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.

David Stokes, Elias Tsapelas, and Avery Frank join Zach Lawhorn to discuss: the cancellation of the St. Louis MetroLink Green Line and what bus rapid transit could mean for the city, major changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) under the One Big Beautiful Bill, and Missouri’s worsening reading crisis and how other states have improved with reforms like third grade retention.

Listen on Spotify

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Timestamps

00:00 Cancellation of the Green Line Project
08:12 Changes to the SNAP Program
17:18 Reading Retention and Educational Reforms
26:10 Property Tax Reassessments in Platte County

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post MetroLink Line Canceled, SNAP Reform, and Missouri’s Reading Crisis | Roundtable 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.

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 proposed route received some tweaks earlier this month, and now is set to run from Natural Bridge Road at Grand Boulevard in north city down Jefferson Avenue past the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) headquarters and the site of the new MLS stadium. This new plan has an estimated price tag of between $600 and $800 million and would be financed primarily through federal funds. However, like the ill-advised KC Streetcar expansion, expanding MetroLink would be a waste.

The first and most obvious problem with the proposal is ridership. The project is touting the ability to connect impoverished areas of North Saint Louis with centers of commerce in places such as downtown and the Central West End. However, project leaders have yet to put out research supporting this claim. Considering that fewer and fewer people are commuting downtown for work, there are reasons to be skeptical of this assertion.

As a longtime Saint Louis sports fan, I understand that MetroLink can be a convenient way to get downtown and avoid the stress and costs of parking. However, building an additional stop and line to service the new MLS stadium is completely unnecessary, considering its proximity to Union Station­­­–it is only 0.2 miles away, or a five-minute walk. Instead of changing lines to access the dedicated stadium stop, soccer fans taking the train downtown would be better off exiting at Union Station and making the short walk over.

As with the KC Streetcar expansion I wrote about in a recent blog post, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a questionable MetroLink expansion comes at the expense of bus systems.  Saint Louis Metro has been forced to cut lines amid staffing shortages, an issue which is predicted to persist into next year. Metro Bus is the primary means of transportation for roughly 22,000 St. Louis commuters, compared to only 4,000 commuters who primarily use MetroLink.

If St. Louis wishes to use federal money to improve public transit, it should improve the bus system and invest in more efficient types of public transportation, like Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Unfortunately, policymakers’ tendency to chase shiny objects will likely leave Saint Louis with a defunct trolley, an oversized light rail system, and thousands of unhappy bus riders.

The post Even with an Updated Route, MetroLink Expansion is a Waste appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Meanwhile, the KC Streetcar Authority has broken ground on a 351 million-dollar expansion, financed by $171 million in federal funds, with the rest coming from a new transportation development district (TDD). This special taxing district will levy a 1% sales tax on areas around Main Street, generating millions in revenue to maintain the streetcar’s “free” admission status.

As Show-Me Institute analysts have argued in the past, the KC Streetcar has failed to generate economic growth and raise property values and does not improve Kansas City’s transit system as a whole. Throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at expanding the streetcar not only continues to grow a poor transit system but also neglects the more valuable bus system. Between 2016 and 2020, buses were the primary form of transportation for about 8,500 commuters in the Kansas City metro area. In contrast, there were only about 250 commuters in the entire metro area who got to work using the streetcar. In addition, the KCATA has an annual operating budget of $57.6 million, which is only about a fifth of what is being spent to expand the streetcar.

Kansas City’s MAX bus system is supposed to be a form of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), but with buses only coming every half hour on two of the three MAX routes, it fails in this respect. These routes need more frequent service, which means more buses and more drivers. Instead of continuing to pour money into an overpriced, ineffective streetcar system, Kansas City should consider diverting funds to its buses, which could be improved at only a fraction of the cost of current streetcar spending.

