This is wonderful news, also known as great news. The proposed route was simply preposterous. Even by Metro’s own overly generous predictions, it was only going to have about 5,000 boardings a day. (That isn’t very many boardings for a billion dollars.) It was bad enough that it generated significant opposition at the East-West Gateway Board of Directors (EWGBOD) project vote, which almost never happens. At the Show-Me Institute, we released a study by Randal O’Toole in 2023 that highlighted why this project was unnecessary and wasteful, and I provided testimony against it before the EWGBOD in early 2024.

The federal government gives away a lot of money for expensive transit projects, so St. Louis invented an expensive transit project to go get that money. Never mind that few people were going to ride it, and that people along this route could be served much more affordably by buses.

But let’s give credit where it is due. The new mayor of St. Louis and Metro deserve credit for making the right decision now. Whether they did it because they realized it was a bad choice all along, or whether they just succumbed to the political reality that the current administration in Washington, D.C., was highly unlikely to fund this project, doesn’t really matter. I am just happy that it is done for, or at least as done for as a project like this can ever be.

Which brings us to the other part of the good news. The city and Metro are redirecting their efforts along this route to consider a bus rapid transit (BRT) route. BRT has worked well in Kansas City (unlike the streetcar) and deserves consideration for this route in St. Louis. I am still amazed, though, at how expensive BRT itself is. (That will be a topic for a future post.)

An affordable (for both taxpayers and riders), changeable, safe, and on-time bus system is what the St. Louis region needs for public transit. We should stop dreaming about getting suburbanites out of their cars and start focusing on serving the needs of people who depend on public transportation. Cancelling the Green Line is the right move in that direction.

The post Green Means Stop appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

So here is my contribution to the effort. Just tell St. Louis’s Bi-State Development Agency (also known as Metro) “no” on its application for around $700 million in federal funds for the ludicrous Green Line (formerly known as the North-South Line) proposal. Like Nancy Reagan said to Arnold on Diff’rent Strokes, “Just say no.”

The new leadership in the federal Department of Transportation (DOT) has instituted major changes in how the DOT is going to make decisions. This doesn’t look good for the Green Line, as the St. Louis Business Journal wrote about this week. The new DOT guidelines state that, among many other things, the DOT isn’t funding projects for local political purposes or social justice reasons. The new DOT leadership is focused on moving people and goods, and actually moving people is one thing the Green Line isn’t going to do. Metro’s own estimates—which based on history are probably inflated—claim that the Green Line will have only 5,000 boardings (so, about 2,500 people) per day. That is for a billion-dollar project. That’s absurd.

Whether you call it the “Green Line” or the “North-South Route,” I call it an inevitable failure and a huge waste of tax dollars. Even if you support MetroLink, there is no reasonable argument for the Green Line project. The federal government ought to reject this plan and many other similar, though not quite as bad, applications from around the country.

You’re welcome, Elon.

The post Hey Elon, Here Are Some Cost Savings for You in St. Louis . . . appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The “Green Line” is dependent on approximately $600 million in federal funds; funds I hope it doesn’t get. I suggest that cutting the national debt can start right here. As national politics affects local policy, I am hopeful that upcoming changes to federal policy will be the death of this plan. Indeed, some key voices, including Les Sterman, the past director of the East-West Gateway Council of Government, have recently called for the project to stop.

In 2004, MetroLink planners predicted there would be 80,000 boardings per day on MetroLink trains by 2025 in St. Louis, Missouri (that number excludes Illinois users). In the first quarter of 2024, there were about 18,800 actual boardings per weekday for the entire system, including Illinois (page 23 in link). (Ridership goes up slightly in the summer with baseball games, but not that much this summer, for obvious reasons.) We can just admit that MetroLink usage has been substantially less than projected. St. Louis should focus on serving the existing system as best it can instead of doubling down on failure with this latest expansion fantasy.

The “Green Line” plan only projects 5,000 boardings per day, at best. Even if that turned out to be accurate—and history suggests it won’t be—that is a very low number. Serving about 2,500 people per day (one person equals two boardings, on average) for over $1 billion is a terrible use of tax dollars. This project should not move forward.

