The Dream Transit System

With visions of light rail (Yay! Central Corridor!) dancing in my mind, I'm reminded of the many conversations I've had at work regarding transit. Many of my coworkers are similarly pro-transit, and the biggest complaint I've heard (and share) is that light rail connecting downtown St Paul and downtown Minneapolis is simply not good enough. We want a full-scale, metro-wide, underground subway system of the 1st class. We've been to cities with top shelf transit systems: New York City, Chicago, Paris, Taipei, etc. We've seen how transformative those systems can be for their host cities.

Sadly, of course, systems like that cost a fortune. The Central Corridor alone is probably going to run $850 million. A complete metro-wide subway system? I imagine we're looking into the tens of billions...

However, it's fun to speculate! If you had to pick, where would you put stations? There are a lot of obvious contenders: a few in Uptown, both banks of UMN campus, downtowns, intersections like Lex/Univ, Snelling/Univ, pretty much every campus in the area, and so on.

So what would it take to make this happen? Anyone got a spare billion?