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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Derailed Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Minnesota's North Star Rail
The North Star Rail line in Minnesota is being canceled after struggling with ridership, particularly following a devastating 98% drop during the pandemic. Though originally conceived as an 80-mile connection between Minneapolis and St. Cloud, budget constraints limited it to just 40 miles ending in Big Lake, setting the project up for challenges from the start.
• 40-mile commuter rail line with seven stations running from Minneapolis to Big Lake
• Pre-pandemic ridership approached 800,000 annually but collapsed to just 400 daily riders today
• Service reduction from six to four daily round trips further hampered recovery efforts
• Recent transit-oriented development along the route now threatened by line's cancellation
• Metropolitan Council replacing rail service with buses, reducing operating budget from $12M to $2M
• Original plan to extend to St. Cloud (population 70,000) never materialized
• Lack of stations in key areas like north Minneapolis likely limited potential ridership
• Political pressure accelerated the cancellation
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Speaker 1:This week on Transit Tangents, we cover the latest news surrounding the cancellation of the North Star Rail in Minneapolis. What went wrong, can it be saved and what lessons can we learn? All of this and more coming up on Transit Tensions. Hey everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of Transit Tensions. My name is Lewis and I'm Chris, and today we are diving into a project revisiting the state of Minnesota. The last time we covered this state, we were talking about an awesome project in St Paul, which was a pretty amazing BRT project that is now operational. This one, unfortunately, is less positive. We're going to be talking about the recent announcement, which involves the ending of the North Star rail line that goes northwest from Minnesota. This was a commuter rail line, essentially, that opened in 2009. It started off fairly strong, although it was a little bit lower than initial expectations, but post COVID has run into some issues, and thus this week we just were met with the announcement that this thing was unfortunately being canceled.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is unfortunate to see. I mean, we want to see real projects succeeding in the country but, as you said, it wasn't quite meeting the expectations. Pre-pandemic. The estimated ridership was going to be 800,000 people per year and it tended to fluctuate from the start of the project to COVID where you really you stayed above 700,000, but it wasn't quite hitting the 800,000. And there may be a significant reason why they didn't hit the 800,000.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah. So I mean right from the start this thing was kind of hampered. It really was not set up for success. Before we get into kind of some of those specific reasons, just to give a little bit more background on the rail as it exists today.
Speaker 1:This is about a 40-mile-long rail line with seven stations, running from Minneapolis to Big Lake. It is double-tracked all the way through. This is a repurposing of an old freight line through the area. The freight line still sees a lot of traffic but it, you know, it's a good additional use of the infrastructure. Pre-covid it saw six daily round trips. So you had six trips headed southbound into the city, six trips headed northbound out of the city and it takes 52 minutes to travel from end to end.
Speaker 1:But, as we mentioned, this thing really was kind of doomed from the start. So this I said is a 40-mile line ending in Big Lake to the northwest, and it doesn't take a lot of research into looking on Google Maps, on Satellite View, even to see why ridership might be an issue, especially with a line ending in Big Lake which is a fairly sprawling kind of suburban area home to only 11,000 people. And when you dig a little bit further into this and you realize that this line was actually supposed to go another 40 miles further to the Northwest, to St Cloud. The kind of original vision for the rail line makes a whole lot more sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I am kicking myself, because if I had known that this was coming up, I would have I would have actually taken a camera with me. I was in Minneapolis just a few weeks ago. I was traveling from Minneapolis to Brainerd, minnesota, and traveled this entire corridor. I actually had done some research. I was looking for a train to get me as far north as I could go, to a bigger city to then maybe rent a car, and then I figured out that this train only went from downtown to Big Lake and it wasn't really feasible.
Speaker 2:The corridor seems pretty primed for a successful rail line. You have all these cute little towns along the way that have a lot of room for development, little towns along the way, that a lot of room for development, and it kind of seems like when they were starting this line, they had this mentality of if you build it, they will come. There's plenty of space and opportunity for that. The downside of this is with the line ending in big lake. When I got to big lake, it's exactly what it sounds like. There's a big lake, it's very recreational, there's an rv park and a little strip mall, but that is it. There's nothing else in Big Lake and, as you said, louis, it is sprawling and sparsely populated, with only 11,000 people, so it is unfortunate that it didn't continue all the way to St.