The post Absurd Light Rail Project Marches Onward appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Let’s recap the proposal. The Green Line would be a five-mile route up and down Jefferson Avenue in St. Louis that then turns west for a few blocks on Natural Bridge near Fairground Park (which is where the JVL group bases its concerns). The entire plan will cost an estimated $1.1 billion, but the line is only predicted to have 5,000 boardings a day. That’s 5,000 boardings, not 5,000 people—most riders would use it both ways —and even that estimate is overly optimistic.

The demand for public transit along this route up and down Jefferson doesn’t currently justify its own bus route, but supposedly large numbers of people will magically ride MetroLink when the Green Line appears.

Why is Metro trying to build this route? Well, to quote Metro’s CEO, Taulby Roach:

A billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but . . . 60 percent of that investment comes from the federal government, so why wouldn’t we want to get that money?

So, basically, let’s get the federal funds and spend them. Who cares that there is no demand for this route or that Metro’s own underwhelming projections admit that few people will actually use it? Let’s get some of other people’s money to spend! No wonder we are $35 trillion in debt.

I commend JVL’s neighborhood group for publicly asking tough questions about this project, which it calls the “Metro-Leg To Nowhere.” The pressure to support this boondoggle is strong. It’s great to see people stand up to it.

The post One Neighborhood Group Stands Up to Metro appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But now we have good news out of St. Louis County regarding transit. County government has rejected all of the various options for MetroLink expansion into St. Louis County. (This is different from the proposed MetroLink expansion in St. Louis City, which unfortunately has been approved locally. The East-West Gateway Council of Governments is currently seeking federal funding for this project, which I hope it won’t get.)

The problem for the various proposals to expand into St. Louis County is that there is no dedicated way to pay for them, at least not yet. The route starts in the city but the expansion primarily serves the county—so is the city or the county going to pay for the first few miles of the expansion? Would the county pay for light rail inside the city? Would the city pay for part of a light rail expansion that mostly “benefits” residents of the county? (Note the use of quotation marks as there is no overall benefit.) Who knows?

This doesn’t mean that light rail expansion in St. Louis County isn’t going to happen, but anything that puts it in doubt is good news in my book.

The other good news in the story is that St. Louis County is now considering bus rapid transit (BRT) as an alternative to MetroLink:

AECOM [the county’s consulting firm] also has been asked to study the use of rapid bus lines, either using new rights-of-way just for buses or designated lanes on existing roads. Those could be deployed instead of MetroLink expansion or in conjunction with it.

BRT has been used in Kansas City with success, and it is something that Metro should consider for St. Louis. BRT moves people effectively at a fraction of the cost of light rail, streetcars, or trolleys. Unfortunately, it seems spending enormous amounts of money is a good thing from Metro’s point of view, no matter how much of it is wasted.

Increased use of BRT could be the transit option St. Louis has been looking for.

The post The Light Rail Line Less Traveled appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Click here to read the full report.

The post Is St. Louis Transit Built for the 2020s or the 1910s? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Is this plan going to be a positive step forward for the St. Louis area? No, not at all. It will be a wasteful doubling down on a failed strategy to force feed light rail into a metropolitan area that would be far better served by an improved bus system from a transportation, financial, and social perspective.

In a forthcoming paper for the Show-Me Institute, Randal O’Toole will discuss how addressing transit issues in St. Louis by expanding MetroLink is a fool’s errand, and an extremely expensive one at that. Metro’s total transit ridership in 2019 was less than it was in 1993, before MetroLink even opened. The pandemic only exacerbated this problem, with fewer jobs and workers in downtown than before. Jobs are spread out throughout the metropolitan area, and buses are well equipped to connect workers to changing jobs, students to new schools, and sports fans to games. (We can admit MetroLink does a good job with the sports teams for some—but that is hardly a justification for expanding the entire wasteful system.)

