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. Continue reading
