Airport shuttles are an often-overlooked tool in the ground transportation network. Follow along as Steve’s Wanderlust highlights the connection between the Twin Cities and Eau Claire, Wisconsin!
Video description
Greyhound won’t do at all! If I can’t drive to Eau Claire for my daughter’s first birthday I’ll take the finest ground based transportation option that isn’t an intercity coach bus service: Groome Transportation’s MSP to Eau Claire shuttle van!
This service is one of a nationwide network of short haul airport to city transportation options that might yield an interesting extension of one’s travel around America. For me it’s really just a bizarre use of money to try out the way to get across the Wisconsin border to my in-laws when a car isn’t an option. It’s certainly more pleasant than Greyhound for hardly more cost!
Featured music under free license via YouTube Creator Studio Silence Walk Full by Anders Baldwin, Brady Hoffman, Alice Shelton, Luke Barker, Ruby Terry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Smooth Sailing (with Guitar) by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Handmade, 100%-free of AI & losing faith in Plymouth Click & Ride! Produced by Megandsteve Travel, 2025. Recorded July, 2025.
Transcript
Transcribed by NJ Hanson
[0:00] Traveling intercity in America can be annoyingly expensive and complicated when you don’t have access to a vehicle. Today I need to go to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, out that way. My daughter’s first birthday is happening today, out there. Megan and my daughter went out there yesterday but I had to work last night, so I need to make my way out there somehow.
[0:21] I could take my van. It’s the simplest option. It’s only 90 miles. Wisconsin gas is a little cheaper than here in Minnesota. But, the van doesn’t have air conditioning and it needs some brake work. I can’t take a train between the Twin Cities and Eau Claire. There are no flights that run between the two cities, so the other option would be an intercity bus. Greyhound does have 6 trips a day that run to Chicago and stop in Eau Claire, but the earliest bus I’d be able to catch and still make it to the party at 1 pm would leave in just a little while from now – 6:45 am. The cost of a rideshare service between my town, Plymouth, and there is over $40. That would double the price of the Greyhound or Flixbus fare. So, I’m going to take the fourth option. I’m going to MSP airport to catch the Groome Transportation shuttle that runs between MSP and Eau Claire.
[1:22] There is so much wildfire smoke today, it is crazy. Usually I’d take Plymouth Metrolink click-and-ride, the on demand micro-transit, to get to Richfield Center then get a Metro Transit bus, but they let me down today. I tried to book a ride and it said, “this is a high demand time” and it just gave me a list of the operating hours for the service. It’s like passive-agressively telling me “we don’t have any drivers for you this morning.” So, I had to take a Lyft. Normally this Groom Transportation shuttle service would be the cheapest way to go but having to take that Lyft ride over here to the mall unfortunately rose it to within about a dollar of Greyhound’s fares. Which, is unfortunate, but at least I get time off from driving on my day off.
[2:10] See, right away I bring up rideshare prices in the Twin Cities. The fact that that was $18 just for 5 minutes of driving and the fact that going down to the Greyhound station this morning would have been upwards of $40 seems very ridiculous. But, if you’re used to taking rideshares or taxis that’s just what you live with. For me, I’d rather just have that $3 mini-bus ride.
[2:36] The distance between the Twin Cities & Eau Claire is substantial at around 100 miles depending on your starting city. In the modern era that’s a distance that has been best served by vehicles on the highway, at about a 90 minute drive & totally doable without stopping.
[2:49] Public transportation options to Eau Claire have been whittled down to Greyhound, Megabus & our mode today, a shuttle service operated from MSP Airport by Groome Transportation – a provider with a national network of routes extending from major cities to surrounding locales that, for one reason or another, are not heavily served by intercity public transportation.
[3:09] And now we’re downtown a couple blocks over from the light rail and we get the Blue Line to the airport.
[3:29] Woah. Everytime I am on the light rail in the Twin Cities anymore, the Green Line is shut down for part of it. It’s maintenance this time for all the stations in Midway and they honestly really need it.