Metro would better serve our region by spending its tax money on an effective bus system, including bus rapid transit for high-volume areas, instead of expanding a costly, inefficient, and unwieldy fixed-route light-rail system that fails in its primary purpose—serving St. Louis transit users.

The post Costly AND Outdated. Where Do We Sign Up? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The plan is for the trolley to resume services on August 4 under the new leadership of the Bi-State Development Agency, with a few tweaks. The trolley will only operate Thursday through Sunday, and in addition, it won’t run year round. Per the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story linked above:

But in a change, Bi-State CEO Taulby Roach said plans now call for the 2.2-mile line to operate only in warmer-weather months. It will shut down Oct. 15 and probably crank up again next April, he said. “We have made the professional opinion that it will run better on a compressed schedule,” Roach said. “We’ve really tried to make a realistic and nonflinching assessment of these assets.” He said it’s more likely that people will ride the trolley cars, which he described as a tourist attraction, during good weather conditions. Moreover, he said, “the equipment simply doesn’t work well” during colder times of the year.

A ”realistic and nonflinching assessment of these assets” is certainly long overdue—it remains to be seen if that’s actually what’s happening here. It is disconcerting to read that this equipment doesn’t work well in the colder months. The original plan was for the trolley to run all the time.

Projects of this size are complicated, and we should be understanding when things that can’t be controlled or predicted cause problems. But “cold winter months in St. Louis” does not qualify as an unpredictable obstacle, and the lack of foresight here is a perfect distillation of the lack of care or seriousness with which this entire process has unfolded.

While describing the Loop Trolley an ill-conceived boondoggle seems like an understatement, it is possible that resurrecting the trolley might be the least bad solution right now. The federal government is threatening to claw back $37 million in grant money (as a reminder, the total price tag so far is $51 million) if the trolley doesn’t operate again. But there are still more questions than answers at this point.

Even with a new schedule, can the trolley function without repeated breakdowns? Will the projected August 4 re-opening date actually happen, or will it be delayed, as so often happens with trolley-related matters? How long does the trolley need to operate going forward to satisfy the federal grant requirements and avoid any financial claw backs? And what happens if East-West Council of Governments declines to give the $1.26 million in grant money that trolley leaders are requesting and claiming they need in order to keep the lights on?

There’s only thing we can say for sure right now: Given the track record of this project, nobody involved should be given the benefit of the doubt.

The post Once More unto the Loop Trolley Breach appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Between 2014 and 2019, ridership on St. Louis Metro buses and light-rail trains dropped by nearly 25 percent. Thanks to the pandemic, ridership in recent months has only been half what it was in 2019, and thanks to increased numbers of people working at home it may not ever return to 2019 levels.

This suggests that St. Louis doesn’t need to spend hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars building new light-rail lines. Yet that is exactly what St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones wants to do, not because St. Louis needs it, but because federal funding might become available for it. That federal funding would depend on local matching funds, meaning St. Louis taxpayers would have to pay higher taxes for train rides few of them will take.

St. Louis’s light-rail record is unimpressive. In 2001, Metro opened the 17-mile MetroLink College extension, doubling the total number of miles in the system. Metro carried fewer bus and light-rail riders the year after opening this line than it had carried the year before. The same thing happened when it opened the 3.5-mile Shiloh-Scott extension in 2003. The 8-mile Shrewsbury-Lansdowne MetroLink extension gained some new riders, but all of those riders were lost after the 2008 financial crisis, and most never came back.

Overall, light rail has failed to boost the region’s transit ridership. In 1993, before the region’s first light-rail line opened, buses carried 40.3 million riders. Since then, Metro has spent around $2.5 billion building 45 miles of light-rail lines. In 2019, buses and light rail together carried 36.1 million riders, 11 percent fewer than before light rail.

Part of the problem is that light rail is functionally obsolete: just about anything light rail can do, buses can do better for far less money. Counting capital costs, Metro spent $12.80 per light-rail rider but only $8.30 per bus rider in 2019.