Politicians like grandiose plans, shiny new objects, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and spending exorbitant amounts of other people’s money. What their constituents need is a bus system that runs effectively so that they can schedule their day properly. Politicians seek the former at the expense of the latter, and it ends up hurting the very people they most often claim to be helping.

The post As Kansas City’s Streetcar Expands, Its Buses Suffer appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For one thing, councilmembers are concerned that it’s too early to know if expanding the streetcar system is a prudent investment. It’s true that the tentatively scheduled election wouldn’t be held until summer 2017, but the downtown starter line only started carrying passengers in May. If Kansas City’s streetcar is anything like other modern streetcars, ridership might drastically drop in the coming year.

Katheryn Shields, at-large 4th-district councilwoman, was concerned about streetcar expansion in generalShe was keen on pointing out the streetcar vote would be on the same ballot as a city-wide infrastructure ballot question. The bond proceeds from the latter measure (should it pass) would pay for sidewalks, roads, bridges and other basic infrastructure. Other councilmembers, including Councilwoman Canady and Councilman Fowler, seconded Shields’s worry.

So, as rail advocates try to convince Kansas Citians to invest their hard-earned money in a slow, inefficient rail project—in a corridor already served by bus rapid transit—they should ask themselves: Which is the better use of limited municipal resources: basic infrastructure that ensures the safe and efficient travel of residents, or outdated rail projects that cost over $60M per mile?

The post Secret Streetcar Plans Unveiled, Raise Concerns appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But the AND approach isn’t a simple matter of uniting the region for a common goal. Where MetroLink is concerned, the AND approach will benefit some at the expense of others. In more concrete terms: the City needs the County’s tax revenue if MetroLink expansion—in any direction—is going to be feasible. But the County has made clear it isn’t enthusiastic about funding the city’s favored north–south expansion. (Note: the County’s transit sales tax revenue is triple that of the City’s. See p. 67)

So, should the County and City just take their toys and go home? Of course not—the AND approach isn’t the problem. The problem is the goal the AND approach is supposed to achieve: a costly $2.2 billion expansion of the inefficient and underused MetroLink, which would mostly lie within City limits.

Recognizing this fact lifts the shroud of mystery surrounding regional infighting. MetroLink expansion is so expensive it would force the County to fund the bulk of a project that will primarily benefit the City. It’s so expensive that it creates an either/or approach to regional transit planning.

But what if, instead of an immensely expensive light-rail expansion that would require every tax dollar it could get its hands on, regional leaders invested in a system of bus-rapid-transit lines that could be constructed and operated at a fraction of the cost. That is, imagine a project that wouldn’t gobble up every last dollar the region has to offer, would actually serve regional transportation needs, and didn’t pit County against City.

If the region’s transit priorities were more in line with its resources, there might not be an either/or approach to transit in St. Louis. Messenger got things backwards: MetroLink expansion isn’t the victim of regionalism—it’s the cause of it.

So long as a costly MetroLink expansion is the goal, it doesn’t matter how well the region’s leaders get along. With the north–south expansion in particular, the City can win only at the expense of the County. That is an either/or approach. If leaders are to unite behind a transit plan, that plan will need to effectively serve all of the region’s residents at a price they are all willing to pay. 

The post Unite the Region with a Sensible, Effective Transit Vision 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.

Not as triumphantly as its advocates might hope (or try to suggest).

On an average day in 2015, over 41,000 trips were taken on KCATA’s system. Since its opening in May, the Kansas City streetcar has had an average daily ridership of 6,365, or 15% of total transit ridership. That’s a significant number of boardings, but still substantially lower than a busy bus route (the #70-Grand in St. Louis has over 9,000 boardings a day) and many times more expensive.

Buses outperform the streetcar in others ways, too. First, the streetcar is primarily moving passengers who are already near their destination downtown; it isn’t usually getting people from home to work, etc., like buses currently do. More importantly, the streetcar route has been served by MAX bus-rapid-transit service and local bus service for years. And the streetcar travels in traffic, at the same speed as buses. From a transportation perspective, the streetcar is redundant and unnecessary.