Speaker 1:Cloud, and with St Cloud too, I mean when you compare the 11,000 people in Big Lake to the over 70,000 people in St Cloud. I mean it's night and day when you're putting together a rail line, a bus line, whatever it may be, if you have kind of one destination on one end of the line and the other end of the line isn't much of a destination.
Speaker 1:There's not many people going to and from there. There are less trips being generated from there. You're obviously going to have less and less folks the further down the line you go. However, in the scenario where you put St Cloud on the end of the line, you have seven times as many people, you have more industry, you have more things going on. You're going to end up with more ridership from end to end on the line, more people going further distances on the line, which kind of you know leads to oh, you have more people riding it. Now you can add more trains, which makes it more convenient for more people, and you get network effects that really lend the transit to being to better serve the region. And it's wild to me that this wasn't done correctly the first time Again, when this was initially studied. The plan time again, when this was initially studied, the plan was to do this full length.
Speaker 2:This corridor is double tracked the whole way and that's always that's always what we find when we do research about what's the limiting factor on expanding rail service.
Speaker 1:It's almost always the fact that the rail is not double tracked and in this case not only is it already double tracked but it's used like the freight. The freight trains use it in both directions. This is not like it's some derelict falling apart rail line. This is a functioning existing rail line that already serves freight and art I mean, obviously it serves commuters. For for this section, I believe some of it might may even serve some of the the long distance amtrak routes that go further out. I believe the Empire Builder goes into this area. If not, I'm going to insert my voice right here telling me I'm wrong.
Speaker 1:But it's insane that, like budget restrictions were the reason why this never went through initially. Because, again, yes, that most expensive part would be like, oh, if you have to double track for 40 miles, yeah, that's going to be expensive. That probably wouldn't be the best use of funds, necessarily if you're not sure about what the ridership might be. But when it's already there, you don't need to go invest some huge pile of money into fancy stations and all this sort of stuff. Do a pilot for five years or something and just do very basic, you know cement platforms with a bench and a bus shelter at each one, and if it turns out that the ridership is there, then you can spend some extra money to make it a little bit better, as you're increasing the frequency of the trains and whatnot. But uh, you know from the start, having the limiting factor be oh, we're not worried, you know, we're worried about the budget. So let's do this kind of half-assed version that doesn't end in a place that people want to go. You're setting yourself up for failure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Pre-pandemic. Yes, you are setting yourself up for failure, but things looked like they were trending somewhat in the right direction. We were getting close to the 800,000 people that they expected or 800,000 riders rather that they expected per year. They expected, or 800,000 riders rather than they expected per year. But then, as everyone knows and every city has experienced, covid came and ridership just absolutely was decimated. We saw a pretty much an entire ridership collapse.
Speaker 1:We went from getting close to a hundred000 people to losing 98% of total riders during the pandemic, which is a wild catastrophic loss Right, and I mean obviously that happened with transit of all kinds and all systems, not only across the country but really across the world. So to be expected. But the ridership recovery here was pretty slow. So with the pandemic you also had kind of service cuts. So instead of six round trips per day you were down to four round trips per day. Six round trips per day is already pretty hard to plan around.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean. It's not like oh, I missed the 8 o'clock train. I'll catch one at 8.30. It's no like you've got three trains to get yourself home at the end of the day, or four trains, six trains, whatever it may be. You know what I mean. Uh, it's not like some frequent level of service but when you drop it down to, you've only got four trains per direction per day. I mean that's that's two in the morning going, you know out, and two in the evening. That's pretty rough. So you know, seeing the service reduction definitely makes a lot of sense in the ridership as well. But even though it was slow, I mean things were coming back. Just looking at it now, in 2021, at the low it was 50,433 riders that year. 2022 was 77,000. 2023 was 97,000. And 2024 was 127,433 riders that year, 2022, was 77,000, 2023 was 97,000 and 2024 was 127,000. Now that is still only like 15 percent of what the ridership was before covid. So yeah, I mean that's a problem well, we also.
Speaker 2:we had an issue because the agency that ran this they were not able to go back to their full operational expenditure because you had local counties pulling their resources out of this line Leading up to the pandemic. The operational budget was around $12 million to operate the line in its current state. You had counties like I think it's Anoka County that reduced their contribution from somewhere around six million to like one point to five million or so. So you had a huge financial losses as well. And then you also kind of think, moving out of the pandemic without going back to those six trains a day, without operating at your full operational capacity, yeah, of course you're not going to see massive growth in the ridership. You know, I do wonder if they did immediately reinstate OK, here's your 12 million dollar budget in 2023. Would the ridership have soared back up to close to 700,000?
