urbanMSP

No one cares about Northstar.

Very opinionated statement, as well as being flat out wrong.
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Considering only 300 people per day ride it (So 150 round trip) It's hard to see how that statement is flat out wrong. I agree that I don't like closing transit. But unless it's reimagined to be a intercity train to st cloud with maybe 4 trains per day this line will need to close. It has been a lemon from the start. No good stations. No good frequency. And not going to it's necessary destination. Keeping it on life support does literally nothing but take transit dollars that could be used to provide more frequency to more deserving routes (once we aren't in a staffing shortage).

The only future I see with the Northstar line is to partner with Amtrak and abandon Commuter rail.

No one cares about Northstar.

Very opinionated statement, as well as being flat out wrong.

Considering only 300 people per day ride it (So 150 round trip) It's hard to see how that statement is flat out wrong. I agree that I don't like closing transit. But unless it's reimagined to be a intercity train to st cloud with maybe 4 trains per day this line will need to close. It has been a lemon from the start. No good stations. No good frequency. And not going to it's necessary destination. Keeping it on life support does literally nothing but take transit dollars that could be used to provide more frequency to more deserving routes (once we aren't in a staffing shortage).

The only future I see with the Northstar line is to partner with Amtrak and abandon Commuter rail.
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You're assuming only the people who currently use Northstar care about it, which again, is wrong. There's definitely a certain amount of people who aren't using it but want it to succeed, whether that means turning it into a service useful to them or just a useful service in general. How many people feel this way is unknown, and I won't claim that I know how many people feel this way, because that would be just as inaccurate of an assumption as saying "no one cares about Northstar."

When I said "no one cares about Northstar," I more so meant politically. Like, politically, the people who like Northstar are, what, Jerry Newton, Dan Wolgamott, and Aric Putnam? 100% of the Republican Party wants it killed, 90% of DFLers could not care less, and local officials are slowing turning against it. It has no major backers, and the 150 people who ride it will not be able to save it.

As Kurt Daudt has pointed out, we could buy every Northstar rider a Mercedes and pay for their gas, and it would be cheaper than operating Northstar. I'm not saying we should do that (I still think we should extend Northstar to St. Cloud!), but math like that is not inspiring in the face of growing discontent with the service.

Republicans have a long history of comparing the cost of transit projects to the number of cars they still wouldn’t be willing to buy for the riders of said project.

When I said "no one cares about Northstar," I more so meant politically. Like, politically, the people who like Northstar are, what, Jerry Newton, Dan Wolgamott, and Aric Putnam? 100% of the Republican Party wants it killed, 90% of DFLers could not care less, and local officials are slowing turning against it. It has no major backers, and the 150 people who ride it will not be able to save it.

As Kurt Daudt has pointed out, we could buy every Northstar rider a Mercedes and pay for their gas, and it would be cheaper than operating Northstar. I'm not saying we should do that (I still think we should extend Northstar to St. Cloud!), but math like that is not inspiring in the face of growing discontent with the service.

Do you have evidence to support your claim that 90% of the DFL couldn’t care less, or are you making another assumption? Does Kurt Daudt have the actual math showing that it would be cheaper to buy every Northstar rider a Mercedes plus gas? Even if that’s true, there’s a few issues: 1) the GOP wouldn’t actually go through with that, so to me it’s pointless to bring that up, 2) the insurance cost for those Mercedes would be astronomical, and 3) that would make our traffic congestion and auto-dependence issue worse.

Speaking of Republicans, Wasn't it Pawlenty who wanted the project cutback to Big Lake or was that MnDot

Speaking of Republicans, Wasn't it Pawlenty who wanted the project cutback to Big Lake or was that MnDot

Wouldn't surprise me if it was Pawlenty, He wanted to kill what's now the Blue line when he was in office, which was a lost cause because the line was well under construction by the time he was in office.

Speaking of Republicans, Wasn't it Pawlenty who wanted the project cutback to Big Lake or was that MnDot

I believe it was the federal government who required Northstar be shortened to Big Lake, because for some reason they concluded the benefits didn’t outweigh the cost of building it all the way to St. Cloud. It’s the same standards that required Southwest to be routed on the Kenilworth Corridor.

$100 per person per ride, assuming 240 days going to work every year makes about a $48,000 subsidy per person per year. A Mercedes A Class sedan costs $34,000, so you could buy every NorthStar rider a new Mercedes every single year, with $14,000 left over for gas, insurance, and fuzzy dice.

When I said "no one cares about Northstar," I more so meant politically. Like, politically, the people who like Northstar are, what, Jerry Newton, Dan Wolgamott, and Aric Putnam? 100% of the Republican Party wants it killed, 90% of DFLers could not care less, and local officials are slowing turning against it. It has no major backers, and the 150 people who ride it will not be able to save it.

As Kurt Daudt has pointed out, we could buy every Northstar rider a Mercedes and pay for their gas, and it would be cheaper than operating Northstar. I'm not saying we should do that (I still think we should extend Northstar to St. Cloud!), but math like that is not inspiring in the face of growing discontent with the service.

Do you have evidence to support your claim that 90% of the DFL couldn’t care less, or are you making another assumption? Does Kurt Daudt have the actual math showing that it would be cheaper to buy every Northstar rider a Mercedes plus gas? Even if that’s true, there’s a few issues: 1) the GOP wouldn’t actually go through with that, so to me it’s pointless to bring that up, 2) the insurance cost for those Mercedes would be astronomical, and 3) that would make our traffic congestion and auto-dependence issue worse.

