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You’ve been promoted to daytime manager of the Jack in the Box on South Grand. It comes with a pay raise, and you’ll have more responsibilities, but this is a next step toward running a non-franchised restaurant—or your own one day. Your biggest issue is getting to work from your home in Jennings. You ride the bus, and you must make multiple line changes along the way, racking up more than an hour of travel. To make matters worse, as of November 2021, Metro Transit reduced service. Buses that used to come every 20 minutes now come every 30. These are the kinds of issues that thousands of St. Louisans face every day: Fix the car, or pay the rent. Take the bus and lose hours switching lines, but pay utilities on time.
Or maybe you rely on a wheelchair to get around, and you’ve just landed your dream job in baseball heaven: a post at Busch Stadium. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) qualifies you for Metro Call-A-Ride, but the vans don’t come sometimes. As of February 2022, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “about one out of every four van rides requested last month couldn’t be carried out because of a lack of availability.” Every MetroBus is equipped with lifts and ramps, but you’re worried about delays in service.
Or say you’re a senior. Getting to and from the doctor can be a challenge because you can’t drive. Luckily, your care provider is only a block from the bus stop in Brentwood. It takes a few line changes, which is fine when the weather cooperates. But if it’s icy, raining, or hot, you worry, Will the bus come on time? How long will I be waiting? For vulnerable people, there’s a big difference between standing in the snow or extreme heat for 20 minutes versus an hour.
Enter Bus Riders United (BRU), a union fighting for better transit and part of a wider network of transit rider organizing, including Transit Riders of the United States Together (TRUST). BRU gathers data via its three-question Rider Survey, plans the installation of free benches at stops across St. Louis, and advocates for hazard pay for drivers and reliable service for passengers. The organization, which meets on the first Sunday and third Wednesday of every month, aims to help bus riders with day-to-day issues and advocates for better circumstances. “Tired of waiting?” BRU asks. “So are we.”
Playing the Waiting Game
Dip into St. Louis transit discourse, and you’ll find that many local leaders and urban planning experts are talking about the North-South MetroLink expansion.
Five years ago, city voters passed Proposition 1, allowing for a five-cent sales tax, with revenue going toward funding a North-South MetroLink line. That same year, a light rail survey of North City quoted $60 million per mile, $114 per mile in downtown St. Louis, and $80 million per mile in South St. Louis. It’s been a popular cause for at least half a decade, and today, around $50 million in infrastructure investment has accumulated in city coffers.
But Mitch Henry-Eagles, an organizer with BRU, says most action is stalled while a Request for Qualifications study—which kicked off in 2020—is done to survey the North-South corridor. Part of that survey asks whether the city would be better off with Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), a range of strategies to make bus service faster, instead of a new MetroLink line.
Taulby Roach, president/CEO of Bi-State Development, the agency that manages transit in the greater St. Louis area, says the resulting funds are earmarked for a North-South MetroLink expansion. Nick Dunne, a spokesperson for St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, says that Proposition 1 funding “has presented an opportunity to expand access to good-paying jobs and other opportunities throughout our region. Mayor Jones has expressed support for expanding light rail in the region, and our administration is working alongside St. Louis County to ensure we move forward with a plan that can benefit the entire metro area.”
At the same time, the RFQ states that “the City also looks to explore less capital-intensive options for high-capacity transit within the identified Northside-Southside corridor, including emerging propulsion systems, gold standard bus rapid transit, and other up-and-coming hybrid systems that blur the lines between bus and rail service.”
Bus ridership fell during the pandemic, from around 36 million boardings in 2019 to about 21 million boardings in 2020. It’s now climbing back toward pre-pandemic levels, but the system itself is shrinking. St. Louis City and County saw a 10 percent reduction in bus service after last November. Then, citing worker shortages, Metro officials announced another 5 percent cut beginning in March. The previous month, scheduled buses simply never arrived at their pickup sites 2,974 times, or 3.3 percent of total bus trips, according to the Post-Dispatch. The cuts are meant to reduce that number, and Metro has taken steps to address its driver shortage, including a higher starting salary and a $2,000 signing bonus.
According to Harvard’s Equality of Opportunity Project, a long commute is one of the biggest barriers to escaping poverty, and upward mobility is far lower in regions with a lot of sprawl, like St. Louis. Unreliability and scarce line options mean people might have to make the decision between having a car and a job, or having neither.
Urban planner Steven Higashide, however, makes the case for buses in his 2019 book, Better Buses, Better Cities. Buses help reduce the number of cars on the road; cut down on carbon emissions; and provide an option for riders with disabilities, seniors, and those who can’t afford a car. The key: making bus service fast and ubiquitous enough that widely circulating, frequent buses change calculations in the average St. Louisan’s mind: How long is my trip going to take? Is parking available where I’m going? Do I have gas in the car? How long am I going to stay at this place, and can I get to the next destination easily?
