The 2040 equation: density minus transit equals failure

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

One of the more compelling promises of the 2040 Plan was an evolution of transit in Minneapolis that would transform the city from a place where you could get downtown to a place where transit could conveniently get you most anywhere: Uptown to Northeast, Longfellow to Bde Maka Ska, the airport to Camden.

Minneapolis hasn’t been that kind of place in generations, in part because of too little density and in part because of too much car ownership.

The 2040 Plan was predicated on and sold as requiring a major investment in local transit density. Not just Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) on the five busiest corridors or light rail (LRT) stopping every mile — not just a rush hour trip to a job downtown — but frequent bus service all over the city. That will be needed when the population jumps by 10, 20, even 100 people on some blocks.

But if you fail to build it — or in fact, “un-build” it, as we have done — you create a market force that dissuades people from reducing reliance on cars or contemplating housing that doesn’t come with parking, as the city now encourages.

This was part of the density compact, if you will. Removing parking requirements for new multiunit buildings and adding hundreds of units of housing to corridors that are not particularly dense would otherwise create traffic congestion and parking problems in places currently free of them.

The 2040 Plan, before it was stopped by the courts, took root during the pandemic, when no one was lobbying for more communal means of anything. Work-from-home now acts as a permanent drag on transit ridership. But auto use has risen.

The lack of a plan to boost transit is a potential environmental harm of 2040. The lawsuit’s proponents may not be arguing for more buses, but the failure to provide them gives their complaint legs. To be clear, I’m no fan of the litigation, but without greater core levels of transit, an enthusiastic implementation of 2040 is problematic.

The plan framers acknowledged that transit in Minneapolis was inadequate to support the kind of density they envisioned without adding a car for every new adult resident. But since 2040′s approval in late 2019, transit density in the city has plummeted. An analysis by longtime (now retired) Metro Transit planner Aaron Isaacs, published in Streets.mn this month, brought the reality home.

The article includes several sobering insights. Of greatest relevance here are Isaacs’ thoughts on city bus services. “Too much of the system,” he writes, “today runs only every half hour. Most potential trips require a transfer to a second bus or train, and it just doesn’t work at half-hour frequencies. … I’ve studied this, and where two routes with 30-minute frequencies cross, there is very little transfer activity. It’s too inconvenient. The frequencies need to get down to 15 minutes to encourage transfers.”

Isaacs is calling for returning service to pre-pandemic levels or higher, yet the predicates of the 2040 Plan envisioned bettering 2019 frequencies to big-city (7-10 minute?) headways. Even our BRT and LRT lines rarely operate at those frequencies.

When the 2040 Plan’s advocates assured the community its implementation would translate to substantial improvements in transit infrastructure, what they failed to mention was that the city of Minneapolis neither funds nor manages transit in the city. I asked city officials if their incapacity to control this investment wouldn’t make more cars a fait accompli. I suspected they were engaging in a form of magical thinking, or worse, bad-faith policy. I’m not convinced there ever was a plan to increase transit on secondary corridors that was backed by a means to fund and implement.

This month, the Atlantic published an article highlighting Minneapolis as a focal point in a war between two styles of environmentalists: “crisis greens,” who support aggressive efforts to develop cities, and “cautious greens,” who frequently litigate against “crisis greens” to slow development, as they did with the 2040 Plan (and Southwest LRT). The 2040 Plan was vulnerable in part because it failed to appreciate that state environmental laws apply to seemingly any large-scale government initiative, even one not in itself an act of development.

Between the court injunctions and high interest rates, it’s not currently practical for the private sector or individuals to infill the city as envisioned by 2040. But that will change, I suspect. Now’s the time to be thinking about a real-world solution to avoid building toward top 10 metro area levels of density while maintaining transit suited to a city half our size.

Adam Platt is executive editor of Twin Cities Business.