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The Feb. 24 article “Northstar Rail could be shut down” failed to mention that service has never been returned to 2019 levels. There are a paltry four trips a day in each direction on weekdays, instead of the six trips before the pandemic. No article I’ve read has mentioned that weekday service hasn’t been fully restored — and why would riders come back with such anemic service levels on offer?
Internet research shows that the Northstar offers less service than any other commuter rail line, with the Northstar in poor company just below the WES (Westside Express Service) in the Portland, Ore., area at five daily trips, and Nashville’s Music City Star at six. Weekend service on the Northstar was never reinstated, and special event service took years to return at all, while the Northstar still didn’t serve all Twins games in 2024. It would take a miracle for any transit route — much less one with built-in issues — to regain its ridership when still lacking one-third of its previous service.
Instead of responding to the shifts in regional travel patterns over the past half-decade, Metro Transit still only runs four daily trips, along with event service. Had Metro Transit offered, as a yearlong experiment, hourly trips on weekdays, regular weekend service and extra trips into downtown on popular weekend event nights, and then seen little improvement in ridership after trying that, it would have made some sense to say the Northstar should be shut down. The harshest assessment of the approach to Northstar is: “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of options.”
Traditional commuter rail services that aren’t re-envisioned and made usable for the whole community will never succeed. Few tangible efforts have been made by the Northstar’s funding partners to respond to this new reality, so the reaction is to kill the entire service to save on operating and maintenance costs. In the article, state Rep. Jon Koznick, R-Lakeville, railed against Northstar’s “ridiculously low” ridership and high operating subsidies. Of course its ridership is low: A route once meant to connect Minnesota’s largest metropolitan area with its fourth-largest instead terminates in the small exurban community — population 11,686 as of 2020 — of Big Lake. Let’s call a spade a spade: It’s unfair to say a flawed-from-the-beginning route that’s never offered much service and ends in a town smaller than New Ulm is an irredeemable failure.
It would be a meaningful improvement if, as proposed for years, the Northstar were at long last completed by extending it to St. Cloud. If it also offered a useful number of trips per day — like the up to 15 mentioned in the Minnesota Department of Transportation study referenced in the article — the service would become attractive to more than commuters, and combined with special events service, could see far higher ridership than today.
Likely because it was focused on more than the Twin Cities to St. Cloud, MnDOT’s just-released Twin Cities-St. Cloud-Fargo/Moorhead Corridor Study did not solely analyze any alternatives that would extend the Northstar. That option is only studied in conjunction with other ideas, obscuring how much it would cost to complete the Northstar by itself, as bus service to Fargo-Moorhead is also tacked on. The headache-inducing and expensive proposition of repaying tens of millions of dollars in federal and state funding should the Northstar be discontinued is granted only a few sentences in the study, despite the potential cost. It is worrisome, too, that based on the Feb. 24 legislative hearing, there are only promises that not all of the funds would have to be repaid, but no straight answers.