“But streetcars have a greater capacity than buses!” rail advocates reply. Streetcar vehicles can purportedly hold up to 150 passengers; however, articulated buses, with over 50 seats and standing room, can accommodate 75 passengers. The City could simply run two buses for each streetcar to match capacity and enjoy significant cost savings (an articulated bus costs 18% of what Kansas City paid for each streetcar vehicle).

In essence, the streetcar offers a more expensive way to move people along a short, 2.2-mile route that Kansas City’s bus system already serves. Is this really the best use of taxpayer money?

The post Streetcars: Suddenly a (Poorly Performing) Transportation Service appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“Streetcars do more than simply improve mobility,” said Donna Mandelbaum, marketing officer for the KC Streetcar. “In Kansas City, the entire community is looking to the Downtown Streetcar to fuel economic growth by promoting development, raising property values, attracting businesses and residents, and helping to redefine our city, streetcars benefit everyone.”

Let’s examine these claims one by one:

• Streetcars do more than simply improve mobility—Actually, streetcars do not improve mobility at all; they certainly do not take cars off the street. They increase congestion and are many times the cost of bus rapid transit.
• In Kansas City, the entire community is looking to the Downtown Streetcar—Recall that the existing streetcar Transportation Development District was approved by a few hundred votes of people within the politically designed district through a mail-in election. Whenever the “entire community” votes on the streetcar, it is defeated.
• Fuel economic growth by promoting development—This is a canard that streetcar aficionados like to push, but there is no research to demonstrate this from anywhere in the world. What really happens, and even the folks in Portland admit this, is that cities lard all sorts of other economic incentives such as TIF and property tax abatements along the streetcar lines, which then drives property development. Even then the claims of economic development are unsupported.
• Raising property values—This is demonstrably untrue. In the streetcar TDD, not only is property value lower than it was in 2012, the recent increase in value is smaller than the increase in all of Jackson County.
• Attracting businesses and residents—As discussed above, claims of a renaissance are spurious. Businesses may move into the streetcar district, but research shows that often they either would have moved there anyway, or that the subsidy only moved the project a short distance from where they would have already developed. As for residents, recent research indicated that Kansas City’s downtown area has seen a 5.3% decline in millennials from 2009 to 2014.
• Helping redefine our city—This is so vague as to be impossible to evaluate. But certainly the high streetcar expenditure as well as subsidies downtown have helped to hollow out the city’s tax base. As a result the city must borrow money to provide basic services.

What Kansas City did was spend $51 million per mile to build a streetcar. It’s neat to ride, and ridership is higher than predicted for now. But then that was true elsewhere before ridership numbers tanked. Voters may decide that spending hundreds of millions more on an expansion is a good idea, but it certainly isn’t because the streetcar is driving development, improving transit, or attracting business and residents.

The post Kansas City Streetcar Failing by Its Own Standards 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.

While the streetcar had problems in the first few days of ridership, none garnered as much media attention as its derailment on May 23. Two days later, service was halted due to electrical concerns. On May 26 the streetcar was hit by a car at an intersection, halting service. Even supporters admit it was a bad week.

What are we to make of it? What is a reasonable expectation of downtime for a streetcar system? According to the 2014 National Transit Database, streetcars run about 95 percent of their scheduled vehicle miles. That sounds impressive until you realize that it is the lowest performance percentage of any rail transit. Nationally, systems such as commuter rail, heavy rail, and light rail run at 105.2%, 97.3% and 98.9% of scheduled vehicle miles, respectively.

All totaled, metro buses run 102.8 percent of scheduled vehicle miles. In Kansas City, the KCATA runs 99.8 percent for both metro buses and bus rapid transit such as the MAX lines.

