MN: Delayed Southwest light rail rolls toward opening as Twin Cities transit use lags

Most stations along the Twin Cities’ newest light-rail line look ready to welcome passengers, as test trains roll periodically down the tracks and workers check crossing arms and signals.

And yet the opening of the Green Line Extension, which will carry passengers between downtown St. Paul and Eden Prairie, is still roughly a year away.

If that feels like a long time coming, that’s because it is.

Among other issues, fights over how to route the line through Minneapolis and St. Louis Park created numerous delays that pushed back the opening date by nearly a decade from early estimates. In addition, the budget for the light-rail line — the most expensive public works project in Minnesota history — more than doubled to about $3 billion amid disputes and cost overruns.

When the line opens, trains will run through a vastly different world than anyone could have foreseen when the project — also known as the Southwest light rail — got the go-ahead.

Light-rail ridership hasn’t recovered from its pandemic-era plummet, and despite improvements, Metro Transit is grappling with different commuting patterns and lingering perceptions that transit is unsafe — especially on light-rail.

Even before the first passenger steps aboard, a lot is riding on the Green Line Extension’s success: Metro Transit’s first real foray into suburban light-rail could set the tone for future light-rail projects, including the long-discussed Blue Line Extension from Minneapolis to Brooklyn Park.

Metro Transit officials say they’re building both for now and the future, calling the line a “generational investment.”

“Over time, it has a lot of potential to really improve mobility in our communities,” said Metro Transit General Manager Lesley Kandaras.

To fulfill that potential, though, the project must overcome its status as a synonym for waste and delay, a reputation that has dogged it for years.

In 2022, the conservative Center of the American Experiment, named Southwest light rail its inaugural lifetime “Golden Turkey” recipient, calling the project a wasteful “boondoggle.” It also has become a punching bag for both Democrats and Republicans at the Capitol, skeptical of transit or the Met Council’s ability to manage this or a future project.

“We shouldn’t make the same mistake again,” said state Rep. Jon Koznick of Lakeville, who chairs the House Transportation Committee and has led Republicans in trying to torpedo the next Blue Line project.

Metro Transit began testing trains on the Green Line Extension last October, and construction of the system is 94% complete. Still, the agency has yet to announce an official opening date, other than to say 2027.

Most of the delay in reaching this point stemmed from a disagreement over whether to allow the light rail to operate alongside bike trails in the Kenilworth section of Minneapolis, which would have required moving freight train tracks.

The Metropolitan Council ultimately settled on leaving the freight tracks and building a tunnel for the light rail, a project complicated by rocky, watery soil and proximity to a condo building.

An audit by the state’s Office of the Legislative Auditor chiefly blamed the tunnel for both the delays and the project’s ballooning cost — from an estimated $1.25 billion original budget to roughly $3 billion today.

Audits also found problems with the Met Council’s transparency, oversight and management of the project. The problems brought bipartisan criticism of the regional governing body and a renewed — but ultimately failed — push to elect its governor-appointed members.

“This is exactly what happens when an organization feels no pressure to be transparent, to be accountable to the public that it serves, because it doesn’t report directly to a body that is accountable to the public,” Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis told the Legislative Audit Commission last year.

Meanwhile, transit ridership plunged during the COVID-19 pandemic and has struggled to recover, particularly on light rail.

Metro Transit recently changed the way it counts riders, making it difficult to compare current ridership with pre-pandemic numbers. But overall, the system’s ridership fell 4% in 2025 compared with 2024, with light-rail ridership down 14%.

The declines have been attributed to structural problems, such as changing commuting patterns, as well as maintenance closures. Another hypothesis is that increased presence and fare enforcement has cut down on the number of riders, Kandaras said.

Among the thorniest problems: a lingering perception that light rail isn’t safe, after years where smoking, loitering and drug use were common on trains. That’s despite stepped up enforcement across the system and a substantial reduction in crime, particularly serious crime, on transit.

“We still have more work to do on that,” Kandaras said.

Ridership estimates for the extension project 29,000 average weekday rides by 2035, but those estimates haven’t been updated since 2018. In the past 12 months, the existing line has averaged 22,000 weekday rides.

Nick Thompson, the deputy general manager for Metro Transit’s capital program, said the agency is confident the extended line will attract riders in the long run. He noted that development, such as apartment buildings, picked up as the extension was under construction.

“We build these infrastructure projects for 100 years,” he said. “Over time, it will just keep growing.”

New lines need time to develop ridership, said Eric Lind, director of the accessibility observatory at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies.

The Green Line Extension runs through walkable places that are appealing to transit riders — especially from West Lake Street to downtown Hopkins — he said.

“Places where you can walk to destinations and get between them on the train, that’s where you’re going to see ridership,” Lind said.

Fast, frequent all-day service will also go a long way to build ridership across light-rail lines, he said.

Metro Transit runs trains at 12-minute frequencies for much of the day.

Kandaras said the agency is working toward a goal of 10-minute waits for more of the day, a frequency sometimes cited as the point at which riders take transit without checking schedules beforehand.

The Met Council and Hennepin County, meanwhile, are moving forward with the next light-rail project in the Twin Cities: a 13.4-mile, $3.2 billion extension of the Blue Line through north Minneapolis and into the northwestern suburbs.

But the project’s future is uncertain, especially given the Green Line Extension’s challenges.

Koznick, the Lakeville state lawmaker, has pushed bills to halt or undermine the project and elevated criticisms from local community members.

A bus rapid transit line, critics say, would be far cheaper than rail and less disruptive to build. Plus, the impending arrival of autonomous vehicles could upend public transportation again, Koznick said during a Capitol news conference last week.

“Minnesotans cannot afford to sink billions of dollars into rail systems that may be obsolete before they even get built,” he said.

Democrats have so far beaten back Koznick’s bills at the Legislature. Perhaps more crucially, federal funding for the Blue Line Extension is also in doubt.

Congress recently allocated $100 million for the project, though that money must first flow through the Trump administration, which has been critical of transit.

Meanwhile, local transit planners are weighing whether to double their federal funding request from $752 million to $1.6 billion after a route change delayed the extension.

Koznick has lobbied the state’s Republican members of Congress and the administration, urging them to deny the funding.

The administration appears to have paused the grant program in question and has tried to claw back grants to other major transit projects, said Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute.

The Federal Transit Administration has not signed any agreements with local transit agencies through that grant program since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, he said.

“The administration is basically getting in the way of getting these transit projects going,” Freemark said.

But transit advocates say Republicans aren’t considering the long-term benefits of light-rail lines, cutting down on sprawl and costly dependence on cars and highways. And they hope the Green Line Extension proves the case for transit when it opens.

“They’re not thinking about the long term and the places and spaces and the connectivity that we would rather have as communities,” said MJ Carpio, executive director of Move Minnesota, a transit advocacy group.

“We would rather be able to spend less on polluting modes of transportation. We want to be more connected.”

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