[3:49] In planning this trip I was ignoring Megabus, on account of all the news this year about the company primarily concerning its demise. In reality, it would’ve been just as unlikely for me to get to downtown St. Paul to pick up the Megabus by public transit in time as it would’ve been additionally expensive to obtain a Lyft ride through both centers of the Twin Cities, just like it would be to get the Greyhound in Minneapolis.
[4:18] Well, you’re a little far away from home. Of course I got here like an hour early and I only had to be 15 minutes early. So, after I use the restroom in the rental car area I think I’m gonna go to the Caribou in the baggage area. For some background there’s a national soccer tournament going on in the north side of the Metro this weekend here in the cities. I was experiencing it at my regular job and I’m experiencing it now with all the people coming down from the rental cars. This is going to be a packed peoplemover over to the Lindberg terminal. I probably won’t be able to record anything, but it’s just a peoplemover.
[5:04] So, this is among one of the waiting areas I could use before I go up to the taxi stand, whatever it is. It does have power points. It has pretty decent looking seats. Yeah, you couldn’t get rest here but you could get respite. And of course, all of the things that I deal with on a daily basis at my regular job – it’s a kind of a retail gig. Juices, sugars, starches, and meats and corns and, you know, things to sustain you.
[5:44] Yeah that’s what we’re doing, the regional shuttle. And there’s more restrooms and kind of daylight. I remember when they were digging all this out in the 1990s. My dad used to take a lot of flights out of here. It’s just been kind of glazed, painted over, and retiled a bit here and there. A lot of TVs. More or less just another place in the airport.
[6:10] And Greyhound is a flat-out, option of total last resort for me. My van with no A/C would’ve been much more pleasant than either the station or on-board experiences I’ve had riding the Hound.
[6:20] I never realised it, but there are so many pamphlets around the airport here. Groome offers around a dozen scheduled daily round trips from MSP Airport, picking up from a facility built onto the edge of the parking ramp at terminal one, just across the lanes for picking up passengers at the baggage claim. The pickup spot is accessible via Metro Transit bus, light rail on the Blue Line, or the ground transportation center at terminal one.
[6:48] Well we know where we have to be but this is a little kind of basementish for me. Let’s go get some coffee in the terminal. I figure if I drink my coffee at an average pace I’ll still have 10 minutes down there waiting for the shuttle.
[7:02] Terminal two has a complimentary pickup location in essentially the same relative location, only that spot is not accessible by Metro Transit bus without a ride on the Blue Line LRT from terminal one.
[7:21] The landside Caribou is down in the baggage claims. This kind of route really is the bread & butter kind of service offered by Groome. A major city’s connection to its next smaller but still significantly sized area of urban and suburban development. Most people don’t take public transit between the Twin Cities and Eau Claire because driving is just a lot cheaper. It’s one tank of gas to get you there and back even if you drive around either city quite a bit. These public transportation options have been whittled down. There’s just six Greyhound trips a day and trains have been gone for many decades now. This shuttle service is rather expensive but it’s the only option with round-the-clock service throughout the day even on weekends. It’s unfortunate there weren’t more park-and-rides I could have utilized and I didn’t even have to use ridesharing services, but that’s just the way it happened today, unfortunately. This is the life when you don’t have a vehicle. In the Twin Cities the public transit is so spare you’d end up paying a lot more than a person with a vehicle would to go a relatively short distance.
[8:26] I guess we’ll see what the shuttle’s like. It has pretty good reviews on Reddit and Google, mostly from people in Eau Claire who need it to get to the airport to take a flight, which makes sense. Groome does base some of their transportation marketing around tourist operations in the cities surrounding metro areas that it serves. They have thirteen different airports that they work out of. And, they do everything from coach buses to jitney minibuses to eleven passenger vans. So, it’ll be interesting to see what we get today. It’s a little bit longer than the Greyhound or Flixbus. It makes a couple extra stops but I think that’s part of the extra convenience of it. It is serving these western Wisconsin communities pretty well given the frequencies, especially on the weekend like I said.
[9:11] And, if it’s a nice ride, and if the tip I spend on the driver was worth it, then I’ll say overall that yeah it’s a good thing. It just ought to be supplemented with more affordable public transit and that could just come with more frequency and more types of choices of modes for the way to get there.
