Boomin Metro
Mobilizing MetroLink from Automobility Hell
Catherine Chung
Winner of the 2023 Editors’ Award
Sept 2023
Photo by Catherine Chung
1 – ONBOARDING
For the last five years, St. Louis’s MetroLink ridership has plunged by as much as forty percent, demolishing St. Louis’s route to becoming an attractive option for young professionals to live and work (“Transit Ridership”). Specifically, this decreasing MetroLink usage demonstrates symptoms of a deeper problem, namely: an over-dependence on automobility; opposition to imaginative urban landscapes; and, crucially, the ways both connect to long legacies tied to injustices for the most vulnerable of St. Louisans. While a singular solution cannot be determined yet, clear steps to remedy these disparities must include refinancing the MetroLink budget, reconsidering the moral grounds of conceal and carry ridership, and reconceptualizing a post-automobility landscape. Ultimately, the obstacles of these specific challenges are enormous but not unresolvable. Scoping Atlanta’s 2022 walkway model shows how these seemingly insurmountable obstacles can be conquered through the aligned wills of the people, elected officials, and business interests of the state.
The problems currently facing the St. Louis MetroLink are numerous and severe. Greater threats of violence imposed by St. Louis through suburbanization and its consequences of suburban poverty, lack of transparency surrounding MetroLink agencies, and continued discord between public discourse and city officials compound bad public relations for St. Louis and prolong progress on revitalizing the city. In this paper, to make inroads with the challenges MetroLink faces, our second section provides a multifaceted yet concise analysis of St. Louis’s fiscal failures, historical segregation, and mobility injustices, but also the sociocultural impact a revitalized MetroLink could provide. In our third section, we give a holistic background of St. Louis’s city planning discrimination and injustices to clarify the immoral solutions the Missouri House’s gun-happy legislature offered in response to public safety concerns on the Metro. Through conversation and analysis surrounding the St. Louis MetroLink, we maintain that progressive signs of future mobility justices, illustrated by Atlanta’s recent pedestrian-friendly initiatives, are not only exceptions but feasible solutions. By synthesizing MetroLink’s necessary challenges and connecting them to tangible proposed solutions, we believe this paper allows any good-faith politician to revitalize St. Louis for a more vigorous political and economic life.
2 – CHALLENGES
The central tragedy around the St. Louis MetroLink is its wasted infrastructure, particularly its failed potential to update its efficiency and design to attract young professionals, immigrants, job seekers, and families. A robust transportation system should market a reputation for relevant routes and reliable operation, which will, in turn, facilitate its city’s population and economic growth. In this section, we will cover three facets of MetroLink’s current infamous reputation: economic and statistical evidence supporting decreasing ridership, sociocultural and symbolic aspects of arrested mobility, and of course, the political implications resulting therefrom.
In a quantitative and economic analysis, numbers tell us that, despite funding efforts, MetroLink’s ridership continues to decrease because St. Louisans are dissatisfied with its safety perceptions and reliance issues (Gray). The in-person physical nature of public transit means ridership further decreased during the height of COVID in the spring of 2020 to fall of 2021, and the several high-profile violent crimes that ran in the St. Louis media cycle during this era did not help safety perceptions on the Metro (Gray). Although the U.S. economy has declared COVID a non-emergency, service cuts and employee shortages continue to plague MetroLink’s reputation (Stolberg). One suburban employee who makes a sixty-minute plus commute cites Metro’s inefficiency as why she ‘really wants” to ‘get [her] car fixed” (Gray). This quote illustrates how MetroLink’s inefficiency drives St. Louis to become more car-centric. Paradoxically, increasing ridership increases MetroLink’s financial straits, but its current ineffectiveness is the defining factor that leads people to look toward other ways of movement. Perceptions of violence on the Metro, intensified with its notorious wait times and reduced service, make it clear why the inaccessibility of St. Louis mass transportation drives away new and even veteran riders.
In another fiscal failure, Bi-State Development, which operates MetroLink, has invested at least $1.3 billion into the light rail service (Page). However, this budget is either insufficient to support all the employees, students, and residents on both sides of the Mississippi who rely on this vital service or needs to be maximized or managed to its most significant impact. Although Bi-State claims on its corporate website to empower and optimize St. Louis mass transit in the name of progress, St. Louis’s history of corrupt city management does little to restore confidence in Bi-State Development’s motives. A closer view of MetroLink’s failures reveals that its quantitative factors—such as decreasing ridership and unwise fiscal direction—show the insights needed to engineer a more optimistic future in which MetroLink changes directions to shape St. Louis into a more culturally connected city that encourages innovation and new residents.
