Department of Things Nobody Reading This, Save Possibly Terry Oglesby, Could Possibly Care About

Light rail tunnel envisioned for Red Mountain

Terry beat me to this one, but I can't resist. This is a remarkably boneheaded plan. Birmingham doesn't need a light rail system anyway, and it's only being proposed because it would be cool. Red Mountain is a pretty pathetic mountain even by Appalachian terms, by the way. It's a moderately tall hill. They could probably go over it, or around it, or use the existing cut, but that wouldn't be as cool as a tunnel. Basically, that's why the city wants to build a dome, why the suburbs west of town built an amusement park, why, in the end, most ridiculous public projects are built. Because somebody thinks it would be cool.

Quick summary... The entire Birmingham metro area, by its broadest definition, has about a million people. Most of those don't live in Jefferson County, and a lot of them are essentially rural residents. What job growth the area has seen in recent years has largely been south or east of the city, in Hoover or on the US 280 corridor, the areas the proposed rail lines are made to take people away from. Inside the city of Birmingham, the primary business district is on the north side of town, while this tunnel will come out on the south side. There is a relatively small area, a few blocks square, in Downtown (north) Birmingham where there's enough congestion (all the city's tallest buildings are there, roughly between 4th and 8th streets and 18th and 22nd avenues) to make a train sort of viable, but there's really nowhere near there to build either the rails, nor the station unless they intend to tear up Linn Park.