There's a key part of this article that I think is important.
One could just write the above off as a gaffe, but Mike Hicks — a fellow transit blogger and former Streets.mn contributor — recently dug into all the other ways the most recent study is flawed. It’s based on bad rail traffic estimates where they seemingly take BNSF at their word. The Gulf Breeze Saga proved this is always a bad idea.
The author goes on to assert (perhaps out of frustration) that only an agency that has it out for Northstar would write a case for killing it in an expansion study. I think it has far more to do with MNDOT only having like 3 people in their rail office and those 3 people probably can't do a major rail traffic study without some form of grant to hire a consultancy company to carry it out, or by putting aside other projects.
That's probably also a big reason why MNDOT has rolled forward with the road projects that helped to kill Northstar - if there's a dozen people working on a Highway 10 project and they're all car brained, why would they care about what the 2-3 people in the rail office are saying about their train project?
I don't think there's someone sitting in a MNDOT office, chuckling ruefully at the idea of killing Northstar. I think it's far more likely that it's dying due to neglect, partially from potential riders, but certainly from a department that doesn't have the capacity to develop and research creative ways to keep it on life support when keeping NLX moving and working with Amtrak and WSDOT on how to build on the runaway success of Borealis are much more important priorities.
As with many things, if you really want things to change, you need to elect an executive who will appoint an MNDOT chair who will dedicate more resources to the state rail office. As we enter a world where it's no longer prudent to plan projects around a partnership with the federal government, if we value these things, we need to build the teams, institutional knowledge, and the capacity to build and support these things on our own.
