southwest light rail. northstar commuter rail. (cost, buses, trains)

[michael31681]

the southwest light rail will not travel through uptown an area with a population density of 15,000 per square mile. often busses gets stuck in traffic during rush hour and i was surprised to see the southwest light rail take an alternate route. the northstar commuter rail is going to open in november and i noticed the northstar corrider has a population of around 900,000 people and there will only be 5 trains heading to downtown minneapolis in the morning and in the late afternoon noon just 5 trains leaving downtown. that does not seem to be enough trains for the corridor of nearly a million people it just seems to be a waste of time and money. i know it cost alot of money to build rail transit but it should be done right the first time even if its cost more then what the state wants to spend. i also heard that a street car might run from the hiawatha lightrail to the southwest lightrail, has anybody heard anything on that?

[uptown_urbanist]

The streetcar is only a distant possibility. It may or may not happen, and even if it does it's not happening anytime soon. The SW LRT line is not a done deal, and I'm still hoping (although the chances are slim) that it will come through Uptown. As far as the northstar line, that's commuter rail and is a different thing than buses, trains, or light rail (although in the TC people seem to be treating the SW LRT route like it's a commuter rail route, but that's a different story...). While I hope that there will be so much demand that they will indeed be able to expand their route and run times, it's pretty typical (even in major metropolitan areas with higher population as well as more established public transit usage patterns) to have fairly limited numbers of commuter trains running. It works, though, and I hope it works equally well for the northstar line.