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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first thing to note about Saint Louis’s transportation system is that it is highly dependent on the highway and street system. In Saint Louis City, Saint Louis County, and Saint Charles County, about 89 percent of commuters either drove or carpooled in 2014. Only 3.4 percent used public transportation. More than half of those who did used buses, which also depend on streets and highways. In terms of the flow of goods, almost 70 percent of freight traffic moves by truck (and hence by road) in the Saint Louis area.

Regional transportation investments for the near future do not reflect these realities. Of the $1.2 billion in federally aided transportation projects slated to move forward in Saint Louis City, Saint Louis County, and Saint Charles County (including multi-state and multicounty projects, the vast majority of which tend to benefit Saint Louis City and County) from 2016 to 2019, 47 percent will be spent on public transportation improvements (see the graph above).

Breaking down the numbers further, investments by Metro (the regional transit agency) will outstrip road & bridge projects made by the Missouri Department of Transportation (which maintains state highways) by more than 30 percent:

Metro will spend about $230 million (45 percent of investments) on the MetroLink, the region’s light rail. This does not include large-scale MetroLink extension plans (aside from a new $13 million station near Grand Ave.), but instead is mostly intended for maintenance and rehabilitation. In all, somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of federally aided transportation investments benefiting Saint Louis City, Saint Louis County, and Saint Charles County will be spent maintaining light rail.

Perhaps increased spending on public transportation will cause residents to get out of their cars and onto the bus or rail. However, anything more than a modest increase in public transportation’s total travel share is unlikely, given the experiences of other cities. That being the case, systematically favoring transportation systems that few residents and no freight companies use over the one that quite literally moves the metropolitan area is asking for trouble.

The post Saint Louis Transportation Planning Prioritizes Public Transportation, MetroLink 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.

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.

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.

The post Make Metro Sustainable, not House Poor 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.

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.

The post North-South MetroLink Line Wasteful, Unnecessary 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 St. Louis Streetcar project, which did not receive a TIGER grant, has garnered less attention. The plan would have built a 6.9-mile streetcar system from downtown Saint Louis to the Central West End, at a cost of $270 million (likely a low estimate).

You may not have heard much about this project, because Metro never mentions adding streetcars in its Long-Range Transit Plan. Their long-term improvements are focused on expanding MetroLink or adding bus rapid transit, but not adding a streetcar network. Nor was the project part of East-West Gateway’s (the Saint Louis metropolitan planning agency) Regional Transportation Plan when it was released in 2011 (it was added in 2013). City leadership did not discuss the plan until it was suddenly to receive tens of millions of dollars from the ill-fated Amendment 7.

The downtown streetcar is primarily the creation of Partnership for Downtown St. Louis, an organization whose membership is mostly made up of corporate representatives and whose budget comes from property taxes collected from a Community Improvement District (CID) located downtown. They created the plan and lobbied the city to submit the TIGER grant application. Although the process used to create the streetcar plan did not come from city residents, the methods of payment would have. The proposed methods of payment included a Transportation Development District (with accompanying sales and property taxes), Tax Increment Financing, tax credits, and parking fees.

Those new taxes and fees would have been a hard sell for a transportation mode that shadows the MetroLink and does not provide rapid transit. However, Saint Louis residents should be upset that non-elected corporate representatives were promising residents’ local tax dollars in order to get a piece of residents’ federal tax dollars. This episode also should be a warning that local non-governmental organizations have the ability to push forward wasteful civic projects with taxpayer money.

The post Light Rail Never Sleeps: The Saint Louis Edition 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.

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Take the example of the Saint Louis area. The City of Saint Louis is set to get $25 million for a streetcar that goes from downtown to the Central West End. That might not be such a bad deal, if it were not contingent on Saint Louis coming up with an additional $271.5 million to complete the plan. The sales tax will also provide $40 million to the city for bus rapid transit, but only if Metro can come up with an additional $40 million. In return for $20 million for an I-64/22nd St. Parkway interchange (mostly to the benefit of the Northside Redevelopment Project), the city and developers have to provide an additional $8.9 million. All told, in return for $270 million in state sales tax money, the City of Saint Louis has to find an additional $323 million from other funding sources. That’s $1,016 for every man, woman, and child living in the city.

The story is similar in Kansas City. The city will get $144 million for the streetcar, contingent on it finding the rest of the half billion needed to make the project happen. While Kansas Citians have long been aware of, and been familiar with plans to fund, the streetcar, this is not so for other projects. Kansas City will receive $24 million for a bike path from Pleasant Hill to Kansas City, if it can find $48 million locally. For those counting, that’s a $72 million bike path. Altogether, projects that the sales tax would fund require $459 million in additional funding from the Kansas City area.

The result of these policies is that after taxes have gone up statewide, purportedly to save our “crumbling” highways, local governments may have to increase taxes even further to secure funding for projects on MoDOT’s list. Amendment 7 is the tax that keeps on taxing.

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As you can see the value of the gas tax has been eroded by inflation while Metro fares have out-paced it. Of course this isn’t the whole picture. Property and local sales taxes and the Federal gas tax (hasn’t increased since 1993) and general revenues also fund streets, roads, and highways, and local sales taxes, Federal, and a minute amount of state money goes into Metro. But this puts into perspective just who is paying their “fare” share.

My position on the gas tax is pretty clear. I have written testimony arguing that Missouri should raise its gas tax, not general taxes, to pay for highways in Missouri. But the fact remains, indirect taxes on drivers mostly pay for roads while only a tiny sliver of the cost of transit in Saint Louis comes from fares.

First for the roads. In 2013, the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT), which maintains federal and state highways in Missouri, took in $2.1 billion in revenue. Only 23 percent of that came from the state gas tax. But that’s not the end of the story. Forty-four percent of MoDOT funding came from the federal government, the vast majority of which the federal gas tax funds. MoDOT gets an additional 27 percent of funds from vehicle sales taxes and various forms of licensing fees. All told, approximately 80 percent of MoDOT’s revenue comes from taxes and fees on drivers. That’s too low, but adjusting the state and federal gas tax for inflation and controlling road spending would go a long way to making that number close to 100 percent. In addition, one should remember that the Missouri gas tax is split, with 4.5 cents of the 17.6 cents going to local governments, where it is a significant source for local road repairs.

The story is very different for transit. Taking the example of St. Louis Metro, from 1991 to 2012, fares covered only 14 percent of the costs of building and maintaining Metro. Just looking at 2012, fares covered only 16 percent of the system’s total costs. And while fare revenue has increased faster than inflation, the costs of operating Metro have increased even faster, as the chart below shows:

Essentially, fare revenue has covered less and less of Metro’s cost over time. The rest of the funding comes primarily from general local taxes and the federal government (much of which comes from the part of the federal gas tax that is designated to mass transit funding).

Has the government been irresponsible with the gas tax? Many would say yes. But that does not mean that people who use transit are paying more for transit than drivers pay for highways, because they are not.

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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.

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