In addition to fiscal analysis, imagining the sociocultural impact of transportation on St. Louis, including what the city’s transit could become, builds towards revitalizing the city’s economy and political reputation. Key to managing a successful citywide image campaign is contextualizing St. Louis’s past injustices, where housing discrimination and city planning injustices from the early 20th century continue to plague St. Louis today through infamous examples such as the Delmar divide. Jesus Barajas, a current U.S. researcher on mobility studies, writes how past discriminatory practices within city management led to present-day consequences where “people of color have lower access to […] jobs and opportunities, active transportation infrastructure […] and suffer from poorer health outcomes related to emissions and inactive travel” (3-4). Part of Barajas’ scholarly work is studying how racialized environments influence and shape travel behavior, and the contemporary effects he describes are explicitly illustrated in St. Louis’s dark legacies of housing discrimination.[1] These historical repercussions continue to make it difficult for St. Louisans to easily visit each other and maneuver around the city via MetroLink, forcing residents into arrested mobility (“‘Arrested Mobility’”).
When a city makes it easy for its residents, newcomers, and tourists to travel around its different neighborhoods, landmarks, and business districts, this accessibility restores dignity in one’s city and motivates the people who live and interact within it to maintain and better their hometown culture. The L in Chicago represents how accessible mass transportation enhances how one experiences Chicago; several stops on the L take passengers to different historically cultural and ethnic neighborhoods throughout the city, such as Chinatown, Greektown, Little Italy, Pilsen, and Ukrainian Village. St. Louis’s MetroLink could adopt some of the L’s positives by incorporating culturally essential locations and neighborhood districts into their stops and routes. Not only would this allow St. Louisans to explore their city’s previously hidden gems, but this could also potentially build St. Louis as a city that embraces its diverse presence and welcomes new voices to contribute to the city. By establishing a more interconnected transportation system with MetroLink, St. Louis solidifies its cultural identity and encourages St. Louisans to connect with each other and their environment in new ways.
At the core of the many challenges facing the MetroLink is a fundamental over-reliance on automobility within city infrastructure, leading to a self-perpetuating system where an automobile city increases urban sprawl and transportation costs, all of which further robs St.Louis’s most vulnerable communities of financial independence (Swanstrom 107). It is this heavy reliance on automobility that has perpetuated environmental racism within St. Louis as well as stagnated job growth over multiple decades (Barker). Automobility, a term popularized by the late British sociologist John Urry, is a tool used to measure forms of environmental racism. Private ownership of automobiles births additional infrastructure, which often conflicts with other more just forms of movement (Urry 27). As Barajas illustrates, in the early Eisenhower era, “laws that had previously favored pedestrians shifted to ensure the smooth flow of automobiles, spearheaded by auto-interest groups, [leading to the] criminalization of jaywalking [and shaping the streets’] hierarchy […] Automobiles reordered who had rights to the road” (10). The automobility Barajas highlights is apparent in many modern American cities.
Additionally, one prime element of a highly automobile-oriented city, such as St. Louis, is urban sprawl, leading to increased transportation costs for the very demographic St. Louis is attempting to attract. Urban sprawl—massive amounts of low-density housing surrounding the city center—increases the community’s reliance on the car and self-perpetuates the cycle of automobility (Swanstrom 102). Concerning St. Louis’s MetroLink, the city’s legacy of automobility remains the critical feature blocking greater use of MetroLink. To have more equitable urban planning and a post-automobility future, MetroLink could research the roots of the problem and engage its suburban demographic instead of allocating resources toward enhancing its present features.
Taken together, Bi-State’s fiscal failures and the dark legacies of St. Louis’s segregation remain chief challenges for MetroLink’s growth, but analyzing the rich symbolism, free movement, and cultural potential of an improved and more robust transportation system provides for an optimistic outlook on St. Louis.
