The capital city is making a strategic shift in its public transit approach by significantly expanding its bus services. This decision underscores the cost effectiveness and flexibility of bus transit compared to rail projects.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) plans to enhance its Metrobus network, recognizing that buses can be deployed more rapidly and at a lower cost than rail systems. The goal of this expansion is to improve service coverage and frequency, making public transit more accessible and efficient for residents.

Kansas City and St. Louis have been caught up lately in schemes to expand fixed-rail transit, which comes with higher costs and longer implementation timelines. By observing Washington’s emphasis on bus transit, these cities can explore opportunities to optimize their public transportation systems through cost-effective and adaptable bus services.

As urban areas attempt to efficiently deliver basic services such as transit, adopting flexible and fiscally responsible solutions like buses can help cities better meet the needs of their communities—something Show-Me Institute writers have been proposing for over a decade.

The post On Transit, Maybe We Can Learn Something from Washington appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fast forward to today and nothing has changed. Property assessment data received from Jackson County through an open records request show the aggregate annual market value of Kansas City’s downtown streetcar Transportation Development District (TDD) is largely growing at the same rate as the county as a whole.

In other words, the streetcar is still not driving economic development in any substantial way. Were that the case, you’d see market values in the TDD rising at a much faster rate, as properties are quickly snatched up and redeveloped to take advantage of all that commerce and excitement.

There may be arguments for expanding the Kansas City streetcar. But those arguments aren’t about transit (all the streetcar routes were once and could be again served much more economically by buses) and they aren’t about economic development. And because 66% of Missouri electricity is generated by coal, the streetcar isn’t green, either.

Unfortunately, as the FTA reported, few streetcar operators actually check to see if their claims are true. That remains the case in Kansas City.

The post The KC Streetcar Still Isn’t Driving Economic Development appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As Metro prepares to expand MetroLink again, we must ask one simple question. Why? Why are we expanding an expensive system that very few people use when Metro continues to cut its bus system over and over again? The bus system actually serves the people who need and use public transit, unlike MetroLink, which is primarily for those who use transit occasionally for sporting events downtown.

Did you know that the St. Louis area had more transit riders before we built MetroLink than we do now? We spent billions of dollars to build a light-rail system, and fewer people ride transit than before it even existed. What if we had spent a fraction of those billions on building a better bus system? A bus system that gets people who rely on public transit to school, work, the grocery store, and, yes, the ballpark, too.

It’s not too late to stop the latest MetroLink expansion mistake. I hope that O’Toole’s report can be a part of the discussion that convinces St. Louis’s political leadership to redirect our money for transit toward helping residents who depend on transit to go where they need to go every day instead of focusing on getting suburbanites to the soccer game a few times a year.

The post The Folly of MetroLink Expansion appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• Operating revenue is not close to covering expenses—MetroLink’s parent organization, Metro Transit (which also includes MetroBus and Call-A-Ride), covers only about 18 percent of its expenses with fares from riders. The rest of the revenue comes from local, state, and federal subsidies.
• Ridership is down by over 20 percent since 2014, so the revenue picture isn’t getting better.
• The primary reason people don’t want to ride MetroLink is that they don’t feel safe. A comprehensive study of MetroLink’s performance released earlier this year found that 71 percent of people surveyed cited security concerns as their biggest criticism of MetroLink (page 4).

So, given that MetroLink is (1) solidly dependent on subsidies for the foreseeable future, because (2) ridership is declining, because (3) riders fear for their safety, what would you prioritize?

Would you decide to build nine more miles of MetroLink for almost $700 million?

Back in the real world, this is what Metro intends to do, apparently missing the point that if people don’t feel safe riding MetroLink, they’re not going to feel safer just because it covers more ground.

Violent crimes on the MetroLink—defined as homicide, shootings, aggravated assault, and rape—numbered 197 during 2017. Proportionally, there were 1.4 violent crimes per 100,000 boardings in 2017. From January to October in 2018, violent MetroLink crimes in St. Louis declined 12 percent according to the head of the city’s MetroLink police unit, although it is unknown if this trend also held system-wide.

Metro justifiably believes that the safety perception spurred the 11 percent drop in ridership between 2017 and 2018, and recently approved a plan that would allow them to hire off-duty sheriff’s deputies for extra security. But should we assume that the recent dip in violent-crime numbers will repair MetroLink’s image and bring riders back? Or would it be smarter to wait and see if the positive trend continues before sinking $700 million into a massive expansion?

