Give Transportation a “Fair” Chance
Date Posted: July 16, 2014
Posted In: Ideas, News,
by Tom Finan, Executive Director, Construction Forum St. Louis
If our industry can get its act together half as well as the City of St. Louis, the State of Missouri and hundreds of officials and volunteers did for Fair St. Louis, the future of transportation in our state just might have a prayer of a chance.
The morning of July 4th I sent out a Tweet on my @TFConstructForSTL handle, and sent an email to some of my closest friends with the following message: “Fair St. Louis across street. Watching fireworks from my balcony with daughter, grandkids, dog… Priceless!”
As previously stated in this space, I live at the Hampton and I64/40 entrance to Forest Park. The evening of the Fourth we had friends in from Chesterfield. They couldn’t believe how easy the drive in had been. Earlier in the day I had taken the kids to the Fair. With a record crowd of 250,000 attending, the event was easy in, easy out, relaxed, and well-organized. Entering the park I couldn’t help but notice the carefully-placed MODOT vehicles, the Highway Patrol and St. Louis Police cooperating, everything structured and organized.
Our industry needs to muster that same kind of coordinated, unified approach to garnering support and getting the vote out to pass the transportation Amendment 7 on Aug. 5.
Let’s face it: this is Missouri, where snowballs in July are more plentiful than voters who want to increase taxes. But if we want our area to prosper, we’re going to have to pay for better transportation.
Vehicles are far more fuel efficient than they were in the ‘90s, so there is less fuel being used, and people are driving less for a variety of factors, including the incursion of the Internet into our shopping and work lives. And the fuel tax doesn’t even touch alternate modes of transportation – mass transit, bicycles, and pedestrian access.
Other states struggle with this issue. A year ago Virginia reduced its fuel tax and increased sales taxes and various fees to fund transportation. The net result was 12.7 percent more revenue for the state’s transportation fund. The move was, and still is, subject to a lot of criticism.
Transportation is central to the ability of our St. Louis region and the state to attract jobs and population. Want Millennials? Want biotech, information technology, and distribution – all those markets that are on the rise? Then you must have a solid transportation system.
What passes for fiscal prudence in some political circles boggles my mind. Governor Nixon’s freezing of funding for a Metrolink stop in the Cortex area (along with funding for a business incubator for LaunchCode, the paired programming initiative that has won national attention is a recent case in point.
This is the same governor who sent transportation proponents scrambling to prioritize projects and get the word out when he forced the issue onto the ballot in the August election instead of November. Nonetheless, working at breakneck speed, MODOT submitted its list, which was approved by the state transportation commission. A total of 800 projects were approved for funding under the .75 cent sales tax increase that will generate $4.8 billion in funding over its 10-year life.
Accessible transportation is part of the minimum ante to become a player in the international technology game. And a lot of the folks who would train at LaunchCode require public transit to get to their jobs. Currently less than three percent of the population in the Metro area uses mass transport. A big part of that is that it’s just not accessible.
In June, the East West Gateway Council of Governments published an update to the transportation portion of its “Where We Stand” report, in preparation for next year’s update of the region’s 30-year long range transportation plan. It compares our region to 34 other peer areas, focusing on criteria that have been identified as important to area residents such as preserving the existing system, supporting public transportation, supporting neighborhoods and communities throughout the region, fostering a vibrant downtown, and promoting more transportation choices. The bottom line is that we are not the best out of our peer group and we are not the worst. I would say we’re mostly somewhere near the middle of the pack. It is also apparent form the report that our transportation agencies have done a good job of stewardship with the money allocated to them.
About a year ago, I listened to one of our legislators tell of how he had killed a St. Louis project because he felt that MODOT was poorly managed, This was the same MODOT whose management of the I64/40 project won national recognition.
Recently, the website Better Roads published an article titled, “Ten States in Dire Need of Highway Trust Fund“. The article stated: “Missouri has been proactive in its spending due to the potential funding halt. The state was one of the first to vote against adding any new projects into 2014 to its five-year plan. In a normal year, it would have added anywhere from 300 to 500 projects.”
We need to maintain our existing transportation network. We need to develop new transportation capabilities – whether that’s mass transit, bicycle and pedestrian systems, or improving our already robust intermodal freight capabilities. Admittedly, all of this comes with a price tag.
But if we as an area can rally around the City/Arch/River project or seamlessly pull off relocating Fair St. Louis, we must be able to focus on something as fundamental as transportation.