The current proposal to expand MetroLink with a new north–south corridor line through downtown fails on two key fronts. First, while transit advocates say spending more money on transit helps low-income people, the fact is that most low-income people do not take transit to work. Census Bureau survey data show that only 4.4 percent of St. Louis–area workers who earned less than $25,000 a year took transit to work in 2019. Meanwhile, the sales taxes used to support Metro buses and light rail are highly regressive, meaning the 95.6 percent of low-income people who aren’t dependent on transit are disproportionately paying taxes to support rides they aren’t taking.

Second, cities that have successful rail transit have a high concentration of jobs in a central business district, and St. Louis is not one of those cities. The percentage of regional jobs in downtown St. Louis has been declining for years. It is currently down to about 60,000 employees downtown, very few of whom take light rail to work. Expanding MetroLink on the proposed north–south route will be a very expensive attempt to take people who don’t use light rail for work to jobs in an area where they don’t work.

The places in downtown St. Louis that benefit from MetroLink (the stadiums, convention center, etc.) already have it. The money Metro wisely spent adding and improving stations at Cortex and Barnes Hospital cost a fraction of the amount of a new line and served an area where people of all incomes actually use MetroLink to go to work. (The Barnes/Central West End stop is the busiest stop in the system.)

Meanwhile, while we debate MetroLink’s further expansion, Metro’s bus system is “disintegrating,” says engineer Richard Bose at the pro-transit NextSTL website, because the agency can’t find enough drivers to keep it operating. Jones and other city and regional officials should devote their efforts toward helping Metro run the system it already has rather than trying to expand it. Federal and local funds spent on an effective bus system offer a better solution to address the needs of the people who live in North St. Louis County. Otherwise, people might get the idea that the real purpose of light-rail transit is not to move people, but to move dollars from taxpayers’ pockets into the hands of light-rail contractors.

The post MetroLink Light Rail is MetroWaste appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While members of the council had different reasons for rejecting the proposal, one question from the head of the council board summarized the objections nicely:

“Why is it always other people’s money?”

Other local officials were fine with the trolley receiving the grant, as long as no taxpayer money from their respective municipalities would be dedicated to the trolley and Bi-State Development assumed its operation. Others objected to the idea of Bi-State operating the trolley, arguing that its responsibility is to provide public transportation, not manage tourism projects.

Show-Me Institute analysts have argued for years that the Loop Trolly should not be subsidized by public tax dollars. It’s good to see regional leaders taking the same approach.

It’s unknown what comes next for the trolley. Trolley backers could seek out private funding, either from investors or from Loop businesses who see a benefit to having the trolley run. Whatever the trolley’s future, hopefully the next ask will be to private sector investors, not taxpayers.

The post Trolley Grant Rejection Summed Up in One Question appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One part of the proposed plan was to allow riders to use Metro passes to pay for Trolley rides. The plan also would have used the Loop Trolley Transportation Development District (LTTDD) revenue to develop (page 3) a park-and-ride pass program to encourage—or potentially force—Loop business employees to park at a distance and take the trolley to work. If forcing people to park in inconvenient locations is the best way to get people to ride the trolley, that should tell you all you need to know about actual demand for the trolley.

Since this new plan received no support, it will not be sent to the Metro board of directors. Further, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA)—the source of the $34 million federal dollars to construct the trolley—has indicated it may sue the trolley’s tax district for $25 million. If the FTA does file suit, several  entities that benefited from the federal money, such as St. Louis City and County, the LTTDD, and University City, could be on the hook for repayment.

The threatened lawsuit combined with the trolley closing has Metro concerned about future transportation grants being jeopardized. However, sinking millions of dollars more into the trolley is a poor way to try and save face. Bad projects should be allowed to end to make way for better ones, not kept alongside them.

St. Louis County has reiterated that no additional county funds will be spent on the trolley. The question of what to do will now be passed to the LTTDD. The LTTDD board members that have commented indicated they did not know what would come next, while the mayor of the City of St. Louis would like Bi-State to reconsider. If there is a market-based solution to keep the trolley running, let’s hear it. Until then, no more taxpayer money should be spent.

