The NAHSRG folks have been saying privately that they'd want to extend the line to Chicago, according to emails and documents the Post Bulletin was able to
get their hands on. But they sent a message in April saying they could start construction on stations by the end of this year and the main rail line next year? That's a wildly optimistic timetable -- even a private project of this scope would need to go through a pretty hefty environmental review, right?
Anyway, regarding station placement -- mattaudio, do you have some good information on how many HSR passengers in Europe use cars to reach stations? I listened to the
Talking Headways podcast and was fairly happy to hear how stations placed in "activity centers" were considered to be much more successful than stations out in far-flung suburban or rural locations. The need for parking is inherently pretty limiting.
I'm often surprised looking up the numbers for different park-and-ride locations -- 28th Avenue station on the Blue Line has 1,443 spaces in its ramp, so it could only contribute a modest percentage to the total ridership on the light-rail line. It averaged 925 boardings per weekday last year, so it probably isn't getting used all that heavily. Of course, the Mall of America just next door is a major destination and transfer point which does much better (2,164 average weekday boardings), but ridership there lags significantly behind what you get for downtown St. Paul, downtown Minneapolis, or the University of Minnesota.
I'm still not a big fan of having the line run to the airport either. Only the Blue Line and route 54 go there today, and it seems like the parking fills up pretty often these days. Terminal 1 had the second-highest ridership (2,866) of any station on the Blue Line, after Nicollet Mall (2,944), but that number is inflated by the folks shuttling from there to Terminal 2.
So whatever sort of service we end up with, I'd still highly prefer to see it reach at least one of the downtowns.
