San Antonio Express-News
Sunday, Apr 23, 2000
Columnist: Rick Casey
Riding the rails not just for hobos ST. LOUIS — The things I do for you readers. Because not all of you can travel to look at other light-rail systems, I do it for you. Purely as a matter of research, I took the MetroLink light-rail train to a St. Louis Cardinals game, which just happens to be the team for which I intended as a child to play left field.
The Redbirds played great, winning 14-1 over San Diego, but I was interested only in how well the train performed. I had arrived by a swift MetroLink ride that deposited me in an underground station less than a block from Busch Stadium.
St. Louis was at one time a city made rich by its location as a crossroads of America, the gateway to the West. The MetroLink runs almost entirely along old, excess rights of way put in place by wealthy (and subsidized) private railway companies. This includes tunnels under downtown. This infrastructure allowed the city to build the first 17-mile leg of its system at the relatively low cost of $21 million a mile.
Because the game was a blowout, many of the 32,000 fans left early. Several hundred of us arrived at the MetroLink station heading west from the downtown stadium. A security guard let nearly 200 of us onto the platform, where a train arrived every 10 minutes.
If you have ever ridden Park & Ride buses to and from an Alamodome event, you know how long it would take to load 200 fans onto a series of buses. Here, everyone had bought tickets through an automated machine that accepts $1, $5 and $10 bills. Rates range from $1.25 for one ticket to $11 for 10. One two-car train easily held all of us in addition to a scattering of riders already on board. With several wide doors per car, we were aboard in less than two minutes. Happy riders, crowded but not packed into the cars, headed out toward the suburbs to the various stations where they had left their cars.
I had been riding the St. Louis rails all day. There was a striking difference between the Cardinals crowd and the daytime riders.
The Cardinals crowd was overwhelmingly white.
The daytime crowd was overwhelmingly integrated.
Every city's light-rail system is different, but in one way, St. Louis' is emblematic of most. It does something few bus systems in America are able to do.
It gets prosperous people to use mass transit.
The MetroLink system extends from the airport northwest of St. Louis, past a large University of Missouri campus, through some bombed-out, inner-ring neighborhoods, to a huge midcity medical complex in a trendy part of town, to downtown and across the river to poverty-stricken East St. Louis.
The ridership comparisons with buses are instructive. Whites make up less than one quarter of bus riders, but 55 percent of light-rail riders. Nearly two-thirds of bus riders make less than $25,000 a year. Less than a tenth make more than $55,000. A quarter of MetroLink riders fall in that first category, and 32 percent make more than $55,000.
The point is that light rail, unlike bus systems, works for both the poor and the affluent.
One-third of the train riders are longtime bus riders. Two- thirds are new regular users of mass transit.
In an age when America has largely replaced racial segregation with economic segregation, anything that brings us together should be celebrated. If mass transit is broad-based, not just something we do for the poor, it will be much more likely to be developed and maintained as a healthy institution. It's no accident that the integrated train system is cleaner and better run than the bus system. Even with a quarter of the riders being poor, there is a middle-class ethic on the trains.
I saw no graffiti. Rules against eating and drinking are observed. A security guard at one of the poorest stations — East St. Louis — said problems are few and limited to the occasional drunk. Customer complaints among bus passengers run about 15 per 100,000 boardings. On the train, the number is about one per 100,000 boardings.
Is it expensive? Yes it is. But once again, the key question is: compared to what? Light rail costs much more to build than buses — if you don't factor in the streets and roads on which the buses ride.
But when it comes to operating costs, light rail shines — where it is well run. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly is how much is the operating subsidy for rail. In St. Louis, fares pay about half the operating expenses. But fares collected from bus riders cover only 23 percent of operating costs.
Cars are subsidized, too, and not just by gasoline taxes. A good chunk of our city budget goes to maintaining streets and roads.
St. Louis and Denver were given to me as examples of well- run systems. Not surprisingly, they make light rail look impressive.
Next visit: Los Angeles, recommended by the anti-light-rail forces as a poster child for their argument.
To leave a message for Rick Casey, call ExpressLine at 554-0500 and punch 4407, or e-mail rcasey@express- news.net.