WHY SO MUCH HATE FOR AUTOMOBILES FROM URBAN PLANNERS? A federalist approach to anti-car urbanism.

Back in the early 1990s, anxious about long-term regional decline and hoping to put my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, back on the map, local leaders embarked upon constructing a totally new light rail system that was to provide living proof of our dynamic vision for the future. The MetroLink promised to unite the diffuse bistate area like never before.

But three decades and billions of dollars later, most St. Louisans except the starriest-eyed of rail boosters would probably say that the money might have been better spent on road repair and expanded bus routes. However noble the ambition, the system has proved an underutilized and crime-riddled vanity project that, for the foreseeable future, is more trouble than it’s worth.
More recently, a smaller-scale St. Louis project, The Loop Trolley, burned over $50 million on a 2-mile vintage-style streetcar line along one of the area’s main commercial corridors, worsening traffic and hurting small business. The system ended up an embarrassing failure that brought in roughly a tenth of projected revenues and shut down after just a year of service.

The appeal