On a frozen morning, when getting out of bed is a challenge, Katrina McCarney gets out of her car and slogs toward the train.
"This is probably the worst part about it," she said as she left her car at the Fort Snelling park-and-ride lot.
She admits sometimes, when temperatures hover around zero, driving is more convenient.
"But on the days when it snows, like that first snowfall this year," she said, "it maybe took me an extra 10 minutes, whereas it took my husband two hours to get home."
McCarney is one of more than 30,000 people, according to Metro Transit, who ride the Hiawatha light rail line on an average weekday.
She says she's saving almost $2,000 a year on gas and parking.
"That's definitely worth a five-minute walk from my car to the train station," she said.
McCarney lives in Eagan, works in downtown Minneapolis and drops her car in the middle.
And she's not alone.
Metro Transit says 90 percent of the people who ride light rail own their own car, yet they choose not use their cars for at least some of their travel.
Additionally, the agency says half of all light-rail riders didn't use public transit at all before the train started running.
Yet skeptics remain.
"I don't believe that at all," said former state Rep. Phil Krinkie, who is now president of the Minnesota Taxpayers League, about the light-rail statistics.
Even with the Hiawatha line speeding past ridership expectations set when the line opened four years ago - and with businesses growing and condos rising along the light-rail corridor - light rail continues to pick up some criticism.
"Why can't we do it with better bus service or increased bus service or what is called bus rapid transit?" Krinkie asked. "Seems a lot more practical, a lot less cost than building a rail line like this."
In the last few months, the questions have come back. When old bridges and buckling roads need help, why would the state spend transportation dollars on new trains?
In January, Gov. Pawlenty threatened to eliminate state funding for the next light rail line: the so-called Central Corridor connecting Minneapolis and Saint Paul, because it had gone over budget by $100 million.
"They need to get reasonable," Pawlenty said of different interest groups whose requests were driving up the line's construction cost. "The project needs to go on a diet."
Peter Bell, the governor's appointed chairman of the Metropolitan Council, said "We will be able to build a very good line, a very effective line, that will carry 43,000 persons a day, when it's fully developed," without going over budget.
Bell's job is to find a way to cut the Central Corridor cost from more than $1 billion dollars to $909 million, or else he says the federal government will withdraw its pledge to pay half.
"My hope is to get broad consensus," Bell said. "At least to the point where all parties can say, 'I can live with this.' "
Among the major requests still unresolved:
The University of Minnesota would like a tunnel under the campus, and if there isn't one, designers will have to figure out if there is room for both a train and cars on the campus.
Neighborhood groups want extra stops along University Ave. or, at least, the infrastructure to add them at a later date. University Ave. is one of the Twin Cities' most congested traffic ways.
Ramsey County wants a train maintenance facility built near Saint Paul's union depot.
Met Council will decide what fits - and what has to go - Wednesday night.
"It's important to understand no light rail line has been built in the United States in the last 15 or 20 years where major compromises haven't been made," Bell said.
But compromise has not been a Minnesota specialty when it comes to transit. Whether it is a question of adding extras to a light rail line or trying to add any public transportation at all, politicians get gridlocked.
"Historically in Minnesota, the transportation funding debate has been between highways - particularly in outstate Minnesota - versus investment in a number of different modes in the Twin Cities," said Frank Douma, a transportation scholar at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute.
And while Minnesota has been stuck in that political traffic jam, other metro areas have sped ahead.
Denver, for example, completed its first light rail line in 1994. Now the light rail system covers 35 miles. The total construction cost was $1.2 billion.
Portland, a smaller city, finished its first line in 1986. Light rail now covers 44 miles in Portland and cost a total of $1.65 billion.
In the Twin Cities, assuming the Central Corridor is built on budget, Minnesota will have 23 miles of rail for $1.6 billion. That's 21 fewer miles than Portland for pretty much the same price.
Phil Krinkie says there's no point in playing catch-up.
"Let's not just spend a lot of money in order to have a lean-to and some railroad tracks," he said, referring to a warming station at the Fort Snelling train stop. "I think we can enhance bus service without spending a billion dollars on one line."
But as the Twin Cities population grows, the Humprhey Institute's Frank Douma says light rail, not bus service, is the best mode of transit for attracting new riders.
"They trust the mode more, or they find it more attractive," he said. "They're more willing to get on it when they would not get on a bus."
And Douma said adding enhanced bus service, with nicer stops that look like train stations, would cost just as much as light rail but won't move as many people.
"You run up against a capacity limit on buses, in that you just can't carry as many people on buses when you're running then at the same frequency, high frequency, of a train," he said.
Additionally, studies have found that people will take trains where they won't take buses, such as sporting events. A recent University of Minnesota survey said the number of fans taking public transit to Twins games nearly tripled after the Hiawatha line opened and stopped at the Metrodome.
Katrina McCarney is one of those fans - one of the people who, without light rail, would be using her car much more.
"If (light rail) went to Saint Paul, I'd definitely take it there," she said. "To a Wild game or something."
Peter Bell calls the Hiawatha line "the most successful public works project in the Twin Cities area in the last quarter of a century."
The success of the Hiawatha line has muted most detractors.
Its price tag is high, but transit experts say there's really no way to compare its cost to, for example, the less expensive cost of a new interstate. New highways can't be built in the middle of densely populated metropolitan areas without destroying homes and businesses in the process.
But no matter how many cars light rail takes off the road, any project that costs more than 80 million dollars per mile will have people asking if this is this the best way to move forward.
(Copyright 2008 by KARE11. All Rights Reserved.)