Even if people eventually feel safe riding MetroLink, the wisdom of adding another line is open to many questions. This much should be clear, though: MetroLink should not be laying more track when people don’t even want to ride what they already have.

The post If You Build It, Will They Come? 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. 

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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 reality, streetcars went away virtually everywhere because of cost, and what people now consider quaint was once seen as outdated technology. Streetcar ridership waned in the early and mid-20^th century, as they were outcompeted by buses and private cars. When public transportation became publicly owned, policymakers switched to buses, which were seen as cheaper, faster, and more flexible. Cities where streetcars persisted tended to be those with long tunnel stretches, where diesel buses would have created ventilation issues.

Returning to the question of cost, it’s important to remember that streetcars require their own dedicated infrastructure, while buses can share roads with cars, freight, and bicyclists. People complain about highway subsidies, but from the transit planner’s point of view the local streets are going to be there whether they decide to run a bus route or not. With a streetcar, the rails need to be built, maintained, and replaced on a regular basis.

While Saint Louis is building a 2.2-mile vintage streetcar line and considering a modern seven-mile route from downtown to the Central West End, these efforts are more expensive showpieces than a return of streetcar transit. For instance, in 1902, Saint Louis City, Saint Louis County, and Saint Clair County had a combined 560 miles of streetcar lines. That’s a long way from nine miles. Even in cities like Portland, which have spent serious amounts of money to bring back streetcars, total mileage is still less than 20.

Nor could Saint Louis afford to bring such a system back. Modern streetcar lines now require more than $50 million in capital costs per mile. Even assuming some economies of scale and track sharing, building 560 miles of lines would cost billions, possibly tens of billions. If the region went for a less expensive vintage streetcar system (like the Loop Trolley), the cost could still be almost $10 billion to build. For comparison, MetroBus, which runs a system roughly three times as extensive as that 1902 streetcar system, only spent $333 million on capital expenses between 1992 and 2013.

In the end, it was mostly costs that killed the streetcars, and mostly costs that will prevent them from ever being anything more than retro-transportation options for cities with more money than sense. As for Saint Louis, the city needs to consider whether its transportation goals are about moving people or moving the city back 100 years. 

The post Why Did Saint Louis Get Rid of Its Streetcars? 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.

The post Saint Louis Metro Ridership Up, but MetroLink Ridership Down appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Read the full essay: .

The post Crush Capacity or Nearly Empty: Demographics and MetroBus Utilization appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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.

The post MetroBus System Changes, 2009-2014: More Miles, Fewer Stops, Higher Price Tag appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The case with Saint Louis and Kansas City, with only around 10 percent of the job market density of NYC, is considerably worse. In both cities, less than 1 percent of job opportunities in the city can be reached within 30 minutes of transit travel. Only around 5 percent of jobs can be reached within one hour. A chart of percentage of jobs available by transit travel time is below:

As a result, moving from suburban residences (where most Saint Louisans live) to suburban workplaces (where most Saint Louisans work) is not well served by transit. Furthermore, large employment centers in exurban areas are difficult to reach via transit at all. Despite significant investment and operating costs—usually more than $300 million per year in Saint Louis—it is clear that very few workplaces can be reached quickly via transit in Missouri.

What accounts for this disconnect? One factor may be that cities like Saint Louis and Kansas City are polycentric urban centers with employment clustering in different nodes across the metropolitan area. Focusing on Saint Louis, while virtually all of Saint Louis City and much of Saint Louis County has reasonable access to transit, much of the system is focused on bringing people in and out of the downtown core. A map of MetroBus accessibility is show below:

A second problem is that transit is time-costly even where it regularly operates, putting work locations outside the 30- or 60-minute transit range. Again taking Saint Louis as an example, it takes 30 minutes to travel from the Chase Park Plaza (in the Central West End) to City Hall via walking and transit. That is about as transit-friendly a route that exists in the city. Traveling from the Central West End to Monsanto headquarters for work (around 8.5 miles apart) would take an hour or more via transit, necessitating a commuter to leave at 7:38 a.m. to get to work by 8:55 a.m. The drive, depending on traffic, is less than 20 minutes.

These realities likely contribute to the very low share of commuters who choose transit in Saint Louis and Kansas City. And unfortunately, it is unlikely that any feasible increase in transit spending or service extension will meaningfully alter these realities. Without significantly rethinking how transit is provided, there is little chance the mode will be able to provide timely transportation for labor pools in Saint Louis and Kansas City.

