urbanSTL

pattimagee wrote:Sometimes, I imagine a world where they led with this BRT proposal instead of rail... and in that world we're all probably pretty happy with this as an outcome, but also in that world we have probably already started construction on this project... so its still a bit frustrating. But all in all, I think I'm just ready to move forward... while looking back and seeing all of the errors in hindsight... frustrating but ready all the same.

I imagine a world where the Krewson admin moved forward after the 2017 vote and didn't sit on its hands and do nothing.

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Krewson was slow. Second only to Slay. Jones was quicker (not fast) but made the wrong trade-off in an effort to reduce cost by eliminating Downtown from the 2017 route.  I'm not sure why they decided to remove Downtown but I do know that the talented consultants/professionals supporting the City (and Bi-State) explicitly recommended they not. That advice was obviously ignored in 2022.

addxb2 wrote:Krewson was slow. Second only to Slay. Jones was quicker (not fast) but made the wrong trade-off in an effort to reduce cost by eliminating Downtown from the 2017 route.  I'm not sure why they decided to remove Downtown but I do know that the talented consultants/professionals supporting the City (and Bi-State) explicitly recommended they not. That advice was obviously ignored in 2022.

Money and commuting patterns/jobs not being concentrated downtown the way you want to pretend they are. Reality is Clayton+CWE+Midtown all have more jobs and job growth and their Metrolink stations probably generate more rirdership than downtown's stations (like in 2018) and it makes little sense to send someone who wants to get to their job or class in one of those areas the opposite way downtown (duplicating already existing bus service). Splitting the difference with a more centralized line not only gives more service to the west side of downtown and east side of Midtown, both of which are deserts, it also makes these commutes much more competitive.

For example, commuting from Chippewa and Broadway to CWE is scheduled as a 31 minute bus ride on the #8, and to get to Clayton is that 31 min bus ride + let's say another 15 mins on the Metro for wait and ride time, totaling for a scheduled 46 minutes. From that same intersection, you can take both the #11 and #73 downtown in give or take 15 minutes for each. Additionally, the #30 and #10 also cross the planned BRT en route to downtown. It takes the #11 about 8 minutes to get from that intersection to where the infill station was supposed to be, and then we can say 20 minutes to get to Clayton from there. So in theory, with a N-S LRT on Jefferson would have a negligible impact on ride time from our example intersection to downtown while it would cut ride time to Clayton from a scheduled 46 minutes to a scheduled 28 minutes.

Obviously we can assume many of these bus lines will be cut when they re-develop the bus map. It would be insane to keep 4 different buses going downtown from this region when youre dumping $500M into a "rapid" bus, so I assume resources will be saved there. But this does not significantly improve the ride experience going anywhere except downtown, which we all know is not exactly driving the city's job growth and we know thousands of students are not commuting to everyday.

This stuff was all explained back in 2022 or 2023 when they re-aligned the Green Line to save hundreds of millions of dollars while not actually losing too many potential riders the way you think. Obviously the BRT is going to basically just be combining ridership from a bunch of pre-existing lines that all funneled downtown, so it'll have a fake pretend estimated ridership, just like Indianapolis' BRT had.

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I dream of a world where we built N-S Metrolink during the Slay administration. 

This isn't about St. Louis, in particular, but I do think it raises some very good points.

Well…..with 255 or so in the house and 55-56 in the senate…I think transit spending is about to make a come back.  Maybe we shouldn’t have given up on NS metrolink.  

It was very short cited by Spencer and that’s why she’ll likely be a 1 term mayor. Metrolink is St.Louis & no matter what naysayers say it should be expanded in every possible way whatever iteration it may become. That’s what city residents voted for & simply taking it away is shameful. The MAGA era is likely one of the worst era’s of our lifetime nothing has gotten accomplished & it’s a good day to see the country becoming blue again. It’s always good to be patient because anything is possible…


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yes, because being patient instead of actually doing something famously satisfies voters. this is a long-term project and there was no way of knowing the Dems would sweep so completely. and even so, it doesn't guarantee immediate transit funding—there's a LOT of sh*t to fix after a decade of MAGA taking a wrecking ball to the federal government. it also doesn't guarantee the pendulum won't swing back in 4 or 8 years. there's still plenty of room for metrolink expansion if funding becomes available, and this one BRT line doesn't preclude that.

Said it many times that it was super short sighted and acted like transit spending would for eternity never be there. This was already a project 40 years in the making, I don’t get the throwing millions of dollars in the trash on the work they had done for a train line that they had put out to the public as a competitive and viable project. Then poof, well we won’t get federal funding during this 4-year presidency, so let’s throw it away!


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dbInSouthCity wrote:Well…..with 255 or so in the house and 55-56 in the senate…I think transit spending is about to make a come back.  Maybe we shouldn’t have given up on NS metrolink.  

NS has not advanced under multiple variations of Red or Blue controlled Federal Governments, no?

ldai_phs wrote: ↑

3:27 PM - 1 day ago

dbInSouthCity wrote:Well…..with 255 or so in the house and 55-56 in the senate…I think transit spending is about to make a come back.  Maybe we shouldn’t have given up on NS metrolink.  

NS has not advanced under multiple variations of Red or Blue controlled Federal Governments, no?

Correct, and while this has been "decades in the making" the only real design work has happened in just the last 2-3 years. Everything before that was effectively drawing imaginary lines on a map.

Right. The FTA's Capital Improvement Grant (CIG) program has a scoring system that has not changed across administrations (to my knowledge, anyway). By all accounts, the proposed light rail iteration of the Green Line did not score well enough to be competitive. Cost-effectiveness is one of the considerations in scoring and projected Green Line ridership was just not high enough to justify the price tag. Had the project been advanced as it was under Jones (even the scaled-back version with fewer stations), it would have failed to secure a grant and been either cancelled or delayed until we raised the money locally.

