Rail transit will pass through Northeast Minneapolis but won’t deliver the kind of urban neighborhood redevelopment that’s already seen along the Hiawatha Light Rail line and that has been ballyhooed for other planned light rail lines that will connect downtown Minneapolis with St. Paul and with the southwest metro suburbs. That’s because the Northstar Commuter Rail, which is set to connect downtown Minneapolis to the northern exurbs one year from now, will have no stops in Northeast as it travels between downtown and the Fridley station that the Star Tribune profiles today.

Fridley saved its Northstar station from federal cuts, but Minneapolis’s plans for a station outside of downtown never got far enough to get cut by the feds. Even so, the Northstar commuter line, which travels on heavy rails otherwised used by freight trains, has largely supplanted in planners’ minds a proposed Northeast Corridor light rail line that would have served, instead of merely cutting through, Minneapolis’s Northeast neighborhoods.

There’s irony in rail transit passing Northeast by. It’s a part of the city that traditionally has held a disproportionate share of Minneapolis’s factories, bars and working class immigrants, and while that economic and demographic profile has evolved somewhat, Northeast’s abundant railroad trackage has stayed put. Yet as rail-rich as Northeast is, a busway seems the most it can hope for, and other areas are ahead in line for even that level of transit.