Long, tortured efforts to improve Twin Cities mass transit have come to a precarious pass. The next two legs of a planned metrowide rapid transit system — the Southwest light-rail line from downtown Minneapolis to Eden Prairie and the Orange Line bus rapid transit from Minneapolis to Burnsville — are now both in peril, threatened by insufficient state and/or local funding and no small measure of self-serving politics.

With deadlines just ahead for matching more than $1 billion in proffered federal funds for transit construction and one of the projects — Southwest — already seeing costs rise $1 million a week due to delay, it’s time to sound a civic alarm. The prospect of the collapse of the next two transit projects in the Metro Transit planning queue should rouse a more vigorous response from this region’s leaders, in both the public and private sectors. These projects are too important to the Twin Cities’ future growth and prosperity to be cast aside.