Page 426 – Show-Me Institute

Missouri Commuting Habits: Public Transportation on the Ascendency?

Posted on October 2, 2014May 5, 2026 by Joseph Miller

Is America, and Missouri, becoming a public transportation nation? Just this year, the American Public Transportation Association claimed that transit usage was at an all-time high. Missouri newspapers have reported increasing ridership on both rail and bus routes, in Kansas City and Saint Louis. Stories often focus on the preferences of millennials (claiming they like rail transit) as both a cause for increased transit usage and the raison d’être for plans to expand existing transit systems. This idea is pervasive in regional planning and transportation departments in Missouri and nationally, and they push for increased transit spending, which has been quickly rising in Missouri cities.

Unfortunately, the most recent commuting data on the national and Missouri levels show no such nascent transformation. In fact, on the national level a higher percentage (73.6 percent) of commuters drove alone to work in 2013 than they did in 2010. Transit usage has shown some increase, but only from 7.9 percent to 8.1 percent of commuters. Given the increasing resources going to transit agencies nationally, along with high fuel prices and an anemic economic recovery, a 0.2 percent increase in commuting mode share for transit is unimpressive.

In Missouri, the story is much the same. At the state level, a slightly smaller percentage of commuters drove alone to work in 2013 than in 2010, but it only fell less than 0.1 percent (to 81.66 percent of commuters). Public transportation did increase its modal share, but only by 0.06 percent (from 1.56 percent to 1.62 percent of commuters). In Missouri as a whole and every major Missouri city other than Saint Louis, more commuters walk to work than use public transportation.

A longer time horizon makes the situation look even worse. Transit’s share of commutes in Missouri and its major cities has slowly decreased over the last few decades; a lower percentage use transit now than in 1990. Taking 2000 as our baseline year, the nadir of public transportation use in the United States as a whole, 1.49 percent of Missourians used transit for their commutes. After 13 years and well over a billion dollars of investments, transit’s share of commuters has remained essentially flat. The same is true of Kansas City and Saint Louis.

While total transit usage may be increasing in aggregate, in Missouri and virtually everywhere else in the country, driving alone is still the undisputed king of commuting. As for public transportation, Missouri spends more than $400 million per year on average on transit, but less than 2 percent of the population use it to get to work.

It may be time to reconsider both the idea that transit usage is sweeping America and that increasing resources to transit (without some serious rethinking of how the money is spent) will propel a transportation revolution.

Missouri Charter School Law: A Soup Sandwich for Military Families?

Posted on October 1, 2014May 5, 2026 by Brittany Wagner

The Show-Me State forbids charter schools from opening in non-urban, accredited school districts, unless they are sponsored by the district itself. In effect, this means public school choice is limited to residents of unaccredited districts in Saint Louis and Kansas City. However, the need for school choice extends beyond those confines. This is especially apparent to Missouri’s military families.

Fort Leonard Wood, a U.S. military base located in the Ozarks, resides in Waynesville School District, which is home to 4,500 military impacted students. Educating these students can be difficult, since many have attended several school districts in several states within a span of just a few years.

These students come from a variety of backgrounds and have varying educational needs.

Waynesville School District is the only option for many students living on the base. Though the district performs relatively well compared to struggling urban districts, it is unfortunate that charter schools are not permitted in this area. Charters essentially are specialized public schools that serve the unique needs of students.

In other communities, if parents are dissatisfied with the performance of their school district, they can move into another district. For military families, this is nearly impossible. This highlights just one problem of Missouri’s restrictive charter law—it disproportionately limits military families’ access to the school of their choice.

Some states have recognized how charter schools can meet the unique needs of military students. There are currently eight charter schools located on military bases across the United States. One such charter school is Sigsbee in Key West, Florida, which offers coursework in environmental science and marine life. Another is Belle Chasse Academy in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, specifically designed to address the diverse academic backgrounds of students whose parents are on active duty.