But such changes don’t come about on their own. Bus ridership grew in Columbus, Houston, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Seattle because leaders took significant action to improve bus service.
BRT, Explained
So what is Bus Rapid Transit?
Using a range of strategies, BRT makes buses run more efficiently—for instance, syncing up street lights to allow buses to run quickly or designating a private lane for buses.
What could it look like in St. Louis, according to BRU? Henry-Eagles shows a sketch of the city with three lines that form a D with a north-south line along Kingshighway and two lines in north and south St. Louis (one from Natural Bridge to Florissant Avenue, another along Gravois to downtown). For a St. Louis BRT, the costs are estimated at $30 million per route, according to Metro. Henry-Eagles estimates that his D-shaped routes would cost around $200 million, which is one third of the cost of one North-South MetroLink.
Passengers can cover much more distance with better lines, Henry-Eagles notes—you can take the bus to the MetroLink station, board a train, and catch another bus at the next station. (For those who might be worried about subtracting a car lane from Gravois or Natural Bridge, Henry-Eagles points out that it’s actually faster to take the interstate if you’re traveling more than 10 minutes along either artery.)
Another option is to build a North-South MetroLink that goes downtown parallel to the Mississippi. “I like the intention,” Henry-Eagles says, “But it hits a river on one half. You’re not hitting all that you can when you drive through the densest parts of the city,” meaning the north and south sections of the central corridor.
Boston tested a BRT pop-up lane called the Silver Line. “They essentially threw down a bunch of plungers,” Henry-Eagles says, adding that plastic delineator posts and paint are relatively cheap. “It cost almost nothing, and it made the bus a lot faster.” Some Bostonians complained that the bus lane made parking scarce. Surveys found that the people who complained weren’t those who lived in the neighborhood around the bus lane or in the area, though; they were commuters.
Henry-Eagles points to Indianapolis’ “IndyGo” Red Line as another example of BRT implementation. Raised platforms in the center of the street and ticketing machines on both sides allow passengers to board the bus as soon as it pulls up. One of the biggest delays—waiting for riders to pony up fare while getting on—is also eliminated.
For 13 miles of BRT, Indianapolis spent around $96 million, with $75 million in federal transit grants. “Expanding BRT in Indianapolis with the start of Purple Line construction symbolizes the beginning of new opportunity and growth for an entire community,” says IndyGo president/CEO Inez Evans. “Adding nearly 10 miles of new and improved sidewalks, more than 25 miles of street paving, 350 new ADA curb ramps, and much more will transform this disenfranchised community that hasn’t seen infrastructure upgrades on this level in several decades.”
Evans points out that running BRT over light rail is less expensive. “Does light rail work in every place?” she asks. “It is my opinion that it does not because it does not have the ability to serve as many people as it could. Why spend billions on one light rail line when you can spend millions on multiple BRT lines in multiple locations? The only thing that’s missing from our Bus Rapid Transit stations are rail lines. The absence of those tracks in the ground is what gives you flexibility.”
Where St. Louis Stands
So will St. Louis consider BRT? That will be decided, at least in part, by Bi-State Development, the transit agency in charge of all St. Louis Metro projects. An “interstate compact” between Missouri and Illinois that pools resources to achieve a cooperative, better transit system across the metro area, Bi-State has some 2,500 employees, including bus drivers, operators, engineers, and office workers. The agency is run by 10 commissioners (five in Illinois and five in Missouri), appointed by politicians.
Instead of plans to make public transit easier to access, Bi-State is currently considering spending $52 million to install turnstiles—a new barrier between St. Louisans and their transit system.
For now, BRU and riders work through Bi-State’s process of submitting public comments to try to affect change, Henry-Eagles says.
Ridership is also regularly surveyed. “We do it formally and informally,” says Roach. Bi-State also hosts monthly meetings with the board of commissioners that previously required in-person appearances for comment, though the commission now allows comments to be submitted via email. Representing two states in one entity, Bi-State leadership was designed to have conflicting motivations, but because officials aren’t elected, they are largely unaccountable to the public. “One thing I don’t think people appreciate sometimes is that we live in a republic,” Roach says, speaking to the point that our elected officials should be qualified to make decisions about St. Louis’ public transit.
“We have a vibrant system that has survived a pandemic,” Roach says. “My job is to look at comments and figure out a system that is vibrant and serviceable, and then pass budgets.”
In the debate between BRT and light rail, the answer might be both. As Henry-Eagles says, “Anything you do with BRT only makes additional MetroLink lines more powerful.”