[9:29] Now you’re supposed to check in with the driver 15 minutes beforehand at the desk. Let’s see if the driver is there. There does appear to be somebody down there, so let’s see if we can check in.
[9:42] So there are drivers here. They might pulse out a couple of shuttles at a time it looks like, so we just need to wait for him to call us for Eau Claire. We get on board. I can’t tell what size of bus it’ll be, so that’s still a surprise at this point. It seems like the drivers help load on baggage. They call people while they’re here and escort them out to the bus. That’s what you’d expect for $66 a person. It’s that per person cost that I think negates it for most people traveling as like a family. Like, would you spend, for some families, a couple hundred dollars each way to go to the airport versus just driving yourselves in the car you already own? I mean, I get it.
[10:30] Primarily this service got good reviews from folks living in the smaller cities that are catching flights. But Groome’s marketing includes nods to expanding vacations beyond typical airport destinations, so they’re trying to attract a wider share of the travelling public. But if you weren’t aware of their services by looking them up specifically, or in a general search for point A-to-B bus service, or by seeing their vehicles while travelling an intercity route – you might not even know this service exists on the fringes of a packed bit of ground transportation providers in the Twin Cities & elsewhere in America.
[11:04] The shuttle is on the comfier side of hotel-style shuttles with a modest capacity that won’t be anywhere near full today. A couple other passengers are seated ahead of me today and I occupy a rear seat that isn’t too disagreeably appointed, but would likely not be conducive to sleeping for hours. Our driver, throughout the entire process, was professional and drove so effectively that I never questioned whether or not we’d get there on time, just a bit of quandary as to why we took the more local divided highway out to the beltway Interstate 494. I believe he was trying to avoid congestion on the way through Eagan, but the stoplights along the way on highway 62 don’t make up much time.
[12:50] Typically this route offers additional drop-off points in Hudson, Baldwin and Menominee, Wisconsin – but with no passengers holding tickets for these towns, we’ll be making a non-stop run out to the edge of Eau Claire on this Saturday afternoon.
[13:05] Why this route is best served by vehicles in the modern era mostly owes to the expense of instituting passenger rail along the corridor, as well as the nature of how the relationship between state-funded rail ventures and their private host railroads exists. The last passenger train to run between the Twin Cities & Eau Claire was well over 50 years ago. Revival of the former Chicago & Northwestern line now owned by Union Pacific would require significant investment to modernize signalling on the line and to increase train capacity over the local freight currently operating on this, a lower priority line than the CPKC and BNSF lines running to south along the Mississippi River, the former being the current route of Amtrak operations through Minnesota and Wisconsin.
[13:49] It’s not that such a line is a bad idea, it’s more that passenger rail is a more removed concept from the priorities of folks living in towns between MSP and Eau Claire. Personal vehicles came about as a more effectively convenient choice for the population here versus setting one’s schedule around a train in the modern era. A shuttle like this can operate on a much less expensive basis than a coach bus or heavy rail, it can also set a higher price point for entry to preserve a clientele that is looking for a convenient & comfortable option that takes the stress of driving the route away while also providing access to the airport without additional connections via city centers.
[14:27] That is to say that the drawback of the service is likely the remote location of Groome’s depot in Eau Claire. Situated on the far northwestern side of the city, technically outside of Eau Claire city limits, there are no public transit options to the city center or surrounding communities that don’t involve getting picked up or walking an extremely long distance, much of which has very little dedicated pedestrian infrastructure. All of this speaks to the drive towards automotive infrastructure as the dominant choice for this route.
[14:58] Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see a passenger rail option, or certainly more frequent coach bus service with better operators competing to serve Eau Claire and other nearby cities. But when most Midwesterners see a few hours time spent driving a personal vehicle, even in the often congested traffic conditions along the I-94 corridor as the preferred option for getting around the region, it’s clear that additional services would be a tough sell for transportation companies as being too little return on their potential investment in this corridor. State sponsored services like WIS-DOT is proposing in the Chicago-Madison-Eau Claire service to compliment the Borealis and Empire Builder have virtues in expanding accessibility across the region via Chicago & the Twin Cities, but that comes with the volatility of tying the public’s tax dollars across the state to a corridor that only serves a few additional stations along this, a line which has not had established passenger rail for several generations.
