Do not call what you are about to read finger-pointing. There’s enough of that going around. This is plain talk.
Light rail has worked in every city across the U.S. It connects marginalized communities to economic growth, increases regional productivity, de-concentrates poverty, promotes healthy living, creates vibrant and accessible public spaces, and catalyzes development in struggling neighborhoods.
St. Louis is dense enough to support more light rail than it has. Denver, which is less densely populated than St. Louis, just invested $7.6 billion in new light rail.
It is true, however, that density is one determinant of ridership, which is the critical metric by which potential routes are evaluated. Les Sterman, who led East-West Gateway for 26 years, was recently quoted in this newspaper explaining that the three routes proposed for study by St. Louis County won’t have enough ridership to attract federal funding. He proceeded to make an important point: that the “insistence on studying them ‘seems more like a political gesture than any serious attempt to expand MetroLink.’”
Sterman raises a fundamental question that has stalled light rail: Is St. Louis County serious about expanding mass transit?
If it is serious, then we should be exploring regional funding strategies. If it is serious, then we should be engaged in a joint planning effort of the full Northside-Southside alignment, which includes 10 miles in the county, instead of studying those three routes that would only be reasonable after Northside-Southside was operating.
Regardless of the county’s current sensibilities, city families without access to cars, cut off from jobs and grocery stores, can’t wait. They are stranded. But they don’t have to be.
A $2.2 billion Northside-Southside light rail extension does sound daunting, but that’s for the full 28-mile alignment, 10 miles of which are in the county. The cost of the city’s portion is closer to $1.4 billion, and building it would use 50 percent federal funding, bringing the city’s cost to only half that. More importantly, the line can be built in phases. The Conceptual Design study, which my office is using parking revenue to fund, will tell us what that the first phase – the “Minimum Operating Segment” (MOS) – could look like.
While the ultimate end points of the MOS will be driven by engineering and planning realities, a potential MOS costing between $500 and $750 million could run from Cherokee Street or Broadway in the south to Florissant or Fairground Park in north. With 50 percent federal funding, the city’s match for the MOS falls to between $250 and $375 million – and $250 million looks a lot different than $2.2 billion.
This money could be raised in a variety of ways: a 30 cent GO bond; a 3/8 cent sales tax, potentially imposed through a citywide Transit Development District (TDD); raising the parking tax to 20 percent, the rate already in place in many of our peer cities; or by even more creative options, including Right of Way donations, special assessment districts, tax increment financing, and public-private partnerships.
Of course, most of these ideas would be (and should be) put to the voters. I am not worried about that. The people who live here in the city want this. They support this. And, they will come out to vote for it.
Tishaura O. Jones is the treasurer for the City of St. Louis.
