Northstar v. COVID (and the people who've always wanted to kill it)

Passengers wait to board an approaching Northstar train at Ramsey station on June 4, 2024. About 30 people boarded from the platform for this trip.

When COVID lockdowns gripped the country and the world in March 2020, Metro Transit's Northstar commuter trains received perhaps harshest service cut of any commuter rail system in the US. On March 23rd, a week and a half after Minnesota stopped business as usual, Northstar service was cut from the already paltry 72 train trips per week down to just 20—a cut of 72% on its own, of course combined with the loss of special event service.

This chart shows relative service levels for Northstar and several other commuter services, as measured in vehicle revenue hours (number of rail passenger cars and locomotives multiplied by the number of hours in service), with the peak service level from the decade of 2013-2022 pegged at 100%: 

Data from National Transit Database agency profiles. Somehow, Northstar's service level varied by 15% in the years before the pandemic and peaked in 2014, though I don't know of schedule changes that explain that. Special event service only adds about 3%. The most likely explanation is that it's from changes in train length.

Those are considered as Metro Transit's peer agencies and routes in the Northstar Corridor Post-Pandemic Study from March of last year: Utah Transit Agency's FrontRunner in Salt Lake City, Sound Transit's Sounder in Seattle, Trinity Railway Express in Dallas–Fort Worth, the North County Transit District's Coaster in San Diego, and oddly the Amtrak Downeaster—somehow classified as a commuter train even though it has a route length and regional-rail service pattern similar to the planned Northern Lights Express to Duluth. 

A huge frustration with Northstar has always been that it began operation as a half-built service, and in more ways than one. We are all familiar with the idea that it was intended to go to St. Cloud or even slightly beyond, and that it got cut back to Big Lake—39 miles instead of an targeted 70 or 80. Less well-known is that it was also supposed to have a broader service schedule, with 18 one-way trips per weekday instead of the 12 that we got (plus the six trips each day on weekends), as noted on page 6 of the Post-Pandemic Study.

Text and graphic from page 6 of the Northstar Corridor Post-Pandemic Study from 2023

How substantial of a difference did it make reducing the planned service by ⅓? It's hard to say for certain, but ⅔ of the initial 4,030 weekday rider projection is 2,687, slightly above the 2019 observed weekday ridership of 2,660, and approximately the level that Northstar had at least touched by 2013. The observed ridership also grew by 46% from 2009 to 2019, above the 39% growth predicted for the period up through 2025.

A chart showing Northstar weekday ridership on an upward trend from 2009 until 2019, with peaks around halfway between 2,500 and 3,000 in the years 2013, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

The chart above shows a nice trend of growth over the years for weekday service, though a depressing decline on weekends where there was an oddball schedule of three round-trips, which was done by running a single trainset from Big Lake down to Minneapolis and back. I've never seen weekend ridership charted for Northstar before coming across this study, so it's interesting to observe how that would have dragged down the total number of riders each year, even if the weekdays with more service were improving.

From the beginning, Northstar had the lowest level of service of any route in the Post-Pandemic Study, and has some of the lowest service of any in the country. One of the only lines to have less service was the WeGo Star in Nashville (formerly the Music City Star). Unfortunately, that line doesn't report numbers to the National Transit Database, so I can't directly compare figures, but it seems to now be exceeding Northstar in terms of ridership, probably just because our service cuts were so severe.

Another thing stoking my indignation as I look through this information is that Northstar historically has historically had quite good utilization in terms of seats filled vs. the number of seats that are available.

Northstar had 54.76 riders per vehicle hour in 2019 (the chart is mislabeled with 2017), second only to Sounder at 60.98. In 2021, the worst full year for post-pandemic ridership among most agencies, Northstar was very close to FrontRunner, Sounder, and TRE passenger loads per car.

The National Transit Database now has another full year of data available vs. the 2021 comparisons in the study. In 2022, Northstar pulled slightly ahead of all of its peers, even though it was still running with just two round-trips per day.

Now, if Northstar was supposed to have been hitting a ridership target 50 or 100% higher than it initially did, it would be well off the chart, up around 82 to 110 passengers per hour. Caltrain had passenger loads in the 80s and 90s prior to the pandemic, but that's an unusual exception as far as I can tell. It seems to have been much more common for commuter lines to be in the 30–60 range.

Anecdotally, it had felt when Northstar opened that a lot of people got burned by early experiences with heavy crowds and decided not to return, at least not for a long time. I think there was a lot of demand for the line that went unfulfilled.

2,600 people per day might not sound like much, but that translates to 217 people per train (with a median a bit higher since the reverse trips were usually quiet). You'd basically need a bus every 5 minutes or better to match the capacity of the old Northstar schedule.

I've been surprised to see that the study only estimated the cost of extending Northstar to St. Cloud to be in the $36 to $67 million range, a small fraction of the $320 million it originally cost to build (or around $475 million adjusted for inflation). That's the equivalent of a few apartment buildings with several hundred units total, and yet the train has spurred the creation of more than 3,200 housing units already.

Northstar has always had a noose around its neck from the politicians who've hated it from the beginning. They like to rag on its high subsidy per passenger, but that's driven almost entirely by the high operating costs to begin with, and the length of the trips (per passenger-mile, Northstar has subsidies somewhat higher than light rail, but much lower than urban buses). The limited schedule meant that the trains were under-utilized, leading to high overheads that can't be spread out easily. While it's likely inflated by the needs of the congested BNSF corridor the service runs on, the overall subsidy to Northstar is pretty small. The way it gets divided up among so few trains and the suppressed passenger levels just makes it look a lot worse.

The train is fine—it's doing as well or better than anyone could have expected considering its constraints. It was opened with unrealistic expectations. The right thing to do is to invest in it and turn it into the service its true supporters always meant it to be.

Passengers unloading at Target Field on June 4, 2024. People streamed out of the station for several minutes, with part of the crowd filling a Green Line train that arrived shortly after, and a steady line of others walking to their destinations