The post Where the Buses Don’t Run appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Metro expects the I-64 BRT to have 5,100 weekday riders to start, 2,100 of which will be new “choice riders.” Another possible BRT route, one that follows Natural Bridge and Florissant, could carry 3,200 riders. Metro used a regional travel demand model to come up with these estimates. And while models can be very useful, the real-world performances of Metro’s Express Buses show no such underlying demand, especially in West Saint Louis County.

Metro operates six Express Bus lines in Missouri, which are designed to handle weekday rush hour traffic to and from downtown. They have routes that follow the region’s major highways between downtown and the county, with fewer stops than normal buses.

As the map above demonstrates, only the proposed Page Avenue BRT does not have an Express Bus currently running a very similar route.

Unfortunately, these express routes are not popular. In fact, they are a regular who’s who list of the emptiest, worst financially performing bus routes that Metro has to offer. The best performing Express Bus by far is the 36X, which carries a mere 563 passengers per day and loses more than two dollars per passenger. Anyone who has read our previous posts on the MetroBus system will not be surprised to hear that the highest ridership is on a route that serves North Saint Louis City and County. The 57X, which runs along most of the proposed I-64 BRT route, has 257 passengers per day and loses more than nine dollars per passenger. By way of comparison, the average MetroBus route carries 897 passengers per day and loses $3.22 per passenger. A full table on Express Bus performance is below:

Express Buses are not BRT. They do not have the higher level of comfort, signal priority systems, dedicated lanes, or sheltered stops that BRT provides. However, they do provide reasonably fast service along major highway corridors between downtown and the county. In that way they likely portend future demand for BRT routes running very similar routes. And the prediction for an I-64 BRT route is not good.

The post Saint Louis Needs Better Bus Rapid Transit Plans appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• Incredible waste: months ago, we pointed out that Kansas City could buy and operate 100 buses serving 130 miles of routes for the same price as the Kansas City streetcar expansion plan. While critics might claim that buses cannot be compared with streetcars (they can), the basic math is unchallenged. Streetcars, which provide only limited service improvement over buses, are many times more expensive and incredibly restricted in their range.
• Dubious benefits: Streetcar supporters must have a hard time keeping a straight face when they claim that streetcars have any transportation benefit. Instead they rely on the argument that these projects bring billions in development. The evidence on this proposition is anecdotal at best, as cities with streetcars have heavily subsided surrounding development. Kansas City is already pushing ahead in this tradition, with anecdotes about new developments that are not so believable on closer inspection, and a raft of subsidies at the ready.
• Everyone will be paying: Even though supporters freely admit that a streetcar is a development scheme limited to a small section of Kansas City, everyone else still gets to pay for it. After all, building a half billion dollar streetcar line can be financially difficult. The proposed transportation development district’s 1% sales tax and new property taxes will cover less than half of the streetcar’s total cost. The rest will come from the federal government, Kansas City residents outside the TDD, and if the proposed 0.75% statewide transportation sales tax passes, the whole state.

Streetcar supporters often make groundless statements about illusive millennials and streetcar economics, but they do make perfect sense when they say that now is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity with the streetcar project.” That’s because once the shine is off the new rails and promises of citywide transformation are unfulfilled, the streetcar will be seen for what it is: just another transit system. Another transit system that is as slow as a bus, but ten times the price. Perhaps that explains the rush to get as much money as possible, as quickly as possible.

The post Don’t Forget the Streetcar is Bad Policy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Metro has proposed increasing fares on selected ticket options by approximately 10 percent, with the purpose of raising an extra $2.2 million in revenue. Metro’s strategy is to regularly increase fares by small amounts, rather than imposing infrequent large increases. But even this smaller increase has its opponents. As reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, many have spoken out against raising fares. One attendee at a Tuesday hearing stated, “I agree with a partial raise, but not such a big jump on everything.”

The fact is that fares cover an extremely small percentage of Metro’s costs. In the last 20 years, total Metro fares ($746 million) have accounted for only 14 percent of the total costs of building and operating transit in the Saint Louis area ($5.5 billion). Even if one treats the generous grants of the federal government as manna from heaven, local taxpayers pay far more to fund Metro than fares contribute. For example, in 2012, fares ($49 million) made up only 22 percent of local operating funds ($217 million). The other 78 percent principally comes from taxpayers in the Saint Louis region, only 4 percent of whom use the system to get to work. While it is true more use transit occasionally, most residents of Saint Louis City and County rarely use Metro, if ever. With the federal government and local taxpayers paying so much of Metro’s costs, it is hard to argue that Metro users are being charged too much for their tickets.