Evidence? No, I don't happen to have a poll of all 100 DFL legislators and the executives, but I don't think my estimate is a bad one.

Rural DFLers probably don't care about public transit at all, except insofar as it serves their communities. Regardless, they're all about to get voted out, so it's not like they'll be around to defend it in a year even if they wanted to.

Progressive DFLers support transit, but not unequivocally. There's been a fair amount of grumbling that Twin Cities transit is too suburban-centric. Northstar, being an entirely suburban service which is performing significantly worse than most urban buses, likely has few friends among the urban/progressive DFLers. Subsidized suburban service is seen as holding back better transit investments like urban rail and aBRT.

Suburban and moderate DFLers probably support transit, but their support is much more equivocal. They're the ones asking questions like "is the per rider subsidy high?" and "does it serve transit-oriented communities?" While the GOP is obviously being disingenuous when they talk about getting every Northstar rider a car (I mean, c'mon, it's obviously hypothetical,) it's still daunting math if you're a DFLer who generically "supports good transit." Hard to see how or why, for example, Kelly Morrison, a Rep in a marginal district who's running for a comeptitive Senate seat around Lake Minnetonka, could or would defend Northstar. Their constitutents don't ride transit, and if they do, they don't ride Northstar.

I think most DFLers would probably respond, when pressed, with something like "we'll be taking a look at that," but most of them don't have a vested interest in seeing Northstar succeed. When a GOP-controlled legislature passes a transportation omnibus to kill it next year, I doubt anyone's going to go to bat for it. When the governor, presumably Walz, has to bargin, it's hard to imagine him giving away some other transportation priority to save a line no one rides.

Unless funding for an extension is secured this year (unlikely,) the GOP fails to take the legislature (unlikely,) or some hypothetical Northstar-friendly Republican is Speaker or Majority Leader (possible? Jeremy Miller maybe isn't 100% anti-rail,) I think the writing's on the wall for Northstar. At the end of the day, it's a culture issue for the GOP, and when they're in the driver's seat, they won't be kind to people riding transit.

Would they need to pay back the feds if buses were run instead of trains? Then St Cloud to Target field would be a one seat ride and Northstar park and rides would still be serviced.

Speaking of low ridership. I was poking around metro transit's website last week and ran across ridership numbers. I think the red line had 300 riders (although I can't seem to find where I found that number so maybe I'm remembering it wrong).

You know what else bleeds cash? Roads. We're forking over hundreds of millions every year just so the counties and MnDOT can claim they're "relieving congestion" despite the fact that we're not going to relieve congestion by having a transportation system relying almost entirely on cars and funding projects that will only encourage more driving and auto-centric development.

Roads are expensive and many of the areas that like to complain about transit the most have many times the lane miles per resident when compared to the core cities. If transportation money were to be spent equally per person across the state I doubt Metro transit would have funding issues. (although this method would be anti Northstar)

Roads are expensive? We tend to spend $3 Billion a year on roads. Google tells me there's an average of 3.38 trips per person per day taken by Minnesotans, so multiply that by 365 and multiply that by the states population, you get 6 billion trips in Minnesota per year, for a spending of 50 cents a trip. Then subtract out the 1/3rd or so paid for by user taxes and figure that some level or roads need to exist even if no one owns a car; to get artichokes to the grocery store and bicycles to the local bicycle shop to find the subsidy amount.

Does that $3B include county and city spending on maintenance and reconstruction?

The $15K the city charged me to reconstruct the 40 ft of street in front of my house is still being assessed on my property.

That's just the MnDOT spending on trunk highways and municipal / county aid. But good point, I don't have data for local street spending. There's a lot more of them, but they're less elaborate and don't wear out as fast.

https://metrocouncil.org/Council-Meetin ... final.aspx

I really don't think we need to another report to tell us that it would be beneficial to extend the train to St.Cloud...

Looking at this presentation again, I'm having a little difficulty figuring out which commuter rail lines they're referring to.

Tallahassee-SunRail in Orlando?
Newington-Hartford Line in Hartford, CT?
Petaluma-SMART in San Rafael, CA
Portland, ME-Amtrak Downeaster (seems more like intercity rail considering it crosses state borders and serves two major cities)
Madison, TN-WeGo Star (formerly Music City Star) in Nashville
Portland, OR-Westside Express Service?
Stockton-Altamont Corridor Express?
Albuquerque-New Mexico RailRunner
Dallas-Trinity Railway Express?
Lewisville-DCTA A-Train
Austin-Capital MetroRail
Salt Lake City-FrontRunner
Harrisburg-Keystone Service?
Chesteton (I assume they meant Chesterton, IN)-South Shore Line
Seattle-Sounder

$100 per person per ride, assuming 240 days going to work every year makes about a $48,000 subsidy per person per year. A Mercedes A Class sedan costs $34,000, so you could buy every NorthStar rider a new Mercedes every single year, with $14,000 left over for gas, insurance, and fuzzy dice.

Can we switch that to an Ioniq 5 or an EV6? Maybe a Mach E?

Maybe even a Tesla M3, considering how far us morons out here commute.

Either extend the line to St Cloud, or shorten it. Big Lake isn’t a good terminal.

I had never actually considered shortening it. Would stopping it in Anoka allow for more frequent service?

The frequency problem is due to the high volume of freight on the corridor. Improvements there would require dedicated tracks.

If the line were truncated to Anoka, the station would need a siding and the maintenance facility would have to be relocated from Big Lake - which would probably require some significant property takings.