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, yeah, you don't know. And I mean like, in addition to that, I mean even even if you got most of your riders back to, I mean, the, the work from home obviously is hurt, transit in a lot of places and whatnot. And you know there are other elements to this that have, kind of both pre and post, covid kind of made things difficult on this line. And when you just you know, kind of anytime I'm looking at a new transit project or I read a story about a transit project, whether it's positive or negative, I just like love going into, you know, google Earth like satellite view and just going all the way down the entire line, essentially seeing what's there. And at first when I was looking at this one, I was like horrified because I was looking at some of the satellite image and it's just like you know, parking lots and grass fields. And then I was, I was I'll save some of it, but as I zoomed in I could tell that like the satellite images are out of date and there actually was an emphasis on transit oriented development in some cases here. At first when I was looking at it, I was like wow, they didn't even try at all. Like I was actually getting kind of pissed. Scrolling through I was like, wow, these guys really mess up, but it's a little disheartening. But I kind of want to go through the line a little bit, starting in Minneapolis and heading north and just kind of taking a look at the stations and some things that, from afar, we can kind of look at and see in the future. Could this be salvageable If someone swoops in at the last minutes and saves this project? Could it be worthwhileageable if someone swoops in at the last minutes and save this, saves this project? Could it be, uh, worthwhile? Or should this thing be scrapped, which is sad to say, but, like you know, in certain instances it could make some sense. So, obviously, the downtown station is pretty awesome. You're right at target field, uh, downtown minneapolis, you've got great connection to the light rail, great connection to buses. Um you, it's nice to have an actual downtown station area.
Speaker 1:The first thing that really stood out to me, though, was there is no station just immediately north of downtown. It feels like it's a pretty dense part of town. You can tell there's a lot of apartments there, retail, all that sort of stuff, offices, and, if you wanted to get there on this commuter line coming from the north. You would have to go straight through it to downtown and then you don't have another rail connection to get you back over there. You'd likely be getting on a bus that would kind of take you a roundabout way over the river to get back into that area. So that feels like a small thing that could have been done to capture some ridership right away. To me it kind of it's very similar to what we have in Austin with Plaza Saltillo station. You have a lot of density at Plaza Saltillo. You have some offices right at Plaza Saltillo. It's really close to downtown, but having that extra stop there in the commuter line is definitely a major positive.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I would think again. I'm not a transit planner. The commuter line is definitely a major positive. Absolutely, and I would think again. I'm not a transit planner, but I would think that if you had this sort of north of downtown line, it helps subsidize the rest of the line because you are adding to that ridership number. So it does seem like that would help improve the overall financial health of the line.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, going a little further north was Fridley Station. There are some apartments nearby, but it is predominantly parking. Um, considering how close you are to downtown, you could really beef up the amount of apartments that are here. Uh, it's an area though that seems like it's. Either those apartments have probably been there for longer than the station's been there. Uh, this one was like less prime for like brand new development, but there's still, I mean, anywhere you're seeing surface parking lots right next to a rail station. You can ask yourself I'm not saying, get rid of all the parking, but could you put a garage here and also build an apartment building that 200 people could live in? Because if the answer is yes, you probably should be doing that. You know what I mean, both from the sense of like housing affordability, but also transit and making sure people can get around those areas. Yeah, the next one down the line or up the line, though.
Speaker 1:This one was the one that really frustrated me at first and I was like furious. I had to like go back and change some of the stuff that I put together. I was like furiously typing away Hakun Rapids, when you look at it at first, looks like a train station behind like a strip mall with just a huge field of grass behind it and I was like, oh my god, like like no attempt at all to do anything. And then I zoomed in. I was like, okay, there's some pretty serious development that has gone in there, and a theme that we're going to kind of see with the next couple stations here is this development is all new. This is all basically post-COVID development People moving in in 2022, 2023, which makes the news about the cancellation a little bit disheartening.
Speaker 2:Well, and it actually surprises me that they wouldn't again try to push more funding into this to try to recapture the ridership, Because again, as everybody knows post-pandemic living in cities the cost of living shot through the roof.