To make matters worse, the percentage of operating costs that fares cover has been on a steady downward trajectory over the last two decades. In 1991, fares ($23 million) covered about 28 percent of local operating costs ($83 million) while today they only cover 22 percent. Increasing ticket revenue is not keeping up with the rising costs of operating, much less improving, the Metro transit system, as the chart below demonstrates.

We have written before about how Metro spends an inordinate amount of funds supplying near empty buses to far-flung areas of Saint Louis County. We also have written about the high cost of building and expanding the Metrolink. However, Metro officials feel they have a mandate to improve and expand those services, waste notwithstanding, which means ever-increasing capital and operating costs. Given those constraints, if Metro does not regularly increase fares, a higher and higher share of operating that improved system will fall on those who do not use it.

The post Metro Plans Unfair Fares? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Read the full testimony:

The post Proposed Metro Fare Increase: Discussing The Options appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The TDD is intended to raise $471.9 million to complete the nascent streetcar system throughout the inner city. Our position is that these systems are less efficient at moving people than buses and that the promises of economic development from streetcars are without empirical basis. To their credit, most streetcar supporters spend their time arguing that the streetcars bring economic development and do not try to claim that streetcars are more efficient people movers.

Nevertheless, many proponents have the idea that it is cheaper in the long run to build a streetcar system than to expand bus service. This post addresses these arguments and asks how many buses the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA) could buy and operate if it were given the resources of the $500 million streetcar plan.

Using data from the National Transit Database, KCATA, and actual performance of streetcars in Portland, I estimated yearly operating costs and revenue streams for the streetcar and an expanded bus system. While any such calculations on an unfinished system require some estimation, my calculations are streetcar-friendly by assuming high ridership, elevated farebox recovery, and controlled capital and operating costs.

The findings were that KCATA could buy and operate 105 additional buses for the same cost of building and operating 7.6 miles of streetcar lines.  To satisfy objectors who might claim huge life cycles for streetcars, I also made a calculation assuming the streetcars were not replaced and that only buses were replaced. This reduction in streetcar costs meant KCATA would only be able to buy and operate 100 buses.

To put that in perspective, KCATA currently only operates 257 buses for 61 bus routes that serve the entire Kansas City region. Adding 105 buses would significantly improve regional services and would utterly transform bus service if they were bound to the TDD meant to serve the streetcars. The chart below shows what type of bus service 7.6 miles of streetcar lines buys:

The case is clear. Whatever one believes about the economic development promises of streetcars, in terms of providing mobility, buses are far more cost-efficient than streetcars.

The post Kansas City Streetcar Expansion Could Buy More Than 100 Buses appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

First, we learned that Kansas City Southern Railroad pulled its support from Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders’ commuter rail project. The Kansas City Star editorial board lamented this development, but it is noteworthy that a very successful railroad has looked at the proposal and found it lacking. At issue was how the commuter lines would come into Union Station; the railroad apparently wanted to use a track that is not suitable for such use.

But at least that line was to use Union Station. Plans for the streetcars indicate that they will run down the middle of Main Street just to the east of Union Station, and deposit riders into the middle of an intersection.

Meanwhile, on Monday, we learned that an actual streetcar system in Kansas City, the KC Strip, is closing operations because of lack of support from some larger and taxpayer-funded businesses.

So to recap, Kansas City’s never-ending train campaign continues to underwhelm. We wrote recently about how rail fails to take cars off the road and how it loots bus funds. Now it continues despite the experiences of people who run trains and trolleys for a living. If private companies do not support or cannot succeed with rail transit in Kansas City, why would anyone think a government bureaucracy would?

It is time for the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA) and other agencies in Kansas City to give up on these train and trolley fantasies and focus on what they have done well for years, running a bus system that best serves the people who actually need and use transit in Kansas City.

The post Trolleys, Trains, And Travails appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This is what has happened in Saint Louis and what would happen in Kansas City. Ridership from valuable and successful bus transit is depleted in favor of a much more expensive and much less flexible rail transit. In 1999, Tom Irwin, who was executive director of Saint Louis’ transit authority, the Bi-State Development Agency (now Metro), indicated that increases in rail ridership — in the face of a fare increase — seemed to come directly from bus ridership. From a 1999 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article:

The increase in light-rail riders is canceled out by the drop in bus ridership, meaning the agency’s revenue remains relatively flat, Irwin said. That’s because there are more bus passengers than rail riders, so each percentage point signifies a greater number of riders.

