Legalectric

Today was the Zip Rail meeting at the Kenyon High School, and it was PACKED.  I printed up 80 flyers, but ran out and could have handed out another 80.  WOW!  It’s great to see people so interested.

I’ve been learning about this project, and it takes some digging to get information.  My goal is to encourage people to ask questions, and where there’s the opportunity, to file comments.  In this case, we have until August 6, 2014, to send comments in for scoping on the “Tier 1” EIS.  This means that we should tell them what all we think should be covered in the environmental review, and send the comments to:

Comments due by August  6, 2014.  Send comments to:

          info@goziprail.org         or

MN DOT Passenger Rail Office ATTN: Zip Rail

395 John Ireland Boulevard, MS 470

St. Paul, MN 55155

 

What I’ve found is that it’s hard to find anything.  Start looking, and what do you find?  Zip!  The best information source is the Midwest High Speed Rail Association, and to look at their “Studies/White Papers” page.  I’m most interested in “Midwest” “HSR” (high speed rail) and “Economics,” and HERE IS THE RESULT for that.

Here is my favorite for basic information, it’s got some basic cost estimates, particularly on p. 105 of 151, for the Metro – Chicago route, take a quarter of that and it’s a good starting ballpark figure, just over $7 billion (the number I hear being thrown around is $1 billion, and no way, no how, so just pay no attention and do some digging):

Economic Impacts of High Speed Rail 2011

And some others:

ROCOG Presentation ZipRail_011714

tac-02

Zip Rail Report

NOI_posted_051313

And remember, here is from the Minnesota Zip Rail site, their documents, sparse, but this is what we have:

Title	Document Type	Date	Format	File Size
1 Page size: select  10 items in 1 pages
Zip Rail Open House Flyer	Public Meeting Materials	Jul 16, 2014		132 KB
Newsletter – July 2014	Newsletters	Jul 07, 2014		885 KB
Technical Advisory Committee Meeting No. 4	Other	Jul 07, 2014		5 MB
Zip Rail Scoping Package	Reports	Jul 07, 2014		7 MB
Technical Advisory Committee Meeting No.3	Reports	Oct 17, 2013		3 MB
Draft Purpose and Need Statement	Reports	Oct 07, 2013		634 KB
Public Involvement Plan	Reports	Jun 01, 2013		4 MB
Notice of Intent	Reports	May 13, 2013		28 KB
Technical Advisory Committee Meeting No.2	Reports	Apr 04, 2013		1 MB
Technical Advisory Committee Meeting No.1	Reports	Feb 28, 2013		1 MB