Military personnel already make sacrifices for their country; they should not have to sacrifice their children’s education as well. The expansion of charter schools is just one way Missourians can provide more access to better quality education for military families.

For more information about charter school reform, read James Shuls’ case study on the Louisiana Recovery School District.

New Friedman Foundation Report Explains Cost Savings from School Vouchers

Posted on September 30, 2014May 5, 2026 by James V. Shuls

In my paper, “Available Seats?: Survey Analysis of Missouri Private School Participation in Potential State Scholarship Programs,” I explained how Missouri could potentially save money from a private school choice program. The Friedman Foundation did me one better. Their new paper, “The School Voucher Audit,” examines how much money private school vouchers have actually saved taxpayers. Based on their estimates, “a cumulative total savings of at least $1.7 billion has been realized since 1990-91, the first year of the historic Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), through 2010-11 . . .”

That is some serious savings! I encourage you to check out the slide share above or the full paper here.

The Bankruptcy of Indiana Toll Road Highlights Privatization Advantages

Posted on September 27, 2014May 5, 2026 by Joseph Miller

Recently, the Indiana Toll Road Concession Company (ITRCC), which operates the Indiana Toll Road, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This bankruptcy will mean a new operator for the toll road and significant loses to ITRCC’s investors and creditors. Although this bankruptcy might be viewed as evidence that Missouri should not allow private toll concessions in the state, in reality this situation highlights the advantages of these concessions to taxpayers.

ITRCC is a 50-50 partnership between a Spanish toll road operator and an Australian investment bank. In 2005, those partners paid the state of Indiana $3.8 billion for the right to operate the Indiana toll road for 75 years. As part of the agreement, ITRCC had to make significant capital improvements to the toll road; from 2006 to the present the company invested $458 million.

ITRCC investors expected steadily rising highway traffic to generate returns that would exceed these upfront costs and justify the many stipulations under which the company had to operate the toll road. However, post-recession highway utilization has made the original traffic projections, and hence the debt repayment plan, untenable. This is what forced the company to declare bankruptcy.

While it is unfortunate to see any company fail, Indiana taxpayers have made out like highway robbers on the deal. The state invested its $3.8 billion windfall in a 10-year, statewide transportation improvement plan. The privatized toll road received $458 million in upgrades courtesy of ITRCC, making it a better road now than when Indiana privatized it. And even though ITRCC has declared bankruptcy and must be restructured, the investors, not the taxpayers, will take the hit for overly optimistic traffic projections.

The important lesson of the Indiana Toll Road bankruptcy is not that a private company failed to make a profit, but rather that privatization deals can tap into significant capital for infrastructure improvements and transfer risk to the private sector. In the case of Indiana, we can retrospectively say that the buyer overpaid, but that was (and still is) a risk investors are willing to make when there is a reasonable prospect of profit. Indiana residents did not share the investors’ risk, but they have benefited from more than $4 billion of investments to their transportation infrastructure. With MoDOT slowly running out of the money necessary to maintain its state highway system, the fate of Indiana’s highway privatization deal should not make Missourians wary. It should make them jealous.

Streetcar Costs Balloon in Charlotte

Posted on September 26, 2014May 5, 2026 by Patrick Tuohey

Austin Alonzo at the Kansas City Business Journal reported that Kansas City is tabulating up the cost of the failed streetcar expansion. We’re still waiting on that, but news out of Charlotte, North Carolina, suggests that streetcars are more expensive than proponents argue.

The Charlotte Observer reports,

When Charlotte was planning to build its streetcar line last decade, one touted benefit was cost savings. The idea was that an electric-powered streetcar is cheaper than a diesel-powered bus and that a larger streetcar provides more economies of scale than a smaller bus.

But as the costs of a 4-mile streetcar line are coming into focus, an analysis shows that the streetcar will likely be more expensive to operate than city buses and the Lynx Blue Line.