Years later, in 2008, Metro threatened to cut about half of its bus routes in Saint Louis if a sales tax, partially to expand light rail, was not approved. In other words, they would sacrifice efficient bus transit to pay for inefficient rail transit.

Kansas City voters have rejected light rail multiple times, so city officials contrived a special tax district in which only 300 affirmative votes were necessary to embark on a multi-million dollar city outlay. The line they propose will be along existing roads, and likely will not attract the traffic (or the convention business) to fill them. What is certain is that it will never be self-funding, but instead will require taxpayer subsidies in perpetuity.

Supporters of light rail will never be dissuaded from their vision. Economics will not do it, studies such as these will not do it, and in Kansas City, even repeated rejection from voters will not do it.

The post Light Rail Does Not Replace Cars appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Saint Louis area officials have long struggled over how to fund the mass transit system. In the November elections, county voters will choose whether to increase the transit sales tax by one-half cent in order to fund Metro. If this measure passes, it will also trigger a one-fourth-cent transit sales tax in Saint Louis city. During the weeks preceding the November elections, voters will hear the arguments both for and against the tax increase. Both sides have merit.

The new tax increase, if it is approved by voters, is expected to generate approximately $87 million in additional funding for Metro, the majority of which would come from Saint Louis County’s higher tax rate and larger base. Saint Louis city’s one-fourth-cent increase would generate approximately $9 million in additional funding. About half of the additional funds raised, around $40 million, would be used to fund the current bus and light-rail system, while the remaining half would be used to fund future MetroLink expansion. Metro officials have stated that without the tax increase, the agency would be forced either to cut back on services or increase fare prices to ensure a balanced budget.

These officials view the prospect of increased fares as harmful, because they fear ridership would fall accordingly. However, this may actually be a better way to raise revenue. In the past, raising fares was a surefire way to decrease Metro patronage, but that assumption might not hold true today. As gasoline prices hover near $4 per gallon, it is plausible that most current Metro riders would rather absorb an increased fare than turn to even greater expenses at the pump. High fuel prices make it unlikely that anything short of a particularly large fare hike would spur a significant decrease in ridership.

To whatever extent possible, those who actually use Metro should be the ones to pay for its services. Therefore, any discussion of additional funding for Metro should include an estimation of the system’s popularity, and, in turn, its cost to taxpayers. For the fiscal year 2008, Metro officials project that the system will carry more than 60 million passengers. MetroBus ridership accounts for 33.5 million of that figure, while MetroLink will transport almost 26 million. Metro has always operated, however, with significant taxpayer cost. According to the agency’s 2007 figures, taxpayers subsidized Metro at a rate of $2.30 per rider, with MetroBus’s $2.61 subsidy average higher than MetroLink’s $1.39. In all, Metro received close to $124 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies during 2007, and although some of this revenue is paid by transit users in addition to their fares, the vast majority comes from non-riders. Higher fares can be seen as a fairer means of raising revenue than increasing the already-sizable tax burden devoted to underwriting Metro.

Conversely, those who ride the Metro regularly are not the only people who benefit from its services. For example, in 2007, Metro carried almost 2 million riders attending special events, which includes sporting events and conventions downtown. If not for Metro, the roads would have been more congested, with more people vying to park — perhaps driving up parking space prices. The reduction in gas usage that Metro facilitated on these occasions, paired with reduced congestion on our roads, are factors that benefit us all — even those who don’t use public transit.

Some of those opposed to the tax increase, however, simply don’t think the money will be spent wisely. Half of the revenue raised from new tax proceeds will fund MetroLink’s expansion, which is an enormously expensive project. For instance, the recent Cross County Extension added eight new miles of track for an estimated cost of $650 million. MetroBus has a much lower operating cost per mile than MetroLink, which means that bus routes can cover more ground at a cheaper rate than rail, while avoiding MetroLink’s large infrastructure requirements. However, it’s likely that increasing gas prices will gradually shrink the margin of efficiency that MetroBus now enjoys.

Metro funding has always been — and probably always will be — a struggle. Yet there is an important role for the government play in public transit provision. How best to provide crucial transit services is debatable. Are widespread taxes fair, or should costs focus on those who actually ride Metro? Those interested in a wider array of possible solutions should delve into the research about public-private partnerships conducted by the Show-Me Institute and the Reason Foundation. Cities like Denver and Las Vegas have already saved millions by allowing private firms to participate in operating mass transit.

Patrick Eckelkamp was a summer 2008 intern at the Show-Me Institute, a Missouri-based think tank. He is currently studying at Saint Louis University’s campus in Spain, pursuing an economics degree.

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