[15:57] Folks out here are less likely to elect officials that want to spend their tax dollars on a train that completely bypasses them just as much as they’re unlikely to oppose a variety of transportation expansion programs of all forms that use their tax dollars to significantly alter the balance of small town life versus access to regions beyond. I mean, there’s all kinds of stores everywhere nowadays. There’s no need to create a lot of very long distance routes for most people in these communities. A service that is frequent enough and includes enough various options for conveniently timed connections to all potential destinations is almost impossible, given the plentiful network of roads and vehicles across the landscape.
[16:38] I doubt that it could happen, but I’d be delighted to see these concepts fuse together in the future and get rail service expanded to Eau Claire and Madison as proposed. At the least, run more coach buses and raise the standards of such to offer somewhat higher capacity vehicles to generate more revenue for transportation providers and a comfier as well as less stressful convenient commuting experience for interurban travellers who aren’t able to drive for one reason or the other.
[17:04] Clearly, Groome has their work cut out for them on this route. Sure, the initial portion of getting out to the airport added to the expense, but I was able to avoid the much higher cost of parking a vehicle in the city, having to return to pick it up later as well. The tradeoff was a carefree experience that I hope this video complements for people considering Groome transportation from the Twin Cities. There are other routes into Minnesota and Fargo that look interesting as well. The cost certainly wasn’t much higher than Greyhound, somewhat more higher than driving myself but certainly more conveniently scheduled throughout the day than other bus services currently provide. That’s of course if you can obtain a ride to your particular destination in town as I did today.
[17:50] There was nothing at all wrong with that. You know, that was $66 of shuttle if you consider the five minute ride to the mall at first was $18, $20. So, I’m going to go try get some lunch because when I get to the family’s house lunch is not assured a while until the party begins and I’m a little more peckish right now, so I’m going to go take care of that. I don’t think most people would count this street or road here as walkable but I see pavement and I have sandals on, so that my definition of walkable.
[18:29] We are not actually in Eau Claire. We are in a, uh, the very edge of Eau Claire and I’m going to go somewhere where I can have somebody pick me up that doesn’t seem so much like by the side of the road.
[18:47] You see, there’s a crosswalk up here. It’s walkable and has a minor shoulder with some gravel in parts and sand in others that, you know, is typical of exurban Wisconsin. It’s like just as soon as you get out of town it immediately turns into pretty much rural. There’s a bit of walking in the street here, though. Gutter, sidewalk, who knows? Let’s go to KwikTrip over there.
[19:19] I would’ve had just about the same walk if I had gotten off on Greyhound or Flixbus over there at the McDonalds. Groome would be a good choice for the ever-increasingly expensive set of lower capacity public transportation options between major cities and small ones like Eau Claire with likewise considerable populations.
[19:39] I’m seeing a couple cool cars. It’s not a total wash on the highway today. Yeah!
[20:11] The city of Altoona was actually the pretty big railroad between Eau Claire and Altoona and they’re not that far apart. We’re talking right next to each other. So, the station here in Altoona is still there as we see, but Eau Claire has been taken down and there’s some of the old warehouses that are still there but not much, really. Altoona still has a lot more of a railroad in its town than Eau Claire does nowadays, but that could still turn around.
[20:53] On the proposed expansions of the Borealis service, a train would run a round trip daily between the Twin Cities and Chicago via Eau Claire and Madison. Or, maybe just some part of that segment depending on how the money works out the state levels and the national. You don’t know, people still wanna just go by car out here but what if your car was down for repair? What if you just didn’t feel like driving and I-94 as fast as it technically is for only 91 miles is still a stressful ride. So, I would like to have a different way to go and the shuttle service kind of did that but with all the railroads still here that big UP yard here in Altoona and there’s still plenty of space where a station could be constructed in Eau Claire. A college in that town and Altoona here still convenient to Eau Claire. Whatever you chose to do, there’s still plenty of railroad out here that could be used for it. Heck, there’s still plenty of capability for more bus service between the two cities and that could be at a lower price than we have nowadays. Just easier for everybody overall.