Speaker 2:We live in Austin and we got, I think, one of the worst increases in the market, but places like Minneapolis were also experiencing these huge bursts in cost of living, and so people were looking for alternatives of living immediately in the city, and these smaller satellite communities with good transit are really viable options for people if they can get back to the city easily. And it seemed like that trend, as you said, and zooming into these little areas, that trend of building more TOD was happening. It may not have been happening for Anoka, which is the next stop on the list, as you put in your notes, it's basically just a parking lot, which may also explain why they wanted to reduce their funding, but I do think that eventually those small towns would have started to see some population increase with better mobility and, honestly, it's probably better for the towns as well. I mean better tax base. You can build out more amenities for your or, yeah, more amenities for your population.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and even really disheartening Totally and like create more jobs in those communities. I mean, like you know, around a transit station, if you put in, you know retail and restaurants and you can put put in offices, like people in your community could have places to go, they have places to work. I mean it's, it's and you have the ease of accessibility to get folks in your community into Minneapolis if they'd like to. And again, I mean, like as you get on the line here even further, ramsey Station, again further to the northwest, a lot of it's still happening but there's a ton of development happening around the station. And again it's just so disheartening because it's like the thought for the transit oriented development was there, but the process to build apartment buildings and all of this sort of stuff and the red tape involved with doing all of this. It takes so long to build the. You know we think it takes long to build transit. It also takes a long time to build anything but single family houses you want to build a single family house is pretty quick and easy. You'll see these massive neighborhoods being built, uh, by these huge companies and whatnot, but like you don't see huge apartment complexes being built everywhere in the united states, I would say in austin, where, like, like Austin's an exception right now, because Austin has cleared the way to do that as they should, and that's why we're seeing housing costs in Austin go down, not up, unlike the rest of the country. In the rest of the country, it's taken a while to be able to do this sort of thing.
Speaker 1:So we're seeing all of this development around these stations at Ramsey, at Coon Rapids. We're seeing all of this development around these stations at Ramsey, at Coon Rapids and, unfortunately, at a lot of these, like, people are just moving into them. Literally, even as we're recording this, some of this isn't fully built out yet. So you know now all of those folks who are moving in. We're seeing this rail station here, which is that's cool, but by the time they moved there, it was already cut down to four trips a day, and now it's like, oh, it's canceled. And it's like, first off, what is the desirability to live this far out now? Now, all of these people are maybe going to rely on a bus, but more than likely they're just gonna get in their car and drive down. And now all of this effort that was put into transit oriented development along this rail line is literally going to lead to more people driving in their cars down the highway. Sad, it's really. It's actually like, really depressing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I absolutely agree. Um, and I think about, yeah, those people like they moved out there specifically. Some people may have moved out there specifically for this reason and now they're just kind of left behind. So, yeah, it is a sad situation there.
Speaker 1:And then we lightly talked about this one earlier. But Big Lake, the end of the line, you don't need to say much, considering there is a literal junkyard in the walk shed of the terminus station of this commuter rail line. So, um, you know, if I was, if I were a transit planner which, like you, I'm, I'm not uh, I think one thing I would do is probably try to avoid, uh, having junkyards in the walk shed of the uh where, where you see junkyards, lewis, I see opportunity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then obviously, like we said, this was at one point initially meant to connect all the way up to St Cloud much bigger population center, over 70,000 people. And even though it doesn't connect now, I think it's worth looking at to see what it would have looked like. There would have been probably two small stops along the way between Big Lake and St Cloud, but those towns are pretty small en route. But you'd still maybe want to try to capture some of that ridership or just have convenience for folks living in those areas.
Speaker 1:But in St Cloud you end up with a situation where the train station is not immediately like in the center of downtown, it's not in the most walkable area, it's kind of set off to the east by a little bit. So you would definitely need to do some work. There's a lot of potential to do some transit oriented development around the station there. But it would definitely bode well to do some sort of like feeder bus system. There is transit in St Cloud, but you'd probably want to do some sort of like well-timed bus transfers and whatnot to get folks from saint cloud to the actual station so that folks wouldn't have to rely necessarily on driving to the station. So, um, but you know, that sort of thing would again bode well for folks who maybe are riding the saint cloud, because if you arrive there you might be able to get on a nice timed connection onto a bus, uh, and finish the rest of your trip, um, up into that area.
