Zzzzz....What? I coulda rode the train?

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Okay, now my ears are perked up.

To understand where I'm coming from on this, you need to understand the topology of Minneapolis, right now, in the Year of Our Lord, 2006.

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The current light rail line in this town goes from the Airport and The Mall of America to the Western edge of Downtown. For you club goers out there, the Franklin stop is right next to the Cabooze. The Cedar/Riverside stop puts you onto the 400 Bar, the Nomad, The Cedar Cultural Centre, the Viking Bar, and the Triple Rock Social Club. The Warehouse District Stop puts you close to First Avenue & the Entry and the Fine Line, and, just a perilous walk or cheap cab ride to Lee's Liquor Lounge.

In other words, if you want to crawl to clubs in this town, and you live near this line (like I do), you can literally crawl to clubs in this town. Especially if you load up your phone, blackberry, or a cocktail napkin with the station stops for each, so you know how much time you have to hop from place to place. In other words, it's nigh on perfect.

Some of you out there have been on this train at 1:21am, too, so you know that the ride "home" is half the fun of the thing. To say a train full of jiggly giggly girls being sloppily propositioned by everyone from Trevor, the dew-ragged hip hop king of Lakeville (getting off at the Mall of America to drive his dad's car home), to Bob, the somewhat homeless guy praying for the transit cops to throw him in jail so that he doesn't have to sleep outside...is good "people watching"...is an understatement.

But, let's return to the beginning...the proposed NorthStar Line. I know some people who know some people and I've had two State Senators tell me that because of various footdragging, proposed stops in Northeast Minneapolis were removed from the line because they would be "too expensive to build." This is stupidity on a colossal scale. If you drill down into the website for this thing, you see that it hops across the creek somewhere down by the warehouse district and knifes through Northeast on some old tracks. Stops at Broadway and Lowry would not only be easy, they'd be organic.

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Now, let me paint a picture for you...if you got off at the Broadway stop that doesn't exist because a handful of people are fucking morons, you could easily walk to the 331 Club and Mayslack's for music. You could also have dinner at The Modern Cafe or Erte. You could also easily walk to Elsie's to throw a few. Note, I'm leaving out about 6 plain old brown wrapper bars that your dad and/or your granddad went to nightly back in the 70's, when men wore moustaches, drank hard liquor and smoked filterless cigarettes.

Like your Econ 101 professor once said, "assume a Lowry Avenue Station." Get off there and you could walk to Jaro's, Psycho Suzie's, Stasiu's, Grumpy's, The Double Deuce, Mario's Kellar Bar, Jax, and several others.

Do you understand that these stations will pay for themselves?

The problem, as always, is that roughly 90% of the people who control 100% of public money are fucking dildos. They do things that don't make sense first, then they over-correct, and it all ends up costing us more money in the future. Why did the train cars get ripped up in Minneapolis in the first place all those years ago? Politicians, lobbyists, and crooks is the answer.

Ask the cops what they think of a train line that eliminates a great deal of the drunken traffic on a Northwest to South route through the heart of the Metropolis.

Twin Cities area transit customers boarded Metro Transit buses and light-rail trains 69.7 million times in 2005, an additional 4.7 million rides over 2004. The increase was slightly more than 7.2 percent.

Bus rides on regular routes — the heart of the system — grew 1.5 percent to 59.5 million. But overall bus ridership for the year was 61.8 million, down a half-percent (or 275,000 rides), according to Metro Transit officials. Areas where bus ridership was lost include shuttle service at the airport — where trains now do most of the trips between the two terminals — and on contract routes, where less service was purchased from Metro Transit by the Minnesota Valley Transit Authority.

Rail rides reached 7.9 million last year, 170 percent higher than 2004, when only a portion of the line was open for five months and the entire line was open starting in early December.

Customers took 5.7 million transit rides in December 2005, 5.5 percent, or 296,000 rides, more than December 2004. Bus ridership in December was up 3.5 percent, or 165,000 rides higher than the 4.8 million rides recorded in December 2004. Rail ridership jumped 22 percent, an additional 130,000 rides, from December 2004.

So, let me get this straight, a public transportation sub-system that has been hugely successful through one portion of the main city out to a big suburb spur, gets me to most of the clubs where I see music safely and without hassle. To their credit, the "Public Good" bonheads are trying to build another route the other direction. But, rather than take advantage of the money that would be instantaneously, assuredly, and organically generated by TWO (2) fucking stops in a historic section of town, they're going to ditch them over the added cost. If you're reading this and you had something to do with all of it, and you're offended because I'm calling you a dildo, well good, because you are a dildo. Dildo.

My two friends the Senators both said, "YOU could be riding the NorthStar Line RIGHT NOW if it weren't for..." Being part of the other 10%, they both said something more appropriate, but what they meant to say was, "...if it weren't for all the dildos."