Prop M & Gas At Two Bucks a Gallon
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This past summer we had gas at $4 dollars per gallon. Today, one day after the election, gas was $2 per gallon. The current world economy has reduced demand so th price has fallen from the Summer high.
Had gas still be around $4 a gallon, Tuesday’s vote in St Louis County on Proposition M might have been a yes — approving a 1/2 cent sales tax increase that would have triggered a 1/4 cent tax in St Louis City that was approved over a decade ago. The final tally was 261,317 against the tax and 245,123 in the affirmative (52/49).
To many our transit system is a way to get to a sporting event and nothing more. But for many daily riders it is how they get to & from their jobs. Gas could be fifty cents a gallon and it wouldn’t matter if the vehicle, maintenance and insurance are too costly. These persons, the ones who use our transit system (light rail & bus), will be the most impacted by the failure of Prop M to pass. But the entire region will be impacted — some employers will find out their employees can’t get to work. Without a workforce, these employers will suffer.
Service will now be cut back to meet the budget. It will be drastic. Our huge and recent investments in new infrastructure will go underutilized. Fewer people will be attracted to the system as it will be a crippled system.
The regionalist in me says we need to cast a wider net — looking to our 16-county region on both sides of the river to find a permanent funding solution. But the urbanist in me says, “F____ the County.” Focus on serving the compact city with a few runs into the older compact inner ring suburbs. Period. Let’s starve the far suburbs of our cheap labor force. Let’s pay someone to be a street vendor downtown rather than have them going to work at Chesterfield Mall.
The newly elected Obama administration will be transit friendly. We need to make serious progress over the next 4-8 years to improve our transit system. Screw a regional system – St Charles County & St Louis County doesn’t want it fine. We need to be building as many miles of on-road streetcars as we possible can. No more of this light rail in special rights-of-way, simple streetcars with significantly simpler (read less costly) infrastructure. The system needs to be about connect people & places a few miles away rather than trying to get transit to every corner of our sprawling region. Streetcars combined with high density urban zoning along the route will create new investment. Now is the time to re-urbanize our major corridors with street-level transit. Work out a deal with communities like Maplewood that abut the city. We don’t need the entire county, just the municipalities that are our neighbors.
Our city grew & prospered with streetcars. It can be done again. We in the city approved a tax in 1997 for transit that has never been collected because the county never agreed to go in with us. Screw that. If we are going to build a regional system of over-engineered light rail then we do need them. In the meantime we need to build a transit system in the part of the region that was built around transit in the first place.
We have decent density. We have the too wide rights-of-way. We have the population that is more willing to use and thus fund such a system. It is time we start acting like the independent city that we are. Add a toll both along I-64 at Skinker — charge people to enter the city to work, go to games or the zoo. I don’t need to leave the city — everything I need is here. They need us too but they act like they don’t. Let them have their environment dominated by cars, that is too spread out to efficiently move people by other means like by bus or rail. If we stopped driving out to the burbs to shop they’d notice.
Perhaps voters in 1876 were right in removing the city from the county?
