initiatives, whether high occupancy vehicle lanes, or bus exclusive right of ways, and more high speed bus models, and other kinds of things. As a first step, let's get that done first.

BILL DEAN: But we've been trying to do that for the last 10 or 15 years. We have done more in this metropolitan area in that regard than most other metro areas.

LYLE WRAY: Rideshare is going south. We're not doing very well in rideshare. It's declining. And we're not very good compared to many other areas. We're not doing very well in other areas. We're getting--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

LYLE WRAY: --the HOVs. We're doing that, but we're not moving in other areas. We're not doing reverse commuting.

BILL DEAN: The HOVs aren't working particularly well, even on 394.

LYLE WRAY: But reverse commute, we're doing very little on that. Suburb to suburb is a real struggle.

BILL DEAN: Well, it's not working. The people don't want to do it.

GARY EICHTEN: Given what has been done is-- because the alternative does seem to be expansion of the bus system, so on, and so forth. Bus ridership has been declining again. It went up.

BILL DEAN: The long term trend is down. Bus ridership over the last decade has gone from something like 93 million at its peak to in the high 60s. And there's a little blip about a year or two ago, which was largely connected with a very expensive marketing campaign. And now the trend continues.

GARY EICHTEN: Is there any reason to believe long term that people would actually use an expanded bus system?

LYLE WRAY: I think the point is that there's a major challenge in getting people onto buses, but I would suggest that one of the major problems with buses is they don't go where people want to go. And they don't come from where people are.

BILL DEAN: And light rail helps buses to do that.

LYLE WRAY: Well, I don't agree with that point. And I'm aware of intermodal connections.

BILL DEAN: Well, it's not a matter of agreement. It's a matter of fact. Look at San Diego. Look at Portland. They have redirected their buses. And they have increased bus ridership in those cities.

LYLE WRAY: That adds some very substantial expense. The concern, though, about buses is that the suburban to suburban commute, in other words, people going from Eagan to Bloomington to work isn't being addressed by this proposal or the full $1.6 billion proposal.

The question is, how much money we want to spend on transit? I mean, if you're saying, let's do the full LRT program. And let's massively expand buses. And will we have more mass transit? Of course, we will.

The question is, how are we going to pay for all this? And we're suggesting that if you look at the legislative track record on funding MTC, we have been very frugal or stingy, some people would say, on funding mass transit as it is.

Where are we going to get the religion to suddenly invest a massive amount of money in mass transit? And that's a concern that buses are really not getting a full shot. We have one quick anecdote.

I came back from Amsterdam this past May and saw, again, excellent heavy rail systems from the downtown area out to the airport, and so on, and so forth. Came back here and the first bus I saw had its front signal lights taped on. I mean, we just aren't spending the money here. And I think the question is really important.

GARY EICHTEN: Very briefly, I want to get back to the phones. If we spent the 500 to $700 million to buy a bunch of buses, would people ride the buses instead of buying this LRT system?

LYLE WRAY: Well, let's remember, the LRT system as it is-- if LRT says people won't ride buses, it's got a major flaw because the system is based on people initially largely getting on a bus. The LRT line doesn't run everywhere. You have to get on a bus to get to the LRT. So if people won't ride buses, they're not going to get on an LRT. They've got to get there.

So the point is, we think that a massive expansion in these other four or five options-- high speed buses, dedicated busways would make a major improvement at a much lower cost. Now, that's the major significant point that LRT requires people to get on buses to transfer to LRT stops, just as they do in most systems.

BILL DEAN: Well, that's partially true, not necessarily totally true. People can drive to a parking lot and get on an LRT. And that's done very successfully. One of the callers mentioned doing that in Sacramento. So connecting buses--

LYLE WRAY: Drive to a bus ride. Drive to a bus, which they do now.

BILL DEAN: But the more significant factor here is that by redirecting the bus routes to serve areas of suburbs from-- make it possible to go from suburban point to suburban point, to address the Eagan to Bloomington problem, where those buses and that capital investment now is utilized serving a spine or arterial areas.

So you're essentially freeing buses to serve people that have never been served by transit before. And I guess that's the point that we're trying to make that transit overall is improved. And people's convenience is expedited.

GARY EICHTEN: Let's go back to the phones. Another caller's on the line. Hi.

SPEAKER 4: Hello.

GARY EICHTEN: Yes, go ahead sir.

SPEAKER 4: Yes, I think light rail is a good idea. I think, though, that we're probably jumping ahead of ourselves. I think it's absurd to consider the corridors you've mentioned for light rail before we expand some of the freeways in certain corridors where there's two lanes for 20 years. And it's apparent one extra lane would make a big difference.