The post Beating A Dead Trolley appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Loop Trolley Company treasurer admitted to the St. Louis Post Dispatch that the Trolley’s “capability to continue on with funding through sales tax and fares … does not look any better and is not going to look any better.”

As Show-Me Institute analysts noted for years, the trolley was a bad idea, despite the vocal support of a few backers. If there was a market for a trolley, private investors should have been the ones to fund it. Instead, the Delmar Loop visitors who don’t seem very interested in riding the trolley were forced to pay extra taxes.

So is this the end of the line for the Trolley? The Bi-State Development Agency, or Metro in common parlance, met Tuesday and is considering taking over the trolley to avoid jeopardizing future federal transportation grants.

The overall failure here is staggering. Twenty years. Fifty-one million dollars. Nine delays. Closed businesses. Dismal ridership. Broken promises.

If this is the legacy of the Loop Trolley, perhaps at the very least it can serve as a warning. Forcing a project on people that do not want it, no matter how much taxpayer money you can get, is simply not a good idea.

The post Clunk, Clunk, Clunk Goes the Trolley appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

What is clear, though, is that the north–south MetroLink expansion isn’t the panacea advocates claim it is.

It isn’t a solution to automobile dependence. Saint Louis’s low population density and dispersed employment centers make the city a bad fit for light rail. Popular, cost-effective light rail systems require population densities upwards of 20,000 people per square mile, but Saint Louis City has fewer than 5,000 per square mile. And experience with existing MetroLink routes demonstrates our region’s preference for the car. Today, a lower percentage of Saint Louisans use transit than in 1990, before MetroLink even operated. Even more embarrassing, MetroLink has lower ridership today than it did in 2005, the year before the Shrewsbury line opened.

It isn’t a solution to poor transit service, either. Firstly, the proposed north-south line operates along a route already served by numerous bus routes. Secondly, the reason less than 4% of Saint Louisans commute on transit isn’t because they have trouble going from North City to downtown. It’s because the antiquated “hub and spoke” model Metro uses makes travelling from North City to employment centers in Central and West County a multi-transfer odyssey. If regional leaders truly want to improve mobility, they’d do better by advancing bus-rapid-transit (BRT) lines. BRT uses sleek, rail-like vehicles, well-appointed and generously-spaced stations, and exclusive rights-of-way to deliver service comparable to light rail. For just a fifth of the local cost of expanding MetroLink, the region could construct the five BRT lines in its long-range transportation plan.

Nor is MetroLink a cure for anemic urban development. Despite claims of rail advocates, the economic consensus is that light rail is not a catalyst for economic growth. Even putting aside the wildly inflated figures touted by rail advocates, we can see with our own two eyes that MetroLink has failed to spur development in Saint Louis. Far from rejuvenating depressed areas, MetroLink has even failed to prevent decline in areas that seemed to be on the rise in 1994 when the first lines opened, like Union Station and Laclede’s Landing. Nor did it ever bring the fantastically improbable golf course to East Saint Louis.

And MetroLink will not solve historic segregation or achieve the nebulous goal of “connectedness.” There simply is no evidence, save the endless, unfounded repetition of rail advocates, that light rail is a solution to economic, social, or racial segregation. (Just think: how might riding a train downtown, where so few jobs exist, make life better for an average North City resident?) And if “connectedness” means residents and visitors have the ability to travel from North or South County to downtown, then we’ve achieved it, as these areas are already connected by bus and bikes routes, streets, and sidewalks. No, these areas are not connected by rail—but if the argument is that we need rail because we don’t have rail, then advocates are running in circles.

Soon, the Mayor and rail proponents will stop begging the question and start begging for money. When they do, Saint Louisans should carefully consider what benefits could possibly justify a $2 billion MetroLink expansion, and whether or not it’s just an expensive “remedy” to treat problems for which we already have more sound solutions. 

The post North-South MetroLink Expansion: Snake Oil for Saint Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Assuming other types of public transportation service (such as buses) are unaffected, the addition of a North–South MetroLink line could increase the speed and quantity of public transportation in the Saint Louis region.  Light rail is generally much faster than standard buses, so more rail can mean faster transit and more riders. However, light rail is not the only way to improve public transportation, and Saint Louis needs to consider light rail as just one option among many, perhaps not the most prudent one.

