Earlier this week, the City of St. Louis and the Bi-State Development Agency, better known as Metro, officially cancelled the planning and application process for the MetroLink Extension Green Line, formerly known as the the North–South route.
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.