And so that's pretty much my point. And the gentleman from the Citizens group, to me, is making a lot more sense than having this be some political program that gets it's funding for-- and it just seems that the moneys could be used to expand some of the corridors and the freeways. And then use the light rail as a supplement to that down the road.

GARY EICHTEN: Jazz up the highways a little bit more.

SPEAKER 4: Well, you don't have to drive around too much in the Twin Cities. I think we have a good basic structure on the freeway here. But if you take 35W, you get to cross town and it's two lanes.

We've grown in the Southern suburbs so much that two lanes 15 years ago wasn't enough. Same with Crosstown, same with 494 going out to Eagan. And 35 or 94 going east past 3M. Just to point out a couple of areas where an extra lane, as they added in the 94 corridor between downtowns, that made a big difference.

GARY EICHTEN: OK, let me ask you very briefly here, for the people here-- Mr. Dean, Mr. Wray. Will the decision on light rail, the corridor here, will that have any impact on plans to rebuild 35W, both the highway segment and they're supposed to have an LRT system on 35W?

BILL DEAN: Well, of course, there's an effect. If the central corridor is not built, it lessens the probability that the 35W corridor would be built because it would have no connection to either the university or St. Paul. Both are factors that would likely make the 35W corridor a lot more economically viable.

LYLE WRAY: I think that the benefits of LRT to the 35W corridor are probably highly doubtful, without getting into the whole issue of freeway expansion. I think there's a question here of how we can best use limited dollars for improving our whole transportation systems.

And I think Mr. Dean has made one point that simply building more freeways is, I think, something that most cities have concluded just doesn't get you there. And that's why things like freeway metering and other kinds of systems that use our resources more effectively are probably going to be a bigger winner in the long haul.

I would suggest, though, that there may be needed areas for freeway expansion. And I guess as a personal point of view as opposed to the league, I think that the artery connecting downtown Minneapolis with the southern suburbs is an artery that cuts both ways. That is to say, it may be in the benefits of downtown to have easy and free access for people to come down there to shop, and to work, and so on rather than being shut out.

But I think that the point you're making about LRT and freeway expansion is that, I think, we need to take a holistic look at transit systems and the whole transportation system, rather than just look at it one particular project like LRT at a time. And I think that's what we've been doing.

And the Citizens League work on this by looking at transit is getting people out of their cars into a variety of other means. And we're not hung up on any particular one. And we looked at LRT without a jaundiced view and basically concluded it was not a bad idea, just cost too much per rider taken out of their car.

GARY EICHTEN: Another caller is on the line with a question. Hi.

SPEAKER 5: Yes, hello. I'd like to voice the opinion that demographic dispersion is actually kind of a circular, self-perpetuating argument. One of the reasons that we are demographically dispersed in this area is that we've never given people any incentive to concentrate.

Demographics will not change unless we stop subsidizing the use of the automobile through massive funding of freeway systems and artificially low gasoline prices. There's many negative side effects to the type of transportation that we are currently using.

I mean, we've got seas of concrete and large ugly parking lots creating what I'd call a suburban blight of our suburbs, which are completely anti-pedestrian.

When you look at the overall bottom line on transportation systems, you've got to not just consider the cash flow of those situations. You've got to look at all the side benefits. The softer benefits are very hard to calculate in most of these situations.

GARY EICHTEN: Gentlemen, do you want to comment?

BILL DEAN: I would underscore what the caller is saying. I think that we accept sometimes as a given that the way things are in the United States is the way they ought to be. And we compare ourselves with Europe and say, well, we didn't develop that way.

Well, we didn't develop that way for a number of reasons, one of which is that the economic resurgence after World War II allowed Americans to buy cars much sooner than Europeans. And at the same time, Detroit waged a massive campaign to get rid of trains in this country.

And we, essentially, lost our knowledge of and the infrastructure that supported rail transit in this country. Europeans did not. And they learned-- frankly, many Europeans learned from when their economic boom took place. And they were able to buy automobiles. They learned from the mistakes that we made here in the United States.

That's not to say that we can't reverse our mistakes. We need to restrengthen our cities and our developed areas. And the Citizens League has consistently supported that notion.

It's really been incredible to me, over the years, to see that a very small group of people, an 11-member committee that essentially rehashed a 1986 study could come up with the recommendation that they have when so many thinking people in the Twin Cities recognize the long-term need for what the caller-- for the reasons that the caller suggests that light rail transit is a reversal of several negative trends that we can see every day in this American society.

LYLE WRAY: Well, let me jump in here. And we don't have time for a full rebuttal because I think we've got to finish at the top of the hour, but I think a couple of quick points. The point I made earlier about us being sprawly, this is a little bit like a day late and a dollar short.

