The St. Paul streetcar is dead; here’s how the $730 million will be spent

The decision to abandon plans to build a streetcar line down St. Paul’s W. 7th Street has left Ramsey County with $730 million to spend on other transportation projects over the coming decade.

After the County Board said in September that it no longer backed the line, Public Works officials began figuring out how to best use the funding. What they came up with is a plan to make it easier for buses, cars, cyclists and pedestrians to get around the county.

“This is a real opportunity, for us as an organization, to really move a lot of needles when it comes to how we serve our residents with the transportation system,” Brian Isaacson, Public Works director, told the commissioners during an April workshop.

It’s a framework critics say doesn’t focus enough on transit and other alternative modes of transportation. Some residents also worry the plan continues to overlook the long-ignored West Seventh Street corridor.

“This document mostly reads like a plan to rebuild county roads, not like a plan to systematically improve multimodal travel,” St. Paul resident John Levin said at a public hearing June 3.

“If you have access to a car, you can (already) get anywhere you need to go in Ramsey County.”

The plan identifies high-traffic business corridors, busy intersections and key interchanges that need to be redesigned to be more accessible to more than just traffic. There’s also money for the upkeep of Union Depot and the rail lines that serve it, as well as for bike lanes, sidewalks and trails.

To illustrate what type of projects this “multimodal” plan might prioritize, Isaacson points to the new Dale Street bridge over Interstate 94 and its expansive sidewalks. Or the work underway on Rice Street, which will eliminate a lane of traffic to make it safer for transit and pedestrians.

Areas like downtown St. Paul and Rice Creek Commons would see big transportation investments. So will thoroughfares like White Bear, Larpenteur, Lexington and Snelling avenues.

The framework doesn’t specify projects; those will be picked each year by county leaders using the new All-Abilities 2050 Transportation Plan as a guide. Over the next decade, the $730 million will come from a half-cent sales tax the County Board levied in 2017 and an annual portion of property taxes that has been dedicated to rail and transit for decades.

Commissioners unanimously backed the plan to repurpose the Riverview funds with Commissioner Mai Chong Xiong saying it will “help catalyze investment and services for multimodal transit.”

Yet critics of how the repurposed funds will be used were upset it doesn’t include new bus rapid transit lines, although the county remains committed to the Purple Line between White Bear Lake and St. Paul.

Now that the streetcar has been abandoned, St. Paul leaders and the Metropolitan Council are gathering public input for how to best improve the bus line down West 7th Street. It is one of the city’s busiest bus lines, and the street needs to be rebuilt, so the cost of creating a bus rapid transit line could top $500 million.

County officials acknowledged they will likely be asked to help fund the project, but they so far haven’t committed to the work. The wait to improve the corridor continues to frustrate residents.

“West Seventh has been holding its breath for two decades. The future is on pause, and that sucks,” said Tom Basgen, who lives along the corridor.