3 – SOLUTIONS
Although the path forward for St. Louis’s MetroLink is unclear, Bi-State and the Missouri legislature’s recent proposals to improve St. Louis’s transportation growth include severe oversights that move MetroLink growth backward rather than forwards. In this penultimate section, we will analyze and critique the economic interests behind the intended solutions from Bi-State, as well as the pertinent political and moral arguments raised by the Missouri legislature’s gun laws regarding public transportation. By isolating these factors, these aspects work together to create a multidimensional solution to a complex challenge.
First, economically, analyzing MetroLink’s upcoming $52 million solution—turnstiles—tells us that, although Bi-State continues to publicize MetroLink as a force for larger investments in transportation safety, Bi-State should be listening more to the public and creating more concretely safe and secure systems (FOX 2). Although the increasing number of guards and turnstiles at the MetroLink stations appear to create more positive safety perceptions of the MetroLink, they are only superficial enhancements towards improving security. MetroLink’s long resistance towards implementing material safety improvements ignores the experiences of riders, demonstrating the lack of influence that voices of mass transit riders, often people of color and low income, have on their environment; therefore, a more intelligent allocation of these resources would establish direct partnerships and links with community riders and civic advocacy groups. Whether Bi-State is using its political power towards a practical remedy remains to be seen; if Bi-State’s solution stops at turnstiles, the efficacy of MetroLink will be restricted to the limits of turnstiles.
On top of quantitative and budgetary concerns, Missouri’s political agenda and lack of moral concern create more dangerous conditions for current MetroLink riders and scare away potential riders. The state legislature’s 2022 legalization of concealed civilian guns on transport via Missouri House Bill 52 illustrates a tone-deaf attempt to increase ridership security (Erickson). Not only does the pro-gun law communicate dominant conservative interests within the Missouri House of Representatives, but it also raises more moral and social issues than it combats. Proponents of this 2022 law argue that their rights are constitutionally protected by the 2nd Amendment[2] and argue that people should be allowed to exercise and defend their rights. However, even though riding the MetroLink while carrying and using guns as a civilian is legal, we maintain that this practice remains politically counterproductive and rises to the level of immorality.
There are different degrees of establishing widely viewed social taboos. For instance, infidelity and extramarital affairs are widely disapproved of but no longer illegal in most instances. Conversely, there have been many eras in U.S. history where some things, like chattel slavery and racial segregation, were entirely lawful but viewed as immoral. The abolitionist cause used the resulting moral uproar from the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which further enshrined slavery into legality, to encourage slavery’s repudiation. Making slavery more legal did not endear abolitionists with the law; it merely fired up abolitionism and led to the Civil War. Therefore, we argue that no matter how lawful it remains to carry weapons on the Metro, it will always be immoral for civilians to arm themselves in such a way. If gun owners claim that self-defense is their main reason for carrying guns on the Metro, they are being counterproductive in doing so. Rather than decreasing danger, weaponry on the MetroLink increases risk and escalates hostile environments. As representative Wiley Price noted, ‘“Even trained police don’t always make the right decisions regarding use of firearms in tight, tense situations”’ (Editorial Board). Suppose the Missouri House’s intended goal is to increase rider safety. In that case, their gun legislation acts entirely contrary, giving free rein to the forces that further crumble MetroLink’s public safety.
When looking at these three factors, we propose that MetroLink amend its budget to incorporate a more transparent and comprehensive security strategy that includes greater voices from the citizenry. Additionally, in addressing the political and moral challenges that arise from MetroLink, we recommend that MetroLink ban civilian weaponry from the Metro on moral and public safety grounds. Although some of these changes may initially appear as a death knell to St. Louis’s aspiring politicians and businesspeople, the long-term benefits and sustainable outlook that results from these suggestions will bolster the current MetroLink experience and further encourage new riders.
4 – ONWARD
The case of St. Louis’s MetroLink offers a chance for us to examine the mobility challenges that arise within post-industrial American cities, particularly cities with a deep history of discrimination and injustice in their city planning and transportation structures. After analyzing the solutions proposed by MetroLink and the Missouri House, we offered concrete solutions for revising Bi-State’s financial state to integrate more civic opinions and feedback, as well as the political potential for a weapon-free MetroLink.