The difference between 95 percent for street cars and 102.8 percent for buses may seem small enough, until you consider the costs of each. My colleague Joe Miller wrote of the rejected 2014 streetcar expansion that Kansas City could buy 100 additional buses for the same cost of expanding the streetcar system 7.6 miles.

As Kansas Citians consider efforts to expand the streetcar line, hard data like transit costs and performance need to take precedence over feel-good puff pieces. That’s the only way to promote good public policy.

The post Evaluating the Kansas City Streetcar appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The city is correct to put the blame on the car owner for this accident. However, that doesn’t make it a good idea for a city to build a transportation system that relies on everyone studiously observing parking regulations. We put “all stops” in traffic signals, install high railings on bridges, and force McDonalds to serve cooler coffee, all because we correctly expect that some small percentage of people are just going to screw up.

Kansas City is not the only city dealing with these issues. Other metros, like Washington D.C., have had continuous problems with collisions on their recently opened streetcar line. Anecdotes aside, the federal government collects public transportation safety data, and from 2011 (when they started reporting streetcar data) to 2015, streetcars and their close cousins, cable cars, were by far the most collision-prone forms of public transportation. Streetcar revenue miles per collision were almost an order of magnitude lower than those for buses or other types of rail:

Cities should expect collisions because of the streetcar’s very design. They share the road with other vehicles and, due to fixed rails, cannot maneuver around obstacles like buses can (or avoid obstacles completely, as separated rail lines do). An object in the path of the rails means either a collision or a delayed streetcar. This safety problem is one of the factors that pushed cities away from streetcars in the first place, and is something policymakers should consider as they plan to bring a small part of that system back. 

The post Kansas City Streetcar Has First Crash appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

To their credit, Kansas City's streetcar aficionados rarely make the claim that streetcars are good transit. They aren't. They are woefully expensive for the service they offer, are inflexible, and are slow. Bus rapid transit such as the MAX on Troost is a much more effective method of moving people.

In Kansas City and elsewhere, the matter comes down to one of correlation versus causation. Streetcar proponents want desperately to claim that the streetcar causes economic development downtown. It doesn't. In fact, all sorts of literature in the United States and around the world fails to show that streetcars cause economic development. There might be a correlation, however, as economic development often occurs along streetcar routes. Why? Because cities such as Kansas City lard their streetcar routes with all sorts of taxpayer subsidies such as tax increment financing and property tax abatements that are much more likely to drive development. Economic development may occur along streetcar routes, but it is not caused by them.

In fact, a 2010 study sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration found that,

The literature regarding empirical measurement of actual changes in economic activity, such as changes in retail sales, visitors, or job growth, is almost nonexistent for streetcars.  

This finding undercuts the primary claim made by advocates of streetcars—that they spur economic development. The same report adds,

Given that federal funding for streetcars emphasizes economic development, along with many local policymakers’ objectives to stimulate economic development, the literature is particularly weak on impacts of streetcars on economic development, such as the attraction of jobs, retail sales, and tax revenue.

In Kansas City, officials have strung together a laughable list of projects supposedly caused by the streetcar. We've debunked them here and here and here. While there may be a correlation between development and the streetcar, it isn't plausible to claim that the streetcar caused the development.

Consider that in the 2013 and 2014 seasons up to May 22, 2014, when ground was broken on the Kansas City streetcar line, the Royals record was 109-99, for a winning percentage of .524. Since the streetcar tracks were laid, however, the Royals went 183-126, including two World Series appearances and one world championship. That's a winning percentage of .592. If I suggested that the relationship between the streetcar construction and Royals’ success was one of causation—the streetcar caused the Royals to win two pennants and the World Series—I'd be laughed out of the room.

Yet this is exactly the sort of specious argument streetcar proponents make when they point to downtown development. The progress of the streetcar and the Royals’ success may run in parallel, but there is no relationship between them or among their causes. Like the streetcar and many developments attributed to it, the relationship is illusory.