As always, the left is right too early. Hopefully they are still able to get something real out of this Democratic majority and not just a fancy bus.

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stldotage wrote: ↑

4:35 PM - 1 day ago

Right. The FTA's Capital Improvement Grant (CIG) program has a scoring system that has not changed across administrations (to my knowledge, anyway). By all accounts, the proposed light rail iteration of the Green Line did not score well enough to be competitive. Cost-effectiveness is one of the considerations in scoring and projected Green Line ridership was just not high enough to justify the price tag. Had the project been advanced as it was under Jones (even the scaled-back version with fewer stations), it would have failed to secure a grant and been either cancelled or delayed until we raised the money locally.

thats not the only way to fund it....Bell, Wellman can put in a pork project in the budget.

Lets hope they do that for the airport first. 

dbInSouthCity wrote:

stldotage wrote: ↑

4:35 PM - 1 day ago

Right. The FTA's Capital Improvement Grant (CIG) program has a scoring system that has not changed across administrations (to my knowledge, anyway). By all accounts, the proposed light rail iteration of the Green Line did not score well enough to be competitive. Cost-effectiveness is one of the considerations in scoring and projected Green Line ridership was just not high enough to justify the price tag. Had the project been advanced as it was under Jones (even the scaled-back version with fewer stations), it would have failed to secure a grant and been either cancelled or delayed until we raised the money locally.

thats not the only way to fund it....Bell, Wellman can put in a pork project in the budget.

Stop. Here we only think in the absolutely most narrow possible ways and do not expand our imagination whatsoever.

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StlAlex wrote:

dbInSouthCity wrote:

stldotage wrote: ↑

4:35 PM - 1 day ago

Right. The FTA's Capital Improvement Grant (CIG) program has a scoring system that has not changed across administrations (to my knowledge, anyway). By all accounts, the proposed light rail iteration of the Green Line did not score well enough to be competitive. Cost-effectiveness is one of the considerations in scoring and projected Green Line ridership was just not high enough to justify the price tag. Had the project been advanced as it was under Jones (even the scaled-back version with fewer stations), it would have failed to secure a grant and been either cancelled or delayed until we raised the money locally.

thats not the only way to fund it....Bell, Wellman can put in a pork project in the budget.

Stop. Here we only think in the absolutely most narrow possible ways and do not expand our imagination whatsoever.

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The largest congressional directed spending project was $200 million this year, for an energy/transportation project, at the congressional member behind it was the head of the committee.

The cross county metrolink didn't get any federal funding and Metro went broke trying to fund it with local $$. 

PeterXCV wrote: ↑

6:19 PM - 1 day ago

The cross county metrolink didn't get any federal funding and Metro went broke trying to fund it with local $$. 

This alone permanently altered STL's relationship with investing in transit. I don't know if we'll ever see St. Louis County come back to the table on big money for non-auto transportation. 

addxb2 wrote:

PeterXCV wrote: ↑

6:19 PM - 1 day ago

The cross county metrolink didn't get any federal funding and Metro went broke trying to fund it with local $$. 

This alone permanently altered STL's relationship with investing in transit. I don't know if we'll ever see St. Louis County come back to the table on big money for non-auto transportation. 

St. Louis County would have overwhelmingly approved a sales tax increase for transit funding yesterday had it been on the ballot. This stuff isn't as hard as you like to pretend it is.

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dbInSouthCity wrote: ↑

5:22 PM - 1 day ago

stldotage wrote: ↑

4:35 PM - 1 day ago

Right. The FTA's Capital Improvement Grant (CIG) program has a scoring system that has not changed across administrations (to my knowledge, anyway). By all accounts, the proposed light rail iteration of the Green Line did not score well enough to be competitive. Cost-effectiveness is one of the considerations in scoring and projected Green Line ridership was just not high enough to justify the price tag. Had the project been advanced as it was under Jones (even the scaled-back version with fewer stations), it would have failed to secure a grant and been either cancelled or delayed until we raised the money locally.

thats not the only way to fund it....Bell, Wellman can put in a pork project in the budget.

Per Google:

Large, multi-billion dollar transit expansions—such as heavy rail subways or light-rail line extensions—usually cannot be funded solely through a single Congressman's earmark due to strict legislative caps on how much funding an individual member can request (typically capped at 15 requests per member, or a $20 million threshold depending on the committee rules). Instead, for multi-billion dollar expansions, lawmakers must lobby the Executive Branch to approve competitive federal grants, such as the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) Capital Investment Grants.

I think if they brought back the MetroLink itself, the route needs to be on Florrisant rather than Jefferson. Revert it back to the 2017 plan route. Hit up downtown to drive up the score. And while I don’t see the Democrat majorities being permanent (because this country loves to give itself whiplash), I think the talks need to reopen now for MetroLink and perhaps maybe two BRTs that can be built elsewhere in the City. Because if you’re going to benefit from the current environment, you might as well go bigger than initially intended.

Chris Stritzel wrote:I think if they brought back the MetroLink itself, the route needs to be on Florrisant rather than Jefferson. Revert it back to the 2017 plan route. Hit up downtown to drive up the score. And while I don’t see the Democrat majorities being permanent (because this country loves to give itself whiplash), I think the talks need to reopen now for MetroLink and perhaps maybe two BRTs that can be built elsewhere in the City. Because if you’re going to benefit from the current environment, you might as well go bigger than initially intended.

So basically what I said to do over a year ago.

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