As shown above, the concept of arrested mobility proves to be the central node in the cluster of challenges related to St. Louis. In the changing infrastructure of U.S. cities, which involves a broader sense of declining automobility, increasing mobility justice can offer us a more equitable transportation future and a more sustainable path into the 21st century. One model of a city that has restructured ideas of mobility and city connectivity while maintaining geographic specificities and regional identity is Atlanta. Atlanta’s 2022 Beltline walkway proposals, to the tune of $4.8 billion, created a 22-mile loop that provides a community path between Atlanta’s neighborhoods, offering a vital gathering space where new and old Atlantans reconnect (“Project Profile”). Atlanta’s commitment proves that rethinking and looking toward a post-automobility future means investing financial, political, and community-based resources toward large-scale equitable mobility planning. St. Louis would do well to engage in and implement more pedestrian-friendly initiatives like Atlanta’s, whose recent changes disincentivize automobility, encourage transportation-oriented development, and promote a systematic reconstruction of what it means to move around and experience civic pride. In an increasingly interconnected world, where many systems of dependence are overly reliant on the will of elected officials and business players, “valu[ing] community experiences [is] essential data for [community-wide] decision making” (Barajas 10). Getting St. Louis on the move means its leaders must be on board with integrating the community experiences of riders and developing radically new conditions for mobility justice and community empowerment. Just as Atlanta’s walkway proposal is bold in economic scope, mobility justice, and conceptual innovation—altering the financial, imaginative, and natural fabric of the city—St. Louis needs this radical newness, which means combining an entirely new conceptual, financial, and material landscape for the city.
[1] One facet of this racial segregation was famously litigated in 1948’s Shelly v. Kraemer decision, whose reverberating effects include redlining and racially restrictive covenants.
[2] As recently litigated in 2022’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision, the Supreme Court’s current composition supports a very liberal interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, especially as it pertains to open carry (Bromwich). This ruling likely emboldened Missouri to enact Bill 52.
Works Cited
“About Us.” Bi-State Development. bistatedev.org/about-us/.
Barajas, Jesus M. “The Roots of Racialized Travel Behavior.” Advances in Transport Policy and Planning: Social Issues in Transport Planning, edited by Rafael H.M. Pereira and Geneviève Boisjoly, volume 8, Academic Press, 2021, 1-31.
Barker, Jacob. “‘Wake-Up Call’: St. Louis Faces Dimming Prospects Absent New Efforts to Draw Population.” STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 5 Mar. 2022.
Bromwich, Jonah E. “Federal Judge Blocks N.Y. Gun Law, Finding Much of It Unconstitutional.” The New York Times. 6 Oct. 2022.
“‘Arrested Mobility’: Exploring Over-Policing of Black Mobility in the U.S.” Cities@Tufts. 25 Nov. 2021.
Editorial Board. “Editorial: More Guns Isn't the Solution to Violence on Missouri Public Transportation.” STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 30 Mar. 2021.
Erickson, Kurt. “Missouri House Approves Plan to Allow Guns on Public Transit.” STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 9 June 2022.
FOX 2 St. Louis. “Bi-State Unveils Proposed Safer MetroLink Station of the Future.” YouTube. 5 July 2022.
Gray, Bryce. “‘Begging for Employees’: Metro Transit Cuts Service amid Staffing Shortages.” STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 29 Nov. 2021.
Page, Sam. “City and County Need to Work Together to Make MetroLink Safer.” STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 7 Oct. 2019.
“Project Profile: Atlanta Beltline.” Center for Innovative Finance Support, Federal Highway Administration. fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/project_profiles/ga_atlanta_beltline.aspx.
Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. “Biden Says the Pandemic Is Over. But at Least 400 People Are Dying Daily.” The New York Times.19 Sept. 2022.
Swanstrom, Todd. “Equity Planning in a Fragmented Suburban Setting: TheCase of St. Louis.” Advancing Equity Planning Now, edited by Kathryn Wertheim Hexter and Norman Krumholz, Cornell UP, 2021, 101–119.
“Transit Ridership.” OneSTL. 13 Feb. 2023. onestl.org/indicators/connected/metric/transit-ridership.
Urry, John. “The ‘System’ of Automobility.” Theory, Culture & Society, volume 21, issue 4-5, 2004, 25–39.
This essay draws from Chung’s experience in AccessSTL, where Washington University students advocate for equitable public transit on campus and in St. Louis.