Local View: NLX can help Minnesota reach its fewer-cars goal

“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”

— Gustavo Petro, mayor of Bogotá, Colombia

The July 17 letter, “ NLX an endless money pit for taxpayers ,” complained that taxpayer dollars spent to build and run the proposed Northern Lights Express passenger train could be better used to build roads and bridges for cars. “Everybody in Minnesota would benefit” from putting the money into more car-centric infrastructure, it stated.

However, in 2022, professional transportation planners at the Minnesota Department of Transportation published a Statewide Multimodal Transportation Plan that includes a target to reduce the number of vehicle miles traveled across Minnesota per capita by 14% by 2040. Put another way, MnDOT planners want to reduce vehicle miles traveled, or VMT, per capita to 9,195 by 2040.

VMT is the amount of travel for all vehicles in a geographic area over time. Annual VMT per capita, or the number of VMT per person, provides another perspective on travel patterns and how much people travel annually.

“VMT per capita is a key measure to understand travel behavior and impacts on the environment at a state level, and whether MnDOT strategic changes are impacting behavior year over year,” MnDOT writes at its “ Performance Measure Dashboard .” “High per capita VMT suggests people do not have effective transportation options to get to destinations. It also suggests that people drive farther to get to the places they need to go (e.g., work, grocery stores, amenities). Reducing VMT per capita is beneficial to Minnesota because, among other things, it represents increased use of multimodal options, decreased congestion on roadways, and decreased greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.”

The state of Minnesota can’t achieve these worthwhile goals by spending additional money building new lanes on existing highways or by building new highways.

Meanwhile, Midwesterners are asking for long-term strategic investments in public-transportation options that will benefit us in the near and far future. Building more public transportation results in less land being used for selling new and used motor vehicles, for on-street and off-street parking, for disposing of worn-out vehicle tires, and for vehicles waiting to be recycled into new manufactured goods.

NLX is such a public-transportation investment. It would return more benefits to everyone than the money we spend building it.

James Patrick Buchanan of Duluth is a lifelong passenger-train supporter and advocate.