Minnesota legislators are not only considering shutting down the Northstar commuter train, they are raging at the Metropolitan Council, which is the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency which also runs its transit agency, for its light-rail cost overruns. At issue is the Southwest light-rail line, which when Metro first asked the federal government for funding was supposed to cost $1.25 billion but now, according to a state legislative audit, is costing $2.86 billion.
Twin Cities light rail: overbudget and underperforming. Photo by Central Corridor.
Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s roughly a 100 percent cost overrun. By the time the federal government agreed to share half the costs, the projected cost had risen to $2 billion. From that point on, the state or local government is responsible for all cost overruns, so what they thought was going to cost state and local taxpayers $1 billion is ending up costing them almost $2 billion.
The Southwest Line is expected to open this year and will be the Twin Cities’ third light-rail line. “The Met Council on all three of your light rail projects has come in so far over budget,” one legislator observed, “it’s like you don’t care.” Of course they don’t care so long as legislators willingly fund the cost overruns.
The Met Council may have reason to care in the future if they ever want to build more projects. “I don’t think the citizens of Minnesota have comfort enough to, if they had a choice, allow the Met Council to take on another rail project,” said another legislator.
Such comments would be expected coming from Republicans, and they did. What should worry the Met Council is that even Democrats (or, as they are called in Minnesota, DFL for Democratic-Farmer-Labor) are upset with the cost overruns. “There is always a rationale or an excuse,” complained one DFL legislator. “Reform is necessary . . . on how the council does business or how it’s structured.”
There’s no indication that the legislators commented on ridership trends, but currently Twin Cities light-rail ridership is less than 55 percent of what it was before the pandemic. Downtown Minneapolis is one of the slowest downtowns to recover, and unless a miracle occurs, ridership on the new line will also be well below expectations.
Before the pandemic, a third of downtown workers took transit to work, but only 3.4 percent of workers in the rest of the region commuted by transit. Fewer than 7.5 percent of jobs in the region were located in downtown Minneapolis, and at some point legislators will realize that a downtown-centric transit system does a disservice to the 92.5 percent of people who don’t work downtown.
As with most photos of US “light rail” vehicles, where’s the people? Compare with photos of places where urban transit works (due to culture, mostly) like Amsterdam, Moscow…
Gosh, I wonder why?
Minnesota First Lady Gwen Walz on the 2020 Minneapolis riots: “I could smell the burning tires. That was a very real thing, and I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening.”