Last month, Citizens for Modern Transit released an economic impact study for the Green Line, the proposed 5.6-mile north-south expansion of the MetroLink light rail system. Its headline finding is that building the Green Line will have an overall “economic impact” of $2.9 billion.
As an advocacy group, CMT is obviously using this study to drum up local support for the project. KMOV reported on the study’s findings, accomplishing the goal of creating positive press for the Green Line.
But what does “economic impact” actually mean? If you look into the detailed report published on CMT’s website (something very few of those who have seen the headline have done), you’ll find that the analysis addresses “projected annual economic activity impacts from direct expenditures to design, construct, and operate the Green Line plus multiplier effects.” Essentially, the study assesses the impact of the ~$1 billion that Bi-State Development will pay to the construction contractors, engineering consultants, and other parties that will design and build the Green Line’s track, stations, and vehicles. It applies multipliers to estimate the incremental rounds of spending induced by Bi-State’s initial investment. For example, if Bi-State pays $100m to a contractor and the contractor buys $10m of rails, and the rail manufacturer buys $3m of steel, and the steel mill buys $500k of new equipment, all $113.5m spent would be counted as “economic impact” (for a multiplier of 1.135 on the initial $100m spent).
The Department of Commerce maintains sector-specific multipliers and a standard methodology for applying them to estimate demand impacts. Impact studies are a popular way of quantifying the diffuse benefits of new public infrastructure and services. After all, when the government builds things, people find them useful and valuable, even if they don’t pay a fee to use them. And when the state spends money on things, those dollars don’t disappear into the ether.
But that’s also the problem with this Green Line study: it doesn’t tell us anything useful for decision-making. The study basically says “spending a billion dollars generates a lot of economic activity,” which would be true whether you’re buying a rail line or building a big metal arch. If the government decided to purchase $100 million worth of refrigerators, you’d see a healthy multiplier effect as fridge manufacturers purchased materials, equipment, and labor to meet the new demand. But if those fridges ended up sitting unused in a warehouse, everyone except the appliance manufacturers would agree that spending wasn’t value-maximizing.
This brings me back to the question I was asking in my last post: what is the purpose of building the Green Line? Is it to provide a useful transportation service or to inject a large amount of public money into low-income neighborhoods? The CMT’s study provides support for the latter objective but not the former. Bi-State’s ridership projections give us some insight into the former: they estimate the line will serve 5,000 riders a day, placing it toward the bottom of the list of projects submitted to the FTA’s Capital Investment Grants program. This level of ridership is on par with a busy local bus route—i.e., it could easily be serviced by existing infrastructure.
I don’t think 5,000 riders a day is a reasonable return on a billion dollars in transit investment. I think St. Louisans would be better served by investment in transit services they actually use, like the severely neglected MetroBus system. A billion-dollar program to increase service frequency, reliability, coverage, and comfort through investment in network redesign, bus lanes, transit centers, and vehicles would benefit over 35,000 daily MetroBus riders and help return ridership to pre-pandemic levels. But “make the buses less shitty” isn’t the sort of project that can be neatly packaged into a federal grant application.
Projects like the Green Line exist because municipal leaders don’t think of transit in terms of utility for the average resident. In most American cities, the predominant view among mayors, city councilmembers, and transit agency leaders is that transit is some combination of:
- A welfare program for the 10% who cannot afford or operate a car;
- A catalyst for redevelopment of derelict neighborhoods;
- A vehicle to redistribute resources into low-income areas;
- A symbol of “big city” pedigree; and
- A method to obtain federal funding for otherwise unaffordable roadway and utility reconstruction projects
This is certainly the framing driving political support for projects like the Green Line. We have no reason to believe the line will attract many riders, but providing a useful transportation service was never the primary objective. The only way to make this outcome palatable for the typical taxpaying, voting resident—who would expect a new light rail line to actually be useful—is to advance narratives around “equity,” pontificate about hypothetical redevelopment, and generate superficially appealing headlines about “economic impact”.
Anti-utilitarian motives have resulted in decades of wasteful spending on bad transit projects. The Department of Transportation appears to have become more discerning under Biden and Buttigieg, as it should be. Supporting vanity projects that have no hope of attracting riders squanders scarce transit funding and erodes support for future investment.
The FTA should not award funding to the Green Line given its ridership projections. Saying this makes me a bad St. Louis booster—I don’t want to see St. Louis lose out on federal investment—but the primary goal of transit projects should be to maximize the number of people served. Transit should not be used a means to achieve non-transportation objectives. If we want to support neighborhood redevelopment, we should change how we zone and tax land. If we want to create jobs, we should support economic development agencies. Individual transit projects have a limited impact on these large-scale objectives, and using them to advance these outcomes will accomplish little at an extraordinary price. Besides, a transit system that attracts a lot of riders will contribute more to achieving these secondary objectives than one that doesn’t!
Unfortunately, it’s too late to expect Bi-State and local leaders to go back to the drawing board for the Green Line. The process is too far along and too much time and money has already been invested. (North/south MetroLink expansion has been under consideration since at least 2000.) Political inertia will carry this project to its fate: federal funding or cancellation.
I don’t have insider knowledge of how the FTA feels about this project, but the Green Line actually getting constructed feels like a long shot despite the region’s ongoing commitment to the cause. If Trump wins or Republicans take control of Congress, there will be a transit funding drought (as there was from 2017 to 2020). If Democrats retain control, I don’t see why they’d prioritize a weak project in a politically irrelevant region given the amount of competition for these funds.
Pessimistically, St. Louis may end up wasting the better part of three decades pursuing a poorly-conceived wealth redistribution scheme masquerading as a transit project. Political capital and agency resources that could have gone toward ideas with a more promising ROI were instead squandered on vanity light rail. Don’t get me wrong—it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if the Green Line does get built. A new light rail line is a new light rail line. Either way, I hope that once the Green Line’s story reaches its conclusion, St. Louis starts to take transit more seriously. A good transportation system moves a large number of people safely, quickly, and reliably—it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. And if we get transit right, other good things will naturally follow.