The post Streetcars and the Error of Confusing Correlation vs Causation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

However, while Kansas City has had some success revitalizing its downtown, the most recent transit data does not suggest any contemporaneous surge in transit usage.

As the chart above demonstrates, despite the fact that total employment has now exceeded prerecession levels in the Kansas City metropolitan area, Kansas City Area Transit Authority (KCATA) ridership has yet to recover. In fact, the most recent data shows total passenger trips are still fewer than they were before the recession by about 800,000 annual riders. Interestingly, transit passenger trips recovered relatively quickly until early 2012, since which time transit usage has actually fallen.

Proponents of transit expansion might argue that Kansas City simply has substandard public transportation options, and that the addition of bus rapid transit, light rail, and streetcars will greatly increase passenger trips. While some net new trips are likely given better service, KCATA’s recent experience should cast doubt on just how much needs to be done to attract new riders. KCATA opened new bus rapid transit lines, a.k.a. MAX routes, in 2005, 2011, and 2013. Since that time, increases in MAX ridership have been met with decreased use in regular bus passenger trips. It is possible to see MAX trips (which are generally longer) as more valuable than the lost bus trips, but there is no evidence that MAX drew significant new riders to KCATA; it is most likely the case that existing transit riders diverted to the better service.

The postrecession performance of KCATA is a bit of a puzzle, and I encourage anyone with reasonable explanations to give them in the comments. However, Kansas City’s employment growth and the increasing numbers of millennials living downtown has not spurred large transit passenger growth. Instead of pushing expensive rail transit plans, perhaps regional planners should ask how Kansas City, with no rail transit and some of the most highway miles per capita of any major city, was able to become to a millennial destination in the first place.

The post Kansas City Transit Ridership Showing Little Progress appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On January 8, the Huffington Post published a piece titled “A Streetcar Named Deception,” by Lawrence Hanley, president of the Washington, D.C., transit workers union. Hanley echoes many of the concerns made in this blog and elsewhere:

Streetcars today are of little, if any, use to those who actually depend on public transit as their primary means of mobility. Unlike light rail, heavy rail, and bus rapid transit, streetcars don’t have dedicated lanes to keep them moving free of automobile traffic. And in many cases, they run slower than a standard bus. And unlike a bus, a streetcar can’t shift out of its lane to avoid an obstacle, causing more traffic.

Streetcars also divert taxpayer money away from mobility-focused transit that helps working people and into boutique transit loops meant for “choice riders.” Meanwhile, bus service that takes people where they really must go gets short shrift, with routes being cut and fares going up. Adding insult to injury, streetcars are usually marketed as “sleek,” “premium,” “clean” ways for the rising urban class to get around. Rather than investing in and improving transit for everybody, politicians and their corporate backers are intentionally developing parallel transit systems—one for the well-to-do and one for the rest of us.

A month later, the New York Times published a piece arguing that money spent on streetcars is largely wasted:

“Bus-based public transit in the United States suffers from an image problem.”

That fact, laid out in a 2009 report from the Federal Transit Administration, isn’t surprising, but it has led to a perverse outcome: Transit agencies are spending millions of dollars on new rail infrastructure that is no faster than existing bus service, simply because riders perceive a train as better than a bus.

Many who are serious about effective transit have abandoned streetcars as a viable option. Why do Kansas City leaders persist when no one, especially Kansas City voters, thinks this is a good idea?

The post Streetcars Have Lost the Left appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The map above shows the proposed MetroLink expansion, along with the prime candidates for the first Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines in Saint Louis. One of those routes runs through North Saint Louis along West Florissant and Natural Bridge Road (West Fl-NB), while the other BRT route runs along I-64/40. The proposed MetroLink expansion would mostly mimic the route of the West Fl-NB BRT, but it also would serve South Saint Louis City. None of these proposals run cheap. The proposed BRT routes would cost around $40 million to implement per line, but they have funds from Proposition M, passed in 2010. The proposed MetroLink expansion would be much more expensive, between $1 billion and $1.6 billion, and would almost certainly require additional tax revenue from Saint Louis City and County. Read more from the Show-Me Institute on the MetroLink plan here.

