Met Council being capable of much rat-hole planning. It's in their DNA.
Met Council votes to end Northstar commuter rail in January
Proof that even a largely dysfunctional agency need not have a flat or downward sloping learning curve..
Little wonder. Politicians suck. Growth uber alles. Feed that beast. Overfeed it.
Some situations demand saying, I told you so. That said - It would hurt less if they scrubbed those Northstar=greatness video items from YouTube. We'd let them. Just, learn from it, but move on.
Not pushing all the way to St. Cloud doomed it. People's overriding willingness to do a my garage, my timing, and pay to park somewhere is too ingrained to overcome. Accept it. It's in the DNA. Move on.
Last mention of Northstar on the blog. Met Council stays an ongoing target.
Can we point fingers? Sure. Somebody other than me Archived it.
| https://archive.org/details/Ramsey_Northstar_Kick-off_Event |
The Archive page at its bottom notes other Northstar related video content that it has saved. Someone in one of the short videos said "We're saving two million dollars." By wasting many times more on a fundamentally bad idea, Politician-think is not how regular people think. Saving by overspending a bad idea is a strange idea of "saving.".
UPDATE: [The above has been revised and extended from original posting.] Strib's report notes:
The Northstar’s operating budget was $18.6 million in 2025. The Met Council estimates the bus service will cost $3.5 million in 2026.
Replacement bus service
The last Northstar train will run Jan. 3 or 4, after the final Vikings regular season home game at U.S. Bank Stadium.
The Met Council will begin running two bus lines to replace service along parts of Northstar’s route Monday, Jan. 5.
Route 888 will serve Northstar stops in Ramsey, Anoka, Coon Rapids and Minneapolis and will run up to every 30 minutes. It will also have three trips each way on Saturdays and Sundays.
Route 827 will replace Route 852 between Fridley and downtown Minneapolis. It will run hourly on weekdays and every 30 minutes on Saturday.
The bus connecting St. Cloud and Big Lake, outside the Met Council’s jurisdiction, will end service in January, Barber said. She said MnDOT is working with Sherburne County to develop future bus service.
The Met Council’s plans to “preserve key assets” for future rail between cities and local use are in development, it said in a statement.
Those riding Northstar will have bus service as an alternative. Details of anticipated stops and service times to start bus service may not last as above reported. Northstar's constrained service because the tracks were leased from BNSF, the bus will not be so constrained, but the economics of actual future ridership will affect the ultimate extent of bus service too.
FURTHER: The net result will be extension of Greater Metro bus service to the North Metrto, to mirror growth and development there, with Northstar an expensive intermediate tried and failed experiment.
Extending bus service to fit regional growth is NOT a bad idea. The history to get there is unfortunate, but bus usage will cost less per year than Northstar and be a general norm that may lessen rush hour loading on Highway 10 by taking some auto traffic out of play. It should have been that from the start without any Northstar flim-flam from the politicians. Without pumping growth by promising commuter rail. But the politicians at Met Council and locally wanted more rooftops paying taxes ASAP, and damn the risks we pump and dump. Grow, grow, grow. There's a sickness to that. It's not affordable housing except for above average earners who can pay North Metro's new housing prices.
Oak Grove and Nowthen can see their own futures in all this, and it should make people there shudder.