As harried commuters arrived on the Northstar Commuter Rail platform in Minneapolis last week, Metropolitan Council Chair Charlie Zelle and other Metro Transit employees met them, bearing cookies and words of thanks.
The celebratory sweets marked Northstar’s 15th birthday this month, a quiet milestone for rail service between Target Field and Big Lake that has struggled for relevance from the very beginning, especially after a precipitous decline in ridership during the pandemic.
The big question forever dogging Northstar is whether the line will ever connect to St. Cloud, as originally planned more than 15 years ago.
The current answer? No one knows. And, unlike previous years, there doesn’t appear to be any groundswell of support bubbling up at the moment to make the final 28-mile connection between Big Lake and St. Cloud a reality.
“Northstar has never lived up to its aspirations,” said Zelle, who, as the head of the Met Council, oversees transportation planning in the metro.
While Northstar has been successfully ferrying suburban Minnesota Twins and Vikings fans downtown on game days, Zelle said daily commuter service “falls into the challenges of express routes in general.”
With the rise of hybrid work during the pandemic and pronounced shifts in the way people commute to work, Northstar provides three southbound trips and one northbound trip each weekday morning, and three northbound trips and one southbound trip on weekday afternoons. No weekend service is available, except for special events.
For now, Metro Transit’s proposed operating budget preserves current service on Northstar. Whether that will change is unclear.