Roads Tussle With Other Transportation Modes for Bucks

Missouri’s Great Transportation Debate entered Round Two recently with Missouri Transportation Alliance spokesman Jewel Patek saying that the challenges of arriving at a consensus plan for transportation were greater in urban areas. As if to illustrate that point, the two district chairpeople of the Missouri Transportation Alliance found their call for better roads fall a little flat when they brought it to St. Louis in March. A cross section of citizens representing everyone from service workers to CEOs responded that transportation means more than roads and a transportation plan is more than a list of projects.

The Missouri Transportation Alliance was founded last autumn to develop and recommend a statewide transportation program for the next decade to enhance road safety, replace failing bridges, grow the economy, and create “quality” jobs. It was founded because the road construction made possible by voter approval of Amendment 3 in 2004 is coming to an end and new funding must be found to continue the same level of highway work. Construction groups, such as the Associated General Contractors, SITE Improvement Association, the Eastern Missouri Laborers’ District Council, and the St. Louis Building & Construction Trades Council are among the group’s core “stakeholders.”

The Missouri Transportation Alliance was founded just in time to face the recession and get caught in the crossfire of a dispute over the spending of extra federal highway money made available by the “stimulus” act – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. So, when Bill McKenna and Susan Stauder opened up the transportation alliance’s second round of public hearings with a meeting in the student government chambers at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, they encountered some push back.

At a meeting in the Student Government Chamber at the University of Missouri – St. Louis on St. Patrick’s Day, McKenna and Stauder displayed maps showing how little road construction is planned for the Missouri Department of Transportation’s (MoDOT) District 6 in the 2009-2013 period compared to how much construction took place from 1999-2008. District 6 consists of St. Louis city and county, and St. Charles, Jefferson, and Franklin counties.

McKenna also displayed graphics showing how much truck traffic has increased on roads in the state in the last ten years, and said Missouri could become a regional distribution hub if the state could maintain and improve its roads. According to McKenna, Missouri is within a 10-hour drive of half of the country's population. With improvements to the state's highway system, river ports and railways, “it could become the nation's premier central distribution point and bring tens of thousands of additional jobs to the state,” he said. But if Missouri does not invest more in its infrastructure, it could lose the competitive battle for distribution center jobs to Kansas or Illinois, he added.

Many people in the audience of about 55 expressed more interest in moving people than in moving products, however, and they expressed more interest in alternatives to the use of private autos on public roads than they did in building more roads.

Garry Earls, chief operating officer of St. Louis County, said the county’s top goal is expanding the region’s light rail system, MetroLink. Representatives of the Service Employees International Union said bus service is crucial. Bob Baer, president and CEO of Metro, said his agency wants money to operate buses and the light rail system.

 “We should be talking about growth goals and revitalizing the built cores,” said Thomas Shrout, executive director of Citizens for Modern Transit. “We need density at transit stops. Your report has to include how zoning and laws have to encourage that vision. A bridge in Tuscumbia is not part of a vision. It is just a project,” he said.

Bicycle enthusiasts also criticized the highway department for focusing only on cars and called for incorporating bicycle lanes in highway and bridge designs.

But the torrent of demands also raised concerns about cost. “The cost of road transportation is tremendous. Then add in mass transit, ports, and railroads and the tax needed to fund it all is exorbitant. How will you decide what is to be included,” asked Steve Hoven, corporate vice president – public affairs of SSM Health Care?

But Bill McKenna, statewide chairman and District 6 co-chair of the Missouri Transportation Alliance is an old hand at dealing with those sorts of questions and controversies. As chairman of the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission, he faced tugs-of-war every time funding came up, said Tom Stevener, vice president of business development at Horner & Shifrin, Inc. “There is always contention over how much money goes to rural areas and how much goes to urban areas,” Stevener said. “Outstate people always feel they are getting the short end of the stick and mobilize behind the Farm Bureau to get more,” he said.

Patek is familiar with those controversies, too. In 2004, he successfully managed a campaign to amendment the Missouri Constitution to dedicate all state motor fuel taxes and vehicle user fees to roads and bridges, effectively taking about $130 million out of the general fund and redirecting it to road construction and maintenance. The promise of Amendment 3, as it was called, was that the money would be used to make roads safer and smoother and to fix failing bridges. The newly-dedicated tax stream leveraged bonds that financed a $1.7 billion gusher of projects that quickly raised that quality of Missouri’s state roads from among the worst in the nation to among the best, and also reduced traffic deaths, but little of the money was directed towards fixing failing bridges. All the bond money will have been spent by the end of this year, however, and Amendment 3 revenue will be unavailable for any new projects for many more years to come as it is dedicated to paying off that bond. It is the exhaustion of the Amendment 3 bond that prompted the formation of the Missouri Transportation Alliance.