Metropolitan Toronto did something about guided rail systems in 1945 and put an iron hand on development around mass transit. We were not willing to do that here for a variety of reasons and now have one of the sprawliest if not the sprawliest Metropolitan areas in the country.

We now have a 12 to 14 county, not city, county metropolitan area that extends into Wisconsin and from here to Buffalo, practically.

BILL DEAN: So how is that an argument for continuing in that direction?

LYLE WRAY: My point about it, however, is that's the current reality. And the current reality is you cannot deal with anything aside from that in the short term. We have stopped growing rapidly.

The growth spurt from 1945 to 1975 is over. And now, we want to add mass transit to a system that's somewhat unworkable. Our point is, let's look at those other four or five options that are far more effective in the short term.

BILL DEAN: There are still 150,000 jobs minimum in the core cities.

LYLE WRAY: But they're mostly people like me who have 8 to 10-minute commutes. And it's no problem. And I won't get on LRT because it's faster to drive my car, unless you want to do a whole raft of draconian things, boosting parking rates, and making it impossible to park downtown, then you make people's choices limited.

But the point about, I think, the caller is making about how we want to design our urban area. Americans have made a choice for low density. Everybody wants, for the most part, single family homes with a double car garage in the suburbs. That does not fit the current reality.

The last point about Europeans having been so far sighted. They are now building suburbs. They are now getting into traffic jams in the suburban areas outside of London, Paris, and Berlin.

As people can afford cars and suburban lifestyles, they are buying them at the maximum rate possible. Government doesn't support that like we do here. And they're making it difficult to do.

So the question the caller raises about what kind of a community we want-- pedestrian friendly communities and so on. I think, frankly, the horse is out of the barn long since passed on those kind of issues.

And the question is, what do we do with our investments in transit dollars in a very tight era? Unless we've forgotten, citizens are not interested in spending billions and billions of dollars.

GARY EICHTEN: Let's see if we can get one more caller on anyway before we have to run. Hi.

SPEAKER 6: Yes, I'm speaking with to Mr. Wray's point about there being alternatives. I would first like to say that I certainly agree with them that the amount of money that's proposed to spend on light rail would probably not ever be justified.

And there's ample evidence, as he said, that the majority of light rail systems built recently have not fulfilled their expectations. But amongst the alternatives, he hasn't mentioned one which is finally coming to its own and out of the futuristic state.

And Chicago is going to have an operating system of personal rapid transit individual cars, which will certainly do a lot for the security problem, which was raised by one other speaker. It will get people from one point to another at a--

GARY EICHTEN: Well, we're about out of time here, but what about the idea of getting locked into spending a lot of money on a technology that might be replaced in the future by something a little snazzier?

BILL DEAN: Well, we have PRT right now. And it's called the automobile. And to spend massively on rebuilding our infrastructure to support another PRT system, I think, would be foolish. What we still have are large numbers of people that depend on mass transit. And despite the fact that it's costly, maintaining a bus system is costly also.

And we believe, Minnesotans for Light Rail believe that building light rail as part of a balanced transportation system that includes automobiles and freeways. Light rail and intercity transportation, which should include high speed rail and air is what we really need to be looking toward.

No, we're not Europe. And we're not going to be like Europe. But we need, in our opinion, to reverse the trend and rebuild a rail transit system in this country that includes light rail in urban areas and high speed rail in between cities of intermediate distance.

GARY EICHTEN: We were talking to Minneapolis State Senator Jane Ranum earlier on the program. She's leading the charge at the legislature for the $10 million appropriation to finish the engineering studies on this line that would run from Minneapolis to St. Paul and tried to pin her down. Yay or nay, how's the vote going to go on the 10 million? And she said she was hopeful.

So what do you think? What's your prediction, gentlemen? Is the legislature going to approve that money? And if it does, does that mean all systems go for light rail or are we going to have this discussion another year or two from now? Mr. Wray, you want to go first? Very briefly here.

LYLE WRAY: Hard to predict the legislature. I'm hoping they're going to take a look at the broader picture of transit and not proceed at this point. I think that the broader picture of transit improvements in transit are important. And we need to get transit funding straightened around altogether in mass transit here. And I that would be a higher priority.

BILL DEAN: I agree that we need a dedicated source for transit funding, but I also believe that the time has come to make a decision on light rail transit. And of course, we hope that the legislature, in its wisdom, will do so. But trying to predict what the legislature will do is like trying to predict whether there will be rain 30 days from now.

GARY EICHTEN: So still very much up in the air. Thanks a lot for coming by, gentlemen. Sure appreciate it.

LYLE WRAY: Thank you.

BILL DEAN: Interesting to follow this. Bill Dean is the chair of the group Minnesotans for Light Rail Transit. And Lyle Ray is the executive director of the Citizens League.