I believe Northstar engineers are BNSF employees, so if Northstar was shut down (which is currently only 2 roundtrips on weekdays) they'd just go to operating freight trains.Also, 15-minute LRT service is dreadful considering that 35,000 people ride the two lines a day- way more than any other route. I'm beginning to think North Star and the Red Line need to be cut loose and their drivers reassigned. Do they even generate 2,000 riders a day?
There should be an audit on daily ridership of every fixed-route in the region. Metro Transit still keeps track of average daily ridership per route and the data is publicly available (or it was in the past), but with the suburban opt-outs it's a lot more murky. Are express routes sustaining ridership, or are they being operated in the hope that downtown workers will return to using them? What routes are redundant and should be reduced or eliminated so resources can be focused on routes that need them? I've mentioned the Orange Line vs the 465 before, and there's also the Red Line vs the 442. Local routes (16, 19, 84) that overlapped with Metro routes (Green, C, A) were cut since they were redundant (during the pandemic anyways).