Listening to county and municipal agencies and finding compromises between local agencies and a common ground on which to erect a transportation plan is the task that McKenna and the transportation alliance have set for themselves. McKenna displayed the skills that will help him do that at the meeting at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. Over the course of the forum, it became clear that there was broad and deep support for mass transit among the St. Louis attendees.

Susan Stauder, co-chair of District 6 and vice president - infrastructure and public policy for the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association (RCGA), expressed that support when she said, “There is a very great need to look at mass transportation. It is one of the things we need in our toolbox to get people around…We have a very successful mass transit system, but we’re losing about 1/3 of the service at the end of the month. We need to fix it. It is a real jewel. We need to preserve and expand it.”

McKenna first explained that the Missouri Department of Transportation and the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission, despite their names, cannot fund transit. “The problem with the existing system is that the transportation department is funded like a highway department: taxes go into a road fund and the constitution says that money cannot be used for anything but roads and bridges,” McKenna said.

When Earls pushed back, saying that if the purpose of the forum was to find out what were local priorities for transportation, then St. Louis County’s priority is expanding Metrolink to double revenue miles and reach 95 percent of the county’s population. McKenna shot back: “It has to be something that is saleable statewide.”

But after several more speakers weighed in to back Metrolink, McKenna accepted that for metro St. Louis, transit has to be part of a statewide transportation plan. “Obviously, mass transit is important to St. Louis. That is a sea change. We’ve never had state funding for mass transit before,” he said. 

St. Louis’s commitment to a multimodal transportation system is more than just verbal. A multimodal system does not just include mass transit as an option, but it also provides connections between different types of transportation. The Gateway Transportation Center, which opened in November 2008, is an example of that commitment. The project was funded by federal, state and local government agencies, with participation from Amtrak, Greyhound and MetroLink. Construction on the project began in 2006 with construction of a MetroBus station at 14th and Spruce Streets that links MetroLink riders to the downtown bus system and vice versa. That was followed by the construction of a 37,000-square-foot Multimodal Center at 15th and Spruce Streets.

The Multimodal Center houses Amtrak train and Greyhound bus operations, a food court and concourse linkage between Greyhound, Amtrak and MetroLink. Don Koppy, vice president and director of architecture at KAI Design & Build, said the $27 million Multimodal Center was designed and built with an eye on the future. Koppy, who began working with an earlier design of the project in 1996, said that Amtrak’s current service does not justify the expense of connecting it to the Multimodal Center, “but the city decided to put infrastructure in place for when commuter rail comes into the city, and commuter rail makes sense if people are going to go out to the exurbs. So it was planned for long term.”

“We invested in a multimodal system,” Koppy said. “The Multimodal Center is at a centralized location and from there you can go to the airport or get on a train, a bus, or a cab, and in the future you will be able to get on commuter rail. I don’t know what else we could have, except we don’t have bikes,” he said.

Joining KAI on the project were: K&S Associates as the general contractor, Jacobs Civil Engineering, landscape architect SWT Design Inc., and St. Louis-based Kiku Obata & Company.

Transit is important in many areas of the state, not just St. Louis, Stevener said. “Kansas City operates a bus system and they have the same problems we do,” he said. “Places like Cape Girardeau, Springfield, Joplin, Columbia and Jefferson City also have transit systems. There are a lot of OATS (Older Adult Transportation Service) systems out-state, and in southeast Missouri there is MTS based in Fredericksburg. There are more and more folks out there who are becoming dependent on transit of some form or other, if just because people are getting older. I think there is demand even out-state for something more than roads and bridges,” he said.

“I think the guys at the state understand that. For years I’ve heard the commission (Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission) talk about total transportation, now called multimodal, but the difficulty is where the money comes from. Most funding comes from fuel tax and it is dedicated by the constitution to roads and bridges, so they can’t spend it on anything else,” he added. And when it comes to going to the legislature for funding from general revenue, “you’re in competition with everything else. That is real fisticuffs,” he said.

Finding a plan that has broad support throughout the state is just the first part of the process. The second part if figuring out to fund it to avoid fisticuffs in the general assembly.

“The motor fuel tax is probably the silliest way to collect a tax there has ever been, because it can’t keep up with inflation,” Stevener said. “If you apply an inflation factor of three percent a year, we’re collecting the same amount of money now as when we first put in a tax in the 1920s to go from dirt roads to macadam.

“We have to do away with this archaic motor fuel tax and go to something more universally based, and get away from a dedication to roads and bridges make funding available for all transportation. Lots and lots of other states do that as normal business,” he said.

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