When I said "no one cares about Northstar," I more so meant politically. Like, politically, the people who like Northstar are, what, Jerry Newton, Dan Wolgamott, and Aric Putnam? 100% of the Republican Party wants it killed, 90% of DFLers could not care less, and local officials are slowing turning against it. It has no major backers, and the 150 people who ride it will not be able to save it.
As Kurt Daudt has pointed out, we could buy every Northstar rider a Mercedes and pay for their gas, and it would be cheaper than operating Northstar. I'm not saying we should do that (I still think we should extend Northstar to St. Cloud!), but math like that is not inspiring in the face of growing discontent with the service.
Do you have evidence to support your claim that 90% of the DFL couldn’t care less, or are you making another assumption? Does Kurt Daudt have the actual math showing that it would be cheaper to buy every Northstar rider a Mercedes plus gas? Even if that’s true, there’s a few issues: 1) the GOP wouldn’t actually go through with that, so to me it’s pointless to bring that up, 2) the insurance cost for those Mercedes would be astronomical, and 3) that would make our traffic congestion and auto-dependence issue worse.
Evidence? No, I don't happen to have a poll of all 100 DFL legislators and the executives, but I don't think my estimate is a bad one.
Rural DFLers probably don't care about public transit at all, except insofar as it serves their communities. Regardless, they're all about to get voted out, so it's not like they'll be around to defend it in a year even if they wanted to.
Progressive DFLers support transit, but not unequivocally. There's been a fair amount of grumbling that Twin Cities transit is too suburban-centric. Northstar, being an entirely suburban service which is performing significantly worse than most urban buses, likely has few friends among the urban/progressive DFLers. Subsidized suburban service is seen as holding back better transit investments like urban rail and aBRT.
Suburban and moderate DFLers probably support transit, but their support is much more equivocal. They're the ones asking questions like "is the per rider subsidy high?" and "does it serve transit-oriented communities?" While the GOP is obviously being disingenuous when they talk about getting every Northstar rider a car (I mean, c'mon, it's obviously hypothetical,) it's still daunting math if you're a DFLer who generically "supports good transit." Hard to see how or why, for example, Kelly Morrison, a Rep in a marginal district who's running for a comeptitive Senate seat around Lake Minnetonka, could or would defend Northstar. Their constitutents don't ride transit, and if they do, they don't ride Northstar.
I think most DFLers would probably respond, when pressed, with something like "we'll be taking a look at that," but most of them don't have a vested interest in seeing Northstar succeed. When a GOP-controlled legislature passes a transportation omnibus to kill it next year, I doubt anyone's going to go to bat for it. When the governor, presumably Walz, has to bargin, it's hard to imagine him giving away some other transportation priority to save a line no one rides.
Unless funding for an extension is secured this year (unlikely,) the GOP fails to take the legislature (unlikely,) or some hypothetical Northstar-friendly Republican is Speaker or Majority Leader (possible? Jeremy Miller maybe isn't 100% anti-rail,) I think the writing's on the wall for Northstar. At the end of the day, it's a culture issue for the GOP, and when they're in the driver's seat, they won't be kind to people riding transit.