As we’ve discussed many times before, Saint Louis is a dispersed region, both in terms of where people work and where they live. Most residents live and work outside of Saint Louis City, and more people commute into Saint Louis County than Saint Louis City for work. The area in the region with the most employees and the highest payroll is not downtown, but West County. Nevertheless, the North–South MetroLink plan would route riders in and out of downtown Saint Louis, as if the year were 1904. In terms of population density, most of Saint Louis City (and nearly the entire planned route of North-South MetroLink) has less than 5,000 residents per square mile. Cost-effective light rail systems generally have population densities nearing 20,000 people per square mile around stops.

Saint Louis’s existing MetroLink lines already encounter ridership problems, despite serving areas with more employment and population than the proposed North-South line would. After spending more than $2 billion building the current system, a lower percentage of Saint Louisans use transit now than did in 1990. And, despite the hopes of transit activists, the situation is not getting any better. Both MetroLink and MetroBus ridership peaked in 2008, and even as better economic times have come to Saint Louis in the last few years, MetroLink ridership continues to stagnate. The result of this failure to draw more riders is that, accounting for all light rail costs since 1992, the MetroLink has cost Saint Louis nearly $10 for every passenger that has ever stepped on board, with a one-way fare of only $2.50. The bottom line is that the existing MetroLink has, despite the investment, failed to achieve meaningful progress toward promoting transit ridership or generating urban development. There is little reason to believe that an expansion will yield better results.

Fortunately for the region, adding more rail is not the only way to improve public transportation. Saint Louis could, for far less than a billion dollars, improve its poorly managed bus system or implement bus rapid transit, both options made much easier by the incredibly low traffic levels on Saint Louis’s highways and arterial roads.

However Saint Louis officials move forward, they would do best to consider public transportation plans that take the city as it is, and not how transit activists want it to be. If they don't the system will continue to operate as it does today: expansive yet inefficient, expensive yet resource-poor, overbuilt yet under-ridden. 

The post Light Rail a Losing Proposition for Saint Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

To see this, we can look at ridership changes on the MetroBus and MetroLink systems since the end of the recession. That recession technically ended in mid-2009, according to the Saint Louis Federal Reserve. And while 2010–2013 cannot be described as great years, total employment in the Saint Louis Metropolitan area has steadily risen since around October of 2009.

Metro ridership was anything but recession-proof. During the economic downturn, MetroLink ridership fell 37% and MetroBus ridership fell 28%. But while the employment in the Saint Louis area has slowly but steadily recovered, the same cannot be said of Metro ridership. In 2010 and 2011, MetroBus gained back much of the ridership it had lost in the recession, but in 2012 and 2013 growth stagnated. MetroLink ridership recovery was less robust. By mid-2014, five years after the recession’s end, MetroLink ridership was still 30% below its pre-recession peak.

But as the chart below also shows, 2015 saw ridership levels reverse their post-recession trend of steady (if modest) growth. From July 2014 to October 2015, MetroLink ridership fell 8% and MetroBus ridership fell 5%. Taking all this together, it means that MetroLink ridership in late 2015 is only 2% higher than the post-recession ridership lows.

There are many factors that may explain weak post-recession ridership growth for Metro. Saint Louis has had a weak jobs recovery, with total employment still below pre-recession highs; employment has only increased 4% since 2009. However, economic growth has accelerated in the last year, the same time ridership began to decline on Metro.

Whatever the underlying reasons, this much is clear: there is no evidence that Saint Louis residents are flocking to public transportation or the MetroLink, despite significant investments made in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The post Metro Ridership Trending Down in 2015 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

 In 2013, Metro spent about $160 million on its bus system. The performance of that system is questionable, both in terms of total ridership and cost-efficiency. In no Saint Louis County census tract does transit account for 25% of all commuters. No bus route covers its operating costs with fare revenue, and many large buses travel Saint Louis’ streets nearly empty. Why aren’t county residents, even in depressed areas of Saint Louis County, using the bus more often?

