Counterpoint: Plan transit for those who lack a car

I appreciated "Transit may be a wreck, but the Met Council didn't derail it," (Opinion Exchange, Feb. 19) because it reflects much of my own thinking as a Minneapolis resident who currently is "between cars" and who has lived car-free for three extended periods in my life.

I have lived and traveled in cities with superb transit (Tokyo and Japan's other major cities, Seoul, London) and workable transit (Portland), and one of my few complaints about Minneapolis is that I am forced to drive in order to live a full life, which is not true in the aforementioned cities.

Yet I was opposed to the alignment of the Southwest light rail line.

Metro Transit's underlying problem is exactly what the author describes in his commentary. Instead of looking at the big picture ("How can we make it possible to live without a car?"), it takes the bus routes that were based on the central part of the old streetcar system and tacks new things on without much thought for how the result will aid the functioning of the whole. Because the question it is asking is, "How can we get people to work and back, Monday through Friday?"

That was the rationale behind the Southwest line: bringing residents of the North Side to jobs in Eden Prairie.

Looking at a system map, you can see the result of this focus: a spaghetti tangle of lines that still leaves large areas unserved.

In a well-planned system, the "skeleton" is a set of rail lines that hit major destinations, with bus lines running between the stations on arterial streets to form a web of accessible transit that goes to most major destinations in the service area. Both the Blue Line (downtown to the airport) and the Green Line (linking both downtowns via the University of Minnesota) serve such a plan, although the Green Line should have gone to the Ordway, Xcel Center and Science Museum of Minnesota instead of terminating at St. Paul's nearly empty Union Station. Such a route would certainly have attracted more riders from Minneapolis.

The Southwest line is designed to bring rail transit to the Excelsior-Grand area and downtown Hopkins. But otherwise, it won't go far enough into the North Side to attract large numbers of riders from that area, and I find it hard to believe that a stop located between Cedar Lake and Lake of the Isles would attract many riders, either. And seriously, who moves to Eden Prairie with the thought, "I want to ride a train into the city"?

Any system needs an occasional stress test to see how it works under less than optimum conditions. I would like to propose an experiment that would put both Metro Transit and its planners to a real stress test.

Require the planners and their families to get around entirely by transit, on foot or by bicycle (they could cheat once a week by calling Uber, Lyft or a taxi, or getting a ride from a neighbor). Do it for six months to experience both winter and summer conditions.

Too stressful a stress test, you say? Not really. Unknown numbers of elderly, disabled, impoverished and youthful residents of the Twin Cities live that way already, all the time. If we are ever to have workable, efficient transit, planners need a rider's eye view of our system.

I can guarantee that it would be an eye-opening experience and would make them aware of the real-world implications of their plans.

Karen Sandness lives in Minneapolis.