Princeton has the Dinky, a heavy commuter train stopping right in the middle of campus.

They aren’t six car trains every three minutes, they’re three-car trains every 7 1/2 minutes, each direction.

The only thing that University was ever full of shit on was endorsing a tunnel that “leads” to a bridge that will need to be replaced by 2030. Given that this line could open in 2014, that means only 16 years of continuous operation before that bridge is in danger of collapsing. It happened two years ago this Saturday, and it could happen again, since Minnesota’s got Ayatollah Pawlenty as governor.

Any comparison to road construction is not wholly fair because the vibrations are not continual, day-after-day, year-after-year.
The point I’ve tried to make is not just for the university labs and the MPR studios, which are both state-of-the-art, but also for century-old churches, like two on Cedar Street next to MPR, which will see their foundations shaken and moved if not for a floating slab.

Of course, any new buildings on Washington Avenue SE in Minneapolis or Cedar Street in St. Paul will not be eligible for vibration mitigation because they will know full well the impact of light rail trains. Radio France knew this when they built the RER.

Comparisons to subways or elevated trains are not really fair since the foundations of the pillars or tunnels absorb a huge deal of the vibrations.

The cost of mitigating MPR and the University could have easily been avoid at the MetCouncil recognized them in the DEIS stage, whereas a one-way loop in St. Paul and the railroad corridor abutting the University would have been less costly in construction and would have required nearly no mitigation.

As a student at the University of Minnesota that understands well the geography, history, and habits of students, the northern alignment would have had nearly no impact whatsoever on student commuting, and would have provided a better station (Dinkytown, as opposed to East Bank) for commerce.

I look forward to hearing more.

Like the constant construciton which the U of Mn does on its own behalf. No, sorry, they sabotaged their own argument by making more vibrations than the rail line, on their own, in advance.

All these “sensitive” labs are perfectly happy to operate next to huge university-run construction projects generating immense vibrations. Which are constant; the university *always* has construction going on. But noooo, a track which is already vibration-reduced and will produce less vibrations, that’s just too much.

If any of their labs are *really* sensitive, they can move them. To a rural area with no cars or other urban sources of vibration nearby at all. Perhaps somewhere between Minneapolis and Duluth.

I hope the board of the U of M gets hate mail from its own students.

Here in Oslo, the SL95 cars are 65 tons. That’s 130,000 pounds. From what I’ve seen of tram systems in Hannover, Amsterdam, etc., this is a rather normal size, and supposably weight. The 795,000 pounds you mention is in the neighborhood of 400 tons, comes in at 3 times that. I’m wondering where you get this number from.

MPR and the U of Mn are not throwing fits. Their concerns are completely legitimate, because when 795,000 lbs of trains come by every 3 minutes, it vibrates, and it can screw things up.

After a project (rail, highway, etc.) is built, any new broadcast studios and laboratories will take the effects into account when they’re under construction, just like if you build a studio on a four-track subway or next to an airport. However, the University was banking and supporting a tunnel under Washington Avenue, or alternatively, an alignment in a nearly-abandoned railroad.

This is entirely the fault of the Metropolitan Council, for sticking with the Washington Avenue routing, and using the Cedar Street routing in St. Paul, when the city wanted a one-way loop. The latter had a few disadvantages, but both were uncontroversial and would have required very little mitigation.