St. Louis Region About as Swift as Ford Executives

Ford Motor Company has announced a 3rd quarter loss of $5.8 billion dollars. That is billion, with a “B”. Seems they were caught off guard that demand changed and people wanted smaller and more efficient cars. They don’t expect profit from North American sales until 2009.

I think leaders in the St. Louis Region (not just the city) are in the same boat, although here they are still not clued into the changes. Sure, Ford made the small Focus but put their attention behind the SUVs: Explorer, Expedition and now cancelled Excursion. Locally we’ve given a token effort to creating mass transit but it really doesn’t meet the needs of most. The real focus locally has been on highways, the more the better. All over the region we are building highway after highway and pushing sprawl development at the edges and older core areas. We are still “investing” in regional infrastructure that assumes cheap oil and everyone driving a locally assembled Explorer. But guess what, we don’t make that Explorer anymore.

While the new highway projects abound we are looking at rebuilding Highway 40 (aka I-64) for hundreds of millions of dollars and everyone seems to be in agreement we need a new billion dollar bridge across the Mississippi River even though existing bridges such as the Eads are seldom at capacity. The assumption locally is we will continue on the same path — more people and more cars driving ever more miles each passing year. That is exactly what Ford thought: people will simply continue to buy SUVs and bigger and bigger capacity with little regard to fuel efficiency. They raked in the profits for a while, some say as much as $10K per SUV on the larger models.

Just as Ford is losing billions in a single quarter I think the so-called leadership in the St. Louis region is not looking at the overall health of our region. They are on the same path they have been for decades — sprawl and highways. As a region we cannot afford to be caught off guard as Ford (and GM) have been. All this infrastructure we are building must be maintained and the more we have the more those costs will escalate. Many of the original MetroLink stations from 1993 are showing signs of deterioration. Where is the funding to maintain this infrastructure?

We cannot grow our region with more highways and bridges. Sure, we can grow literally in terms of how much land we consume but we will not see appreciable growth in terms of overall population and more importantly, new money, based on all these spread out highways and river bridges that help suburbanites avoid older core areas. We need new money. We need business that attracts customers from outside the region so other cities, states and countries send their money here. Without new money we are simply taking our existing money and spreading it ever thinly. As Ford has found out, the thinner you are and the later you begin to address the issue the harder it is to recover. I fear our region is going blindly in the same direction and a decade from now we may be in a world of hurt. We’ll have lots of new highways and such but we will be calling for mass transit and shorter commutes.

An auto company can close plants, layoff or buyout workers and scramble to get new models to market — often remaking some they’ve been selling in Europe or Asia. In a few years their fortunes could be quite different. What can a region in two states with multiple counties and numerous municipalities do in such a similar crunch? Nothing quickly, that is for sure. Transit projects take at least a decade if not more. A locally funded in-street modern streetcar system could be done in 5 years or so but will we have the local funds if things turn sour?

Meanwhile Ford is losing market share to global leaders such as Toyota and Honda. Toyota may soon surpass Ford in terms of total production. Again, our region cannot afford to fall further behind in market share for people and jobs in the global economy. We are all excited at the moment about the World Series but the reality is people are choosing to live in other regions and that is where the jobs are going. Ford recently hired a new chief executive to help them turn things around but our region doesn’t have a single CEO. Instead, our region’s leadership competes internally to see who can land the next big box store by giving away all the tax revenues the project might generate. Missouri and Illinois are fighting over how to fund the billion dollar bridge that is billed as balancing the region by encouraging more sprawl on the east side.

St. Louis’ Mayor, Francis Slay, and his director of Planning and Urban Design, Rollin Stanley, poke fun at St. Charles County for its “New Urbanist” projects, claiming we have old urbanism in the city. Meanwhile in the city Slay and Stanley seem to be content with replacing our old urbanism with auto centric development better suited for St. Charles County. Until Slay and Stanley get their own house in order I don’t see them having any room to criticize others. The fact suburban areas such as St. Charles County are beginning to embrace urbanism should be a sure sign the tide is shifting. Our region is the Titanic headed toward the iceberg and our elected captains are giving the ship full power and holding a steady course.