Perhaps the better question is why those with any other option would take the bus to begin with. The map above shows the bus routes that currently serve North Saint Louis County.

What is immediately obvious is that, aside from downtown and a couple routes to mid-county areas, buses that serve North County stay in North County. They do not provide direct service to the Central West End, South Saint Louis City, West Saint Louis County, or South Saint Louis County, much less Illinois. Most routes funnel riders to the MetroLink, where they have to transfer to a train, and (if their final destination is not on top of the MetroLink) transfer once more to reach their final destination.

To illustrate how time consuming this process can be, we list rush-hour travel time from a randomly chosen address in Ferguson, MO, to prominent employment areas and compared that to travel time for a car.

Of course a car will be faster than transit, but it is surprising just how much faster it is, even for areas near Ferguson. Take the Galleria, which is about 10 miles (or a 20 minute drive) away. Using transit, the trip would take well over an hour. Why? The fastest transit route includes two transfers, which entails a lot of waiting around.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution for making the Saint Louis bus system better. The region has low population density and spread-out work locations. But it’s never going to look better until Metro can provide service that people will actually find value in without breaking the bank. Metro does plan to change routes after the completion of its transit center, and that may improve the situation somewhat. But maybe, before it plans another $5 million bus stop, Metro should consider how many new buses that money could buy them, and why anyone who could park in their free lot would want to use the bus anyway. 

The post Inefficient Bus Service Plagues North Saint Louis County appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

                The problem with the city’s property tax collections is not the rate (around $7.5850 per $100 assessed value), but the fact that most of Saint Louis City is not actually paying the posted property tax rate. As this and future blog posts will detail, most of the city’s land area and much of the city’s properties either enjoy special property tax breaks or are exempt from property tax altogether.

                One type of entity that pays little or no property tax is government. This includes city, county, state, and federal government, but does not end there. In Saint Louis City, many properties are owned by other quasi-governmental bodies, including: the Bi-State Development Agency, the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District, Great River Greenways, the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA), the Saint Louis Convention and Visitors Commission (CVC), the Saint Louis Housing Authority, the St Louis Municipal Finance Corporation, and others. Altogether, government-owned properties make up almost 30% of all properties (by area) in the city, as the map below illustrates:

Large city parks are one reason governments own so much of Saint Louis City. But even if we take parks out of the equation, governments still own more than 23% of the city by land area and 12% of land by value. For instance, the city’s land bank, the LRA, owns more than 11,000 parcels of land, including the land on which Busch Stadium stands. Busch Stadium’s public connection is not an outlier. Many large entertainment venues in the city, including the Scott Trade Center and the Edward Jones Dome, are on public land. Different government organizations own housing complexes, office buildings, theatres, parking lots, and wharfs. Setting aside the question of whether or not all of this government ownership is justified, little if any property tax money can come from these parcels.

Check back for our next post on this issue, which will explore the prevalence of tax-exempt properties in Saint Louis City.  

The post Saint Louis Property Taxes, Part 1: This Land is Their Land appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

If you are in Kansas City, probably not. According to the city’s for-hire vehicle code, jitneys (fixed-route buses not otherwise regulated by the government) are illegal. City ordinances do not describe a method for getting the government to approve a private bus route.

In Saint Louis, the Metropolitan Taxicab Commission’s (MTC) For-Hire Vehicle Code expressly allows for private shuttles, which can travel from one fixed point to another (although likely not more complex routes). Unfortunately, the regulatory hurdles toward getting a commercial service shuttle are formidable. It requires applying for certificate of need and necessity (which the MTC can refuse to grant at will), along with a plethora of other regulatory requirements. Getting permits to operate just one shuttle will cost you more than $3,000.

