Southwest LRT Parking Won’t Take Over Minnetonka

Minnetonka appears to have escaped without large concentrations of parking spaces at its Southwest Light Rail Transit station.

Parking is among the biggest worries for cities along the line. Local planners frequently worry that parking could create traffic problems and take land that could be used for redevelopment.

But the Southwest LRT project also needs sufficient parking for the commuters who will make the line financially viable. The Draft Environmental Impact Statement assumed 15 of the 17 new stations would have park-and-ride facilities and estimated that the project would need 3,500 park-and-ride spaces along the line.

Yet Minnetonka’s Opus station is expected to have just 60 parking spaces, according to a Finance & Commerce article.

That does not mean Minnetonka residents will be far from a park and ride. Planners expect the Shady Oak station on the Hopkins-Minnetonka border to have between 400 and 525 spaces, depending on how many park and rides wind up being built along the line.

Planners are looking at park-and-ride spaces more closely during the engineering process, a Met Council spokeswoman told Patch via e-mail in early April.

The Southwest Light Rail project is currently in the preliminary engineering phase, which began in the beginning of the year and is expected to last about two years. About 30 percent of the design work will be done once preliminary engineering is complete.

Click here to read the full Finance & Commerce article.