I’m quickly getting addicted to Alpha News’ reporting. This article is a great example of the work Alpha is doing. They’re doing reporting on things we’d never see in the Strib or other newspapers.

What other newspaper has written about the impact the collapse of CTIB, aka the Counties Transit Improvement Board, is having on the cost of the SWLRT? Anders Koskinen’s article is truly an eye-opener. In it, Koskinen wrote that, according to “the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, ‘the cost of constructing a new 6-lane Interstate highway [is] about $7 million per mile in rural areas, $11 million or more per mile in urban areas.'” Further, Alpha reports that it costs “about $1.25 million per mile” to “mill and resurface a 4-lane road.” Finally, Alpha reports that it costs “about $4 million per mile” to “expand an Interstate Highway from four lanes to six lanes.” Later in the article, Koskinen wrote that the per-mile cost of building a mile of the SWLRT is “$128.14 million.”

That’s only part of the story. The other part of the story is that the “project will cost a total of $1.858 billion and construct just 14.5 miles of new rail for the Metro Green Lines.” That’s before factoring in the fact that Hennepin County’s “contribution totals roughly $656.65 million, about 35 percent” of the SWLRT project. That’s assuming that the federal government picks up its $929,000,000 portion of the tab for SWLRT. That’s far from a certainty at this point.

Apparently, the Dayton administration thinks that SWLRT is never too expensive. Such type of thinking is frightening. To people in outstate Minnesota, spending $128,140,000 per mile of SWLRT can’t be justified, especially when it costs $1,250,000 per mile to resurface a 4-lane road. According to my trusty calculator, MnDOT could resurface almost 1,500 miles of road for the cost of building the SWLRT.

Guess who supports SWLRT:

I guess he thinks he hasn’t hurt our wallets enough through Obamacare. The time to stop SWLRT is now.

Technorati: SWLRT, Met Council, Al Franken, Transportation, Pork