(Northstar is the Minneapolis based commuter rail service that is about to cease operations.  Metrolink made many of the same mistakes in its early years and only in the last few years has it embraced connectivity and through services – true Regional rail. Unfortunately I cannot provide a map of the original MinnARP proposal so you’ll have to get out your atlas! P. Dyson)

On January 4, 2026 Met Council’s attempt at rail commuter service, the Northstar train, will make its last run. Lots of time, effort, and money went into bringing Northstar to the northern suburbs, but not enough creative thought. The result is huge opportunity forfeited to politics and bureaucratic ineptitude.

Northstar service began in 2009, after more than 15 years of mostly political development efforts, the usual environmental studies, and colossal blunders by Met Council that doomed the project from the start.

The original concept that became Northstar appeared in a 1989 White Paper by MinnARP based on a conceptual engineering study (by MinnARP and Nordberg-Herzog Associates) that asked: “If one were to use rail to supplement the region’s sometimes over-taxed freeway network, what would that look like?”

The answer was essentially a new concept at the time for rail passenger service that was more than a commuter train, but less than an intercity service, which was named “Regional Rail.” The proposed initial corridor was Hastings to Elk River, along the same route used by Amtrak’s Empire Builder. The route would have trains running—like metro freeways—across the metro area and thus serving passengers going long or short distances to and from any points on or near the stations. Buses and park-and-rides would feed the trains. The route would serve both downtowns (St. Paul and Minneapolis), many suburban and inner city stops (e.g., Grand Avenue in St. Paul) AND both campuses of the U of M via a stop under the Intercampus Busway at St. Anthony Junction. That stop was like adding a third city on the route, with a population of 75,000 people.

Trains would run all day—hourly or more in rush hours and every hour (or two) at other times. That way, trains could serve all types of travel need from full-day commuting to special events to shopping and doctor appointments and everything else that people do in cars using the freeways. Almost no one would ride between end points, but neither would the trains be useful only to people making full-day commutation trips to only one of the area’s central business districts.

Hastings and Elk River have small yards that could house the trains and service facilities. And, from there, trains could easily start a trip by backtracking a modest distance to obvious outermost service points at Red Wing and Becker, or even St. Cloud.

The White Paper observed that while Hastings to Elk River was the most logical initial corridor, later expansions using existing main line railroads could be developed at modest cost along other corridors, including Wayzata or Waverly to Hudson (WI), Chaska to Farmington, and Mankato-St. Paul-Minneapolis, creating a full network of travel possibilities—just as did the freeways. EACH of these routes also would serve both major downtowns, both campuses of the U of M at the St. Anthony Junction site, and a large number of online communities, in and out of the urban core, just like freeway on-and-off ramps do.

But the Northstar project, even when ardently supported by Anoka County political leaders and Gov. Ventura, was doomed from the start because of planning failures, large and small, that limited Northstar to being not a widely-useful regional service but a mere commuter train to Minneapolis—a one-trick pony, a tool designed for just one job, and they didn’t even get that part right. When the Covid epidemic erupted in 2020, and people from Anoka County largely stopped commuting to downtown Minneapolis, and Northstar could not perform any other service for area travelers, ridership plummeted and by 2025 had rebounded only to about a third of its peak level.

Met Council, with the creative vision of a brick, learned nothing about the post-Covid commuter rail adaptations made in other cities that quickly adapted older commuter trains into services that began to look a lot like Regional Rail—running all day and across a metro region, not just into downtown in rush hours and quit.

After Covid, Metro Transit—once and always a bus operator—made no attempt to evolve Northstar, and even as ridership continued to grow on the reduced commuter service it offered, pulled the plug and decided to convert Northstar back into a conventional bus route.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Like all train wrecks, more than one thing caused this colossal failure. Here are some of them.

Misunderstanding Rail Mobility.

Northstar would have been a very different and vastly more productive service if it had mimicked the freeways, by running across the metro area, and running all day. Met Council missed that entirely, and focused instead on getting to St. Cloud. There’s nothing wrong with pushing a few trains a day 40 miles farther west to access St. Cloud. In 1990, MinnDOT estimated that 10,000 people a day commuted between the Twin Cities and St. Cloud (going both ways, too). But why prioritize going 40 miles west to tap a fraction of 10,000 travelers rather than going 10 miles east to tap a population of 500,000 in St. Paul and its surrounding areas?

And in a classic demonstration of bureaucrats managing someone else’s capital assets, Metro Transit parked its valuable Northstar trainsets at the Target Field station all day between rush hours, instead of keeping them working to serve area travelers. These costly mobility machines spent far more time parked every day than running.

Using Metro Transit as the operator.

Metro Transit is primarily an urban bus system and it applied its expertise in city buses to Northstar. Rail service is fundamentally different from bus service. It largely caters to a different demographic, and it is costly to operate, so must work very hard to develop and retain patronage. Metro Transit did none of that and even made a mess out of the LRT system. Metro Transit has demonstrated that it didn’t understand trains or regional mobility needs.

Paying little interest in past traffic patterns.

The first mistake was making Fridley a stop. A relative handful of people used bus transit from Fridley, and after spending millions making Fridley a Northstar stop it produced the same result. The alternative was Foley Boulevard. Transit patronage was so heavy there that a two-story parking ramp/park-and-ride was built to get cars off the street and their drivers into buses.  Despite the Northstar route running within feet of the park-and-ride, Northstar skipped this lucrative potential stop.

Comfortable station stops.

Metra of Chicago has heated shelters for its train stops while Metro Transit has something resembling a bus stop, cold with some shelter from the wind. Despite the inherent reliability of train schedules, passengers need better shelter in Minnesota’s winters if one is serious about attracting drivers out of their cars.

Pricing.

When Northstar began in 2009, Metro Transit pricing made it the most expensive commuter train service in the country (in price per mile terms). That suppressed usage during the critical early trial phase when potential customers try out a new service. Although prices were later reduced, it took Northstar years to recover.

The traffic base.

Northstar terminates in downtown Minneapolis and thus depends on full-day, five-day-a-week office workers. With people working from home after 2020, a huge amount of patronage vanished. Northstar should have served more stops beyond downtown at both ends of the line. MinnDOT has long known that a majority of cars approaching downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul on area freeways are actually headed for destinations beyond the downtowns. (That’s why the one lane connecting I-394 to I-94 eastbound is always such a colossal mess.) Northstar couldn’t serve that majority of travelers because it never ran beyond downtown Minneapolis.

No thinking outside the box.

Something like a quiet car without the bright lights also was requested by patrons. The availability of hot coffee and donuts would be something to look forward to every morning. Few bus routes connected with Northstar Trains. Rather than abandoning tens of millions of dollars investment there might be a better option by combining bus and train service. Bus service could feed Northstar and fill in for the times Northstar doesn’t operate. But Metro Transit applied no entrepreneurial thinking to Northstar.

It didn’t have to end this way, and we are confident that low-information legislators and urban planners will learn all the wrong lessons from the Northstar experience. Relying on the “Covid” excuse, rather than understanding what Northstar might—and could—have been, we believe that it will be a very long time before another opportunity to use Regional Rail will arise in Minnesota. Minnesota’s taxpayers and regional travelers are the ultimate losers.