I Couldn’t Have Said It Better

Last week, I submitted a draft review of plans to expand St. Louis’ light-rail system to the Show Me Institute, Missouri’s state-based think tank. The region has the biggest light-rail system in the Midwest, yet it is a complete failure. Buses and rail together carried fewer riders in 2019 than buses alone carried in 1993, the year before the first light-rail line opened. Doubling light-rail miles in 2001 and another significant expansion in 2008 both resulted in an overall loss of riders. Yet Metro, the region’s transit agency, wants to build more light rail.

“Our low income St. Louisans are right now being failed by our bus system.” @sarahfenske says the bus system needs to be improved before Metrolink is expanded. #DonnybrookSTL pic.twitter.com/J9YXYKLfZS

— DonnybrookSTL (@DonnybrookStl) March 31, 2023

My draft report was more than 13,000 words long including an 800-word executive summary. While writing it, I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that local media failed to report any significant opposition to Metro’s billion-dollar plan to add 17 miles of new light-rail lines. So I was pleased to watch the above video, in which local reporter Sarah Fenske charged that it was “crazy” to build light rail when the local bus system was “failing” low-income riders and not getting people to their workplaces. To my chagrin, Fenske pretty much summarized in 35 seconds what my long-winded report said in 13,400 words.

Metro is the epitome of America’s transit systems today, which have forgotten their mission to improve urban mobility as they focus instead on new construction. Without looking at ridership, Metro’s light-rail system is the best in the nation, as it is all grade-separated from other traffic which makes its trains faster than any other light rail in America and safer as well. Yet speed and safety haven’t attracted riders, mainly because downtown-oriented trains don’t go where people want to go.

That’s even more true since the pandemic, as downtown St. Louis’ recovery is ranked 51st among the nation’s 52 largest downtowns, with only San Francisco recovering less. There are edge cities around St. Louis that have more jobs than downtown St. Louis had before the pandemic, yet they aren’t served by light rail and some aren’t served by Metro at all.

Instead of fixing these problems, Metro wants to spend more than a billion dollars building two more light-rail lines radiating away from downtown. It’s justification for doing so is, basically, that the feds are giving out free money for rail construction, so St. Louis should take it.

A look at Metro’s route map reveals that a lot of its buses follow the same routes as the city’s streetcars in 1896. Yet the city’s rapidly declining population today is little more than half what it was in 1896, as most people and jobs have moved to the suburbs. Metro’s service to the suburbs is rather sparse, and it doesn’t serve St. Charles County, whose urbanized portions contribute 300,000 residents and more than 130,000 jobs to the St. Louis urban area, at all.

Metro clearly lacks the imagination to fix these problems. Instead, it wants to continue with policies that are already known to be failures. This isn’t just St. Louis’ problem. It’s the problem with the nation’s transit industry as a whole.