The specific overruns in Charlotte are detailed in the article.

My colleague Joe Miller points out that some streetcar advocates claim streetcars have lower operating costs than buses because they compare the costs of operating a streetcar at full capacity to a bus at full capacity (120 passengers versus 60). However, in real life the transit systems don’t normally operate at anything close to full capacity, so their numbers are very inaccurate. Even then, this doesn’t include the enormous capital costs of rail.

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised that streetcars are inefficient. We have been highlighting the poor economics of rail transit for some time. The same Charlotte Observer article also points out that the supposed economic development benefits of the rail line—those so dramatically emphasized in Kansas City—”are difficult to evaluate in a cost-benefit analysis of a transit project.”

The initial streetcar website in Kansas City relied heavily on data prepared by the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), so it is no surprise that the claims made were similar. As Charlotte deals with higher-than-expected construction and operational costs, Kansas City voters should be pleased that, at least in this instance, they made a wise choice by not going along with other streetcar cities.

On a Scale of 1-10, It’s 15

Posted on September 24, 2014May 5, 2026 by Michael Rathbone

Dollars an hour, that is. There is a continuing push in Saint Louis and other cities throughout the country to improve the pay of low-wage workers. That is a noble sentiment and I, for one, hope that wages do go up. In fact, I want wages to go up for everybody. However, increasing the minimum wage is the wrong way to go about it.

If proponents are successful in raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, there will be a lot of pain. First, such an increase will cause job losses. A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report estimated that if the minimum wage went up to $9 an hour, 100,000 jobs would be lost. If the wage went up to $10.10 an hour, the number of jobs lost would increase to 500,000. If the CBO is correct about job losses, one shudders to think about how many jobs would be lost if the minimum wage went up to $15.

Is the loss of so many jobs worth the increase in wages for those workers who manage to keep their jobs? That’s a question for proponents to consider. They also should consider the fact that many people who work for minimum wage are not poor. Why mandate raises for them while risking job losses for the same people wage-hike proponents are trying to help?

There is a better way to help poor families. Both the CBO report and Professor David Neumark’s 2012 study on the minimum wage find that the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a better alternative for helping poor families than increasing the minimum wage.

The EITC is a refundable tax credit that provides direct cash assistance to low-income families. The tax credit is more effective at helping poor families because it is specifically targeted toward them. The minimum wage is not. For example, a teenager working a minimum-wage job whose father is a corporate attorney and whose mother is a surgeon would receive the same monetary benefit as a single mother of two working at McDonalds. That would not be the case with the EITC. If Missouri and other states really wanted to help poor families, expanding the EITC would be a more effective tool than increasing the minimum wage.

Trucks on Missouri’s Highways

Posted on September 23, 2014May 5, 2026 by Joseph Miller

The Show-Me Institute recently hosted a panel discussion on the future of transportation funding in Missouri. An audience member asked what percentage of Missouri interstate traffic consisted of trucks. While that question received no direct answer at the time, an analysis of MoDOT’s average daily traffic maps indicates that trucks make up a significant part of interstate traffic.

MoDOT collects data on how many total vehicles pass over certain sections of the state highway system on an average day, including the interstates. In some areas they also publish the number of trucks that pass over the same section of road. Here is a chart showing truck traffic on I-70:

Total truck traffic on I-70 ranges between 7,600 and 24,000 vehicles per day on the observed segments, which on some parts of I-70 accounts for over 40 percent of total daily traffic, dipping to around 10 percent in the Saint Louis metropolitan area. Combining this data allows us to estimate that truck traffic averages 22 percent of all traffic on I-70.

The story is much the same for the other interstates in Missouri. Truck traffic can range above 40 percent of total traffic in rural areas, usually dipping to between 10-20 percent of total traffic in urban areas. The estimated percentage of total traffic from trucks across major interstates in Missouri is as follows:

For most interstates in Missouri, truck traffic averages more than 20 percent of total traffic along the length of the highway. The exception here is I-64/40, likely because it runs almost entirely through urbanized areas in Saint Louis City, Saint Louis County, and Saint Charles County.