These regulatory roadblocks, along with competition from the heavily subsidized bus services (subsidies pay for more than 80 percent of costs in Saint Louis and Kansas City), likely have much to do with the absence of private bus routes in Missouri’s cities. But it was not always this way. In the early 20th century, jitneys took most American cities, including Kansas City and Saint Louis, by storm. They were faster, cheaper, and more flexible than incumbent streetcar competition. Hostility from streetcar owners and the nascent taxi industry pushed most cities to make jitneys illegal; but in Saint Louis they morphed into “Service Cars,” which served parts of North Saint Louis until the 1960s. At that time, Bi-State (Metro) moved to buy out the existing competition that was “skimming the cream” off its customer base.

Today, transit in Missouri’s cities is the exclusive domain of public monopolies, with limited competition from heavily regulated taxi markets. The resulting waste, inefficiency, and poor service are the predictable result. However, there is opportunity for improvement. In the United States, and especially internationally, private bus routes still exist. Reducing government control to only essential transit services, and allowing the private sector to provide the rest, could create space for competition and innovation in the transit market. Of course, a necessary first step toward that opportunity is to actually make private bus routes a legal possibility; that’s a change Kansas City and Saint Louis can and should make right away.

The post Private Buses: The Once (and Future?) Transit Option appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But since the recession, transit ridership has been on a steady recovery. Continuing that trend, from January 2014 to January 2015, Metro increased passenger trips by 1 percent. This increase has encouraged leading regional transit advocates, who call for more investment in transit and even a new North-South MetroLink line in the city.

However, the growth in Metro’s ridership should be taken in perspective. For one, ridership is still well below Metro’s prerecession peak of 58 million (reached in October 2008). As of last January, total annual ridership stood at just 47 million trips.

In a bit of irony, while transit enthusiasts are generally rail focused in their plans to improve Saint Louis’ public transportation, buses, not rail ridership, have accounted for the increased transit ridership in the past year. MetroLink ridership actually decreased in 2014 by some 200,000 riders. With total annual monthly ridership more than 30 percent below its prerecession peak, it is reasonable to conclude that rail ridership in Saint Louis has not had a recovery.

In short, Metro ridership is increasing, but the growth is slow and prerecession highs are far from being matched. In addition, most of the recovery in ridership has occurred on MetroBuses, not the MetroLink. There may be many reasons for wanting to expand transit (and even rail transit) in Saint Louis, but spiking transit demand is not one of them.

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Transit spending, and especially rail transit like MetroLink, skews toward capital-intensive projects that make agencies “house poor”—that is, even if an agency can get most of the start-up costs of a transit project paid out of federal funds, that agency still may not have much money to pay for a project’s predictable long-term costs. That’s relevant to Saint Louis, where about 30 percent of the region’s transit funding comes from federal grants that usually require the the expansion of transit service.

Local governments don’t usually take this longer view on transit proposals; instead, projects are sold to residents based on their immediate local cost, with little consideration to how the city or agency will pay for the system’s eventual maintenance and reconstruction. This gap in logic on the part of many planners is a very real concern for taxpayers and transit riders alike; Boston’s transit agency has essentially bankrupted itself through rail expansion, and Chicago will need $36 billion to repair its transit system in the next decade.

Saint Louis is hardly different. Its MetroLink rail system cost more than a billion dollars to build, but MetroLink costs more than $80 million to operate each year, just as it is. This revolving pricetag, paired with MetroLink’s paltry fare take of $20 million per year, helps to explain why Metro has never replaced a MetroLink car: the agency simply doesn’t have the money for it. Indeed, MetroLink’s 83 vehicles are now more than 15 years old, on average.  Even building a new station on the existing line had to be entirely funded by the federal government. Expanding the rail system—as Saint Louis planners want to do with the North-South MetroLink line—will only exacerbate the system’s substantial, and predictable, long-term liabilities without also solving the problem of reliably paying for either existing or proposed rail maintenance and improvement.

Saint Louis planners should take into account the full costs of the projects being proposed and look toward increasing efficiency. Yes, a new MetroLink line may be an exciting possibility for many Saint Louisans, but if the entire Metro system is to have solid financial footing in the future, superficially attractive prestige projects like the North-South MetroLink line may need to defer to practical, efficient, and effective improvements to the region’s bus system.

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