St. Louis has more miles of light rail than any other Midwestern urban area, yet fewer people rode St. Louis transit in 2019 than in 1991, before the region opened its first mile of light rail. According to a new report from the Show-Me Institute, this is because Metro, the region’s transit agency, has planned its transit system for the 1910s, not the 2020s.
Click image to download a 4.3-MB PDF of this report.
That means that Metro has built a system that assumes that most people work downtown, live in dense residential neighborhoods close to light-rail stops, and don’t have access to automobiles. None of those conditions have been true for at least 50 years, and Metro’s system is especially unsuited to the post-pandemic world.
Metro doesn’t even serve downtown all that well. Before the pandemic, only about 10 percent of downtown St. Louis workers commuted by transit. But this was much better than in the rest of the region, where less than 3 percent of workers commuted by transit.
Now Metro wants to make the system even worse by building a new, street-running north-south light-rail line. The existing east-west light-rail lines all operate in their own exclusive rights of way, which has the virtue of making them somewhat safer and faster than most other light-rail systems in the country (but still not fast enough to attract more new riders than the system’s loss of bus riders). The proposed street-running light rail would be no faster than buses and would be prone to accidents that will kill and injure far more people.
Red stars are primary transit centers; blue stars are secondary centers. Red lines are non-stop bus lines between primary centers; blue lines are non-stop bus lines to secondary centers; purple lines are bus-rapid transit; orange lines are local bus routes; green lines are existing north-south local bus routes in the city of St. Louis that should be retained to serve residents of dense inner-city neighborhoods. Lines represent origins and approximate destinations but not exact routes. Click image for a larger view of this map.
As an alternative, the Show-Me Institute report, which I wrote, proposes a network of non-stop buses to major economic centers in the St. Louis region. This is an improved version of the polycentric proposal I made for Portland, which was published two weeks ago by the Cascade Policy Institute. The Portland plan designated nine transit centers, each of which would have non-stop buses to every other transit center plus local buses radiating away from each of the hubs.
The St. Louis polycentric proposal designates seven primary transit centers, each of which has non-stop buses to every other primary center, plus six secondary centers, each of which has non-stop buses to two, three, or four other centers. This allows for coverage of more economic centers without spending the money required to have non-stop buses between all of the centers.
Buses could operate to multiple centers. For example, a bus could leave the Belleville secondary transit center, stop at the East St. Louis transit center, then continue to the airport transit center, allowing Belleville residents to reach the airport with only one stop at an average speed of 45 mph. Another bus could start from Collinsville, go non-stop to downtown St. Louis, then non-stop to Westport Plaza, then operate as a bus-rapid transit line to Chesterfield.
This system would allow for lots of fast, one-seat rides across the urban area. Even where two-seat rides would be needed, high bus frequencies would mean that the average wait time for connections would only be about five minutes.
The St. Louis proposal also includes several bus-rapid transit lines. I’ve become disillusioned with bus-rapid transit lately as it tends to be no faster than light rail, which is only a little faster than local buses. But in some of the low-density suburban fringes of the St. Louis area, it makes more sense than either local or non-stop buses. My plan shows seven BRT lines.
This plan would cost far less than building a north-south light-rail line. Moreover, I estimate that operating as many as five buses an hour during peak hours on most of the bus routes in the system would require no more vehicle-hours of bus travel than the current system. To the extent that vehicle-hours (and not vehicle-miles) are proportional to costs, the proposal’s operating costs would be no more than today’s bus system.
In 2019, St. Louis buses traveled at an average of 13 miles per hour and carried an average of less than 7 riders (i.e., 6.9 passenger-miles per vehicle-revenue-mile), which declined to 4 in 2021. The non-stop buses at the heart of the proposed system would spend most of their time on freeways, greatly increasing average speeds and making it likely that they would attract far more than an average of 7 passengers.
Recognizing Metro’s backwardness, one major part of the St. Louis region has never been a part of the transit system. St. Charles County has more than 130,000 jobs and 300,000 residents yet its voters wisely refused to join Metro because they could see it was a waste of tax dollars. While I would hesitate to ever recommend that they do so, if Metro adopts a plan like this proposal and demonstrates that it can carry riders far more efficiently than it does today, St. Charles County might agree to join.
On a personal note, this is the seventh major report of mine that has been published this year. I have one more that is currently being edited and I plan to write another if the state of Oregon ever gives me the data I need to write it. Even if the Oregon report isn’t completed this year, this will be more reports than I’ve written in any year since the 1980s, when I was cranking out more than one report a month plus publishing and writing for a monthly magazine.
Is there a list of these seven major reports anywhere? I enjoyed reading the Portland and St. Louis reports, but I can’t find the other five on this site.
In 1914, the owner of a Ford Model T Touring Car in Los Angeles realized he could make a little extra money by getting a chauffer’s license and charging people a nickel for a ride. Within a year, more than 60,000 people in cities all over the country were emulating his example. Jitneys, as they were called (apparently a slang term for a nickel), were faster than streetcars, and since drivers were often willing to depart from fixed routes, they were more convenient as well. Immigrants and poor blacks made excellent use of them or became drivers of such jitneys themselves. The streetcar industry felt threatened by jitney competition. While the streetcars were private, they paid franchise fees to the cities and jitney drivers did not. So streetcar companies asked government for regulatory protection against the jitneys, cities gladly complied. The regulations killed the jitney industry, reducing the number of jitneys nationwide by 90 percent by the end of 1916. But eliminating Jitneys did not save streetcars, whose ridership peaked in 1919, and collapsed by 1929.
Jitneys remained in service in San Francisco well into the mid 1970s…..when BART was conceived in the late 60s fear of jitneys.. was a modest forethought. But jitneys saw their first restrictions…. by late 70s had largely been phased out. Their return in 2010s by Fords. Chariot services….. agency was once again regulated to death.
Government cronyism 101: if it competes against us it must go.
Polycentric models CAN provide MASS transit.
1: Analyze highest density job centers in a given region
2: Advertise to those areas, via social media/radio, etc.
Apply accordingly.
I would add that jitneys were likely popular among immigrants and black people since they werent segregated into low quality and cramped vehicles and couldnt afford their own vehicles because they were unable to secure loans due to redlining. Streetcars were still killed by competition from private not public vehicles as more and more people owned automobiles, most of whom did so on credit which contributed towards the stock market crash and subsequent great depression. This plus the fact that these streetcar companies were private meant that they couldnt hold resilience against this sudden unsustainable economic shift, even if they were the better option in the long run. tl;dr: I think jitneys were doomed anyways and only really existed due to redlining and segregation and streetcars died because of reckless and unsustainable growth of automobiles