However the numbers are sliced, trucks make up a significant portion of interstate highway traffic in Missouri. And with the average truck doing hundreds, if not thousands, of times the damage the average car does to highways, it may be reasonable to consider funding mechanisms through which shipping companies and residents can jointly invest in highway improvements.

I Am Somebody … Who Has a Choice

Posted on September 22, 2014May 5, 2026 by Brittany Wagner

“In this class, we learn about government; the three branches are legislative, executive, and judicial,” said De La Salle student Trinity with an air of confidence as she gestured to drawings on the classroom’s white board.

Trinity, a school ambassador, led a tour through De La Salle Middle School, a private Catholic school that serves low-income, predominantly African-American students. The school, funded largely through charitable donations, is inspiring—high class participation, positive atmosphere, and flexible grouping by ability. The most impressive quality, however, is that the students forge their own educational paths: “I want to go to Incarnate Ward,” Trinity said.

Trinity, like her peers, is highly tuned in to the various high school options available to her. Her fellow eighth and seventh graders are required to attend high school prep classes once a week, introducing them to both public and private options in the St. Louis area.

Like many other middle schools, De La Salle’s students explore colleges and careers and learn skills that will allow them to be successful in high school. The difference is that students at De La Salle decide which high school fits their own educational agenda, instead of just hoping that the school down the street will fit their personality, goals, and abilities.

“What are you looking for in a high school?” I asked Trinity.

She thought for only a moment. “Diversity,” she said.

Other students expressed different characteristics. “I want to attend a high school with a high average ACT score,” said one student. “I want to attend a school with a good sports program,” said another.

After students graduate from De La Salle, counselors continue to check in once a quarter to ensure students are adapting well to the educational environment they have selected. Individualized goal setting, family involvement, and graduate follow-up have made all the difference.

The high school graduation rate for De La Salle students is 98 percent. This is an impressive statistic considering the graduation rate for the surrounding area is 76.39 percent or less, according to IFF. The typical variables that affect graduation rates are race, income, and family status. One other variable should be considered—educational choice.

De La Salle students are beating odds because they are in the driver’s seat. Being somebody—the school’s mantra—is about choice, and De La Salle students are not just choosing high schools, they’re also choosing success.

Name One Branch of the U.S. Government

Posted on September 20, 2014May 5, 2026 by Brittany Wagner

For an immigrant seeking U.S. citizenship, this might be just one of the 100 questions he or she would be required to answer correctly. Shockingly, one-third of Americans can’t pass the citizenship exam, and a majority of high school students would not be able to pass the test. In response, a group has launched an effort to make passing the citizenship test mandatory for Missouri students.

The effort is expected to receive bipartisan support, as research shows there is an increasing lack of civic responsibility in American citizens. Mandatory testing may sound like the answer to instilling values in Missouri students, but it’s not, and here’s why:

Storing information in long-term memory does not happen overnight. It’s not uncommon for students to engage in “binge studying,” as opposed to studying for shorter amounts of time over a longer period, which is more likely to lead to long-term memory storage. Thus, a 10-question multiple choice test in which students study for one hour prior to the test will not necessarily produce value-driven Americans.

This is not to say that civics education is not important, but there are other outlets to reform that may have more of an effect. In fact, research indicates that schools of choice increase civic values and responsibility. Students who attend private schools tend to be more politically tolerant and have increased political participation, knowledge, and voluntarism.

The United States implemented No Child Left Behind mandatory testing more than a dozen years ago. It is clear that simply testing students does not magically improve student learning. Why would we expect it to work for civics? Let’s consider alternatives like school choice programs before we implement more mandated tests.

If we want students to value liberty, why not start with liberty in education?

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