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Minnesota’s Northstar commuter service cuts fares to lure more riders
Maybe if they ran it all the way to St. Cloud they would get more passengers.
William Hays, here are facts about jobs in Minneapolis: As of March 2012, the unemployment rate in Minneapolis fell to the same rate in was in October 2008 when the great recession first hit. From mid-2010 to mid-2011 5,300 new jobs were created in Minneapolis, the fastest rate of job growth in that city since 2006.
Here in Pennsylvania, both CSX and NS are very busy which is one indicator that the economic situation is not as dire as many claim it is.
Another tax payer subsidized train by the self proclaimed social planners who think they know more than everybody else because they went to college and everybody else didn’t. Plus they want almost “free” transportation for the lower classes like in Europe. If it works in Europe, therefore it should work in America. What was the name of that German locomotive that had a life expectancy measured in days on the SP and DRGW?
I predict a fuel tax increase in those counties with this train. Or an increase in the property taxes. Or even a sales tax increase. Possibly even state-wide increases. Trouble with spending somebody else’s money is sooner or later, the smart ones figure out what is going on. Progressives call that group, trouble makers, tea baggers, and so on. And when enough people wise up, the house of cards will crash immediately after the progressives are yanked out of power.
Until Northstar makes it to St Cloud, it will be a stunted service. The best and most cost effective way over the long run to raise revenue is to finish the project.
So Me Hays, the GOP quashed every attempt to start a jobs program and it is Obama’s fault., Next you will blame him for the Penn Central bankruptcy. Lets dump politics here and get back to trains
Easy to say, extend to St. Cloud, but hard to get the $$ with the Tea Party strangling any such efforts. I tend to agree that this line will not be strong until it connects to St. Cloud, but it is hard to convince congress to fund it if there aren’t tons of folks on it already. Kind of a chicken and egg problem.
If you look hard enough (probably not too hard though) you will find the road builders are lobbying against it at least indirectly by competing for more $$ for roads.
What we really need to do is tax the people who are beating up the roads, not you and I with cars, but trucks.
Easy to say, extend to St. Cloud, but hard to get the $$ with the Tea Party strangling any such efforts. I tend to agree that this line will not be strong until it connects to St. Cloud, but it is hard to convince congress to fund it if there aren’t tons of folks on it already. Kind of a chicken and egg problem.
If you look hard enough (probably not too hard though) you will find the road builders are lobbying against it at least indirectly by competing for more $$ for roads.
What we really need to do is tax the people who are beating up the roads, not you and I with cars, but trucks.
You’ll have to cut it more, if O’Bama gets re-elected. No jobs = no commuters. Uff da!
Somebody needs to find some way to get service extended on a fast track basis to St. Cloud as originally intended before that reactionary Pawlenty got his way about Northstar. A trucated line plus the lack of off-peak and reverse service aren’t helping ridership one single solitary iota.
Delenda Carthago Est, etcetera, ad nauseaum
Mr. Guse, the day you realize that highways are also a “free” government program, with more tax money spent on highways in a single year than has EVER been spent on Amtrak, so that you sound like a hypocrite of the first order every time you tweeze a splinter out of Amtrak or transit’s eye while leaving the plank in the highways’ eye, I will eat my hat covered in barbecue sauce.
Interesting article. I don’t know if the Tea Party plays a role, I think it is more less than common sense planning and “make do” engineering in terms of routes and frequencies. Commuter rail grows incrementally not in one quick layout like we might do in HO or Lionel, right? The comments by the anti-education radical from Illinois a bit out of line and misinformed. “Another tax payer subsidized train by the self proclaimed social planners who think they know more than everybody else because they went to college and everybody else didn’t. Plus they want almost “free” transportation for the lower classes like in Europe.” I might be a bit thin-skinned here because I like taking trains rather than driving in traffic and went to college and thus take umbrage to ideologues referring to us “lower classes.” By the way “everybody else” in my high school class for the most part did go on to some sort of college, even if it wasn’t Ivy League like Mitt Romney or Grover Norquist. Being that I didn’t want to be uneducated one of the things that I learned both in college and high school and in defending our country during the Cold War (directly engaged with the communists) is that radical right wingers of the fascist ,Third World or Marxist left wing varieties thrive on scoffing at education and at whoever they deem to be “lower class.” They don’t call Mussolini’s Italy a “corporate state” for nothing. Our astute commentator from Illinois has ever read about European trains in “Trains” much less ridden them, because if he had, like many “Trains” writers who have, he’d know they are not “almost free.” (Europeans pay high taxes for a lot of services - and public transportation is expensive - but cheaper than gasoline.) So, people,I hate to appear “too educated” or “lower class” but let’s comment on rail issues on their operational merits and leave the political ranti
Trucks already pay for the roads. There is no tax in place to fund commuter rail.
All of the comments notwithstanding, this move is most unusual. A public agency that seems to understand that there is a law of supply and demand and that cutting prices might actually result in more rides taken and paid for? Unheard of in most government-owned operations! The usual approach from a public agency is to raise its prices (fares) when demand (traffic) is off, in order to keep the income stream from shrinking. Unfortunately the result is fewer rides taken and a drip in traffic and another round of fare boosts and . . . so it goes.
We have toll roads here in So Cal that have disappointed at every turn. The folks don’t want to pay, so the owners of the road raise the toll to make up for the weak appeal. That means in turn that even fewer drivers pay and . . . well, by now you get it.