The post Map Series: III. Proposed MetroLink and Bus Rapid Transit Routes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

So how much will the proposed line cost? According to the Post-Dispatch: “The original north-south proposal was initially estimated at $1 billion in 2007 dollars. Members of the coalition would not venture a guess this week at the current price tag.”

The latest plan actually goes further north than the $1 billion plan suggested by East-West Gateway (EWG) in 2008. According to East-West Gateway’s Vision 2040 (released in 2011), the cost for a route from Florissant Valley Community College to Butler Hill (going further south than the current proposal) was more than $1.6 billion. It is therefore safe to assume that the plan will cost between $1 billion and $1.6 billion, probably closer to $1.6 billion when adjusted for inflation. To put that in perspective, this MetroLink expansion would cost between $2,700 and $4,406 for every person living near the proposed line.

Proponents hope, and likely require, that the federal government will pay up to half of the costs of building the new route. Even allowing that, the city and county would be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in capital costs and additional annual operating costs likely to exceed $20 million per year. That will mean tax increases in the city and county, all to add 12,000 to 15,000 transit riders per day. For perspective, Saint Louis City and County combined have more than 630,000 daily commuters.

There exists a much more cost-effective way of increasing transit service along the city’s north-south corridor: Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). BRT can, and does in other cities, provide the speed and comfort of light rail service for a fraction of rail’s price. Metro is in the process of implementing BRT in Saint Louis right now, and we have argued that BRT routes serving the city and North Saint Louis County make the most sense. According to EWG, running BRT on Grand from Natural Bridge to Chippewa would cost a total of $24 million to implement. That’s less than half the cost of one mile of the proposed MetroLink expansion. In fact, Metro could afford to implement all five of its preferred BRT routes for less than 20 percent the cost of the north-south MetroLink proposal.

MetroLink proponents make the same ungrounded claims about the rail transforming marginalized communities as they did two decades ago (remember the golf course in East Saint Louis?). Now, just as then, it is not rail, but rather improved transportation that raises living standards. And in terms of improving transportation, the relative merits and incredible cost differential between BRT and light rail should be the end of the argument.

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From 2009 to 2014, the MetroBus system totaled more than 1,500 routes, 100-plus miles more than in 2009. While Metro actually cut the length of most bus routes over that period, the addition of 14 new routes has meant an overall increase in route lengths. A map of routes cut and added between 2009 and 2014 is below:

At the same time, MetroBus stops have receded over the same period, from more than 10,500 to 9,615. Reduction of stops may be a good cost-control strategy. However, the reductions have not been even across all areas. Most portions of the system within the city and near suburbs saw a large decrease in stops while those further away from the city tended to gain stops.

Together with the information on route miles, it is clear that Metro service now has wider total area coverage, but it has fewer stops and fewer route miles in most areas close to the city core.

Contemporaneously, the costs of operating MetroBus have increased faster than inflation, from $131 million to $151 million from 2009 to 2013. While Metro justifies increased service, the bus system is no more efficient than it was in 2009, with the percentage of system costs covered by fares still hovering at 22 percent. The routes Metro added since 2010 have, for the most part, garnered lower-than-average ridership. On October weekdays, when Metro records its highest ridership numbers, added routes averaged less than 700 riders per day with a farebox recovery of 24 percent, lower than the system average of 1,300 riders per day and 35 percent, respectively.

This result is predictable, as half of the added routes serve South and West Saint Louis County, which rarely supports cost-efficient, high-ridership routes.

With Saint Louis County’s increasing support to Metro, it is perhaps unsurprising that they receive more service. But whether that makes for an efficient bus system is more in doubt. More on this to come.

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