Speaker 2:So what we could have had, I don't know Well what we could have had, even though we don't live there, I know, yes, what Minnesotans could have had? Yes, every time you say St Cloud, in the back of my brain I just keep hearing St Olaf. I don't know if you were also a Golden Girls fan. I was not. Rose Nyland was from St Olaf, anyway. A fan I was not. Rose Nylund was from St Olaf, anyway. That's been playing in the back of my head this whole time. So what really put the nail in the coffin for this project as we talked about? It wasn't really set up to succeed. From the beginning, writership post-pandemic had completely collapsed and, with the funding removed, there wasn't really a path forward for rebuilding this massive ridership they had before. There was a study conducted in around 2023 that looked at the feasibility of this line and increasing funding and what they could do. However, the study didn't. It wasn't designed to give recommendations or have any commitments associated with the study. So to me, that just seems like it was a waste of time and effort and money and money. Yeah, because studies do cost money. They usually cost a couple million dollars to conduct.
Speaker 2:But then what really started to happen was in 2025, you started to see the legislature paying a lot more closer attention to this line. You had the chair of the House Transportation, finance and Policy Committee in Minnesota try to put forth legislation to basically kill the line. That representative is John Koznik, who is a Republican representing Lakeville, and one of his primary reasons for advancing this legislation was the project cost too much money. They could cancel it with permission from the federal government and not be required to pay back any of the construction costs that the federal government put up. But then his top reason was the line wasn't helping reduce congestion between St Cloud and Minnesota and for all of the reasons we've already listed, of course it wasn't designed to reduce congestion at this point. But what also is funny about that statement is the alternative to this would be bus service, and buses sit in traffic and create more traffic. So potentially can create more traffic. So potentially can create more traffic. They can also alleviate it. But in this situation I think they would just sit in the traffic right.
Speaker 1:It would be adding a bus to the road.
Speaker 2:That was a train right so all of that together just really um started to put the nail in the coffin before this legislation uh that representative, uh kosnick put forward really made its way through the statehouse. That was when the Met Council, who manages the entire project they had already started to work on a plan, but they quickly got it presented before all this happened to say, ok, we are going to cancel the train service and instead we're going to institute this bus service and our operational budget will go from what we need, which is 12 million to 2 million.
Speaker 1:so a huge, huge cost savings, uh, for moving to the bus system right and again, I mean it's uh, I guess the jury's still out on whether or not this is a good idea to cancel this. I mean, when you look at the ridership, we didn't break it down to this level yet, um, in the episode. But this thing sees like 400 riders per day right now. 400, like that's that's bad, I mean that's not good. Uh, like it's really hard to justify running rail service for 400 people a day, um, that those are numbers that make more sense for for buses. But again, when you, when you think through the long-term strategy of like you've got all this development along the line, you do have people moving into these areas because, as intended, intended with this development along the line, yeah, it makes you think whether or not they should have held on for at least a couple more years to see where things were going, to try to play with different ways to run the service. But alas, here we are. You know, again, this service will be officially canceled in January.
Speaker 1:I was trying to find some, you know, potential good news in all this in January. I was trying to find some, you know potential good news in all this. You know, maybe there's like some secret way that, like some other rail service, is able to take advantage of the space In my head. For a little bit. I was, like you know, I hear a lot of positive news about the Borealis line that runs from Chicago to St Paul. I thought it ran all the way to Minneapolis but it ends in St Paul. Minneapolis doesn't actually have an Amtrak station anymore, which I didn't know. It just uses St Paul and then you transfer over. I was like, oh, it runs all the way to Minneapolis. Maybe they could just extend the Borealis a little bit further and utilize that to have some additional service running all the way to St Cloud. But Borealis doesn't run that far and there would not be an easy downtown Minneapolis addition to it without doing some weird turnaround.
Speaker 2:But that was part of the study too was maybe the feasibility of Amtrak taking over the North Star service and operating it, which, had things been different last November, that could have potentially happened, but as it stands now I don't think Amtrak is taking on many new service routes.
Speaker 1:You don't think Sean Duffy just wants to put trains all over the place?
Speaker 2:I will bite my tongue on that. All I can say is rest in Pete.
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Speaker 1:Public transit's where it's at, watch me go.