Northstar train ridership dip leads to rethinking of commuter transit

When the Northstar line opened in 2009, it was hailed as the state’s first modern commuter train. At that point, it had already been 13 years in the making.

But the train’s days may be numbered.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Council said they’re beginning to study replacing the line — which runs 40 miles between Big Lake and Minneapolis — with buses.

Eric Lind is the author of the report driving some of this rethinking. He is the director of the Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies.

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MPR News host Tom Crann spoke with Lind about the report and the future of commuter transit.

Below is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity. Press play above to listen.

Before the pandemic, the Northstar train carried 2,000 to 3,000 riders a day. Is it true that the numbers have dwindled to just a few hundred since then?

Yeah, that’s correct. Northstar is the prototypical example of a specialty service. It was built specifically to carry people to the downtowns under really time constrained schedules, people that had to be downtown by 8:30 in the morning and had to leave around 5:30 in the afternoon. And obviously, the pandemic changed a lot. It especially impacted this particular type of travel.

Have we seen a rebound in other forms of transit?

We’ve seen increases in ridership across light rail, bus and especially the bus rapid transit that Metro Transit has been building out. The types of trips people are making are for all purposes. They’re more flexible. It’s more directions, more times of day than just simply going in and out of a downtown.

The reason that Northstar hasn’t been a part of that rebound is because the specific type of travel that Northstar was built to serve very efficiently is the No. 1 type of transit that has disappeared from transit ridership. The other conditions that really facilitate people using Northstar are things like traffic hassles and parking costs; along the corridor, those things are just not as strong motivators as they were before.

Why have commuter buses rebounded better after the pandemic, even if they’re not back to 2019 levels?

They’re being run more often and even bidirectionally, and they provide opportunities for people to make trips more flexibly and to travel even at lunchtime or other times of day, rather than being so time constrained.

The original sin of the Northstar, if you will, is that it did not go all the way to St. Cloud, where there were a multitude of destinations. You might think about people connecting at both ends of the line. It's really hard to imagine generating enough ridership with additional frequency to get back to that efficiency that made the train so valuable.

What do you make of this talk in the Legislature about replacing Northstar with buses?

It will be less efficient, but ultimately, to meet the current demand, it does make a lot of sense.

Northstar is very complicated in terms of its funding structure, and there will be a lot of conversation about how much it’s going to cost to unwind it, because there will be potential for costs that the state and the Met Council will incur to pay back the federal government for parts of the development of the line in the first place.