» planning

There’s a very nice article out today in the St. Louis Beacon that features Metro’s Jessica Mefford-Miller, our new Chief Planner, discussing the August 3 service changes. She discusses ridership numbers, the new routes, and funding issues, making several interesting points:

• The Planning Department tries to collect more than one month of ridership data before considering it “solid” data; she said information from one quarter, or three months, is better;
• Ridership may be light on some of the restored routes because there is an “expiration date” on the restored service since the funding for these routes came via one-time stimulus grants or emergency funding;
• Some of the service changes involved new routes, which do not have a market constituency built-in the way that the old “restored” routes did, and it takes a long time to build ridership.

The article also mentioned that Metro is “tweaking” fall schedules, making adjustments based on actual operations for the past month. According to Jessica, the changes are minor and will be invisible to most customers.

While searching through the Post-Dispatch’s Building Blocks blog, I ran across an old but interesting post about job sprawl, a term I’d never heard until today. According to Tim, a study from the Brookings Institute looked at job density and ranked cities in order of highest to lowest. St. Louis, as you might imagine, is pretty close to the bottom of the list, i.e. has less job concentration and more job sprawl.

We could rehash all of the old arguments about sprawl here, but what I actually found interesting about the article is how it highlights another reason why planning public transit in St. Louis is a real challenge. Metro’s official mission is “Regional economic development through excellence in transportation,” which is one reason that Metro is very conscious of serving job centers. That’s hard enough in any city, but what happens if, as they say, the center does not hold? As job centers deteriorate and companies locate willy-nilly across the region, it becomes more and more difficult to identify (and thereby structure transit around) job “centers.” You can see, by looking at the job sprawl phenomenon, that planning for transit needs to be just one part of a regional plan that should address not just roads and buses and trains, but also serves to coordinate development  of job and industry centers.

One final note: I, too, will be interested in seeing the follow-up study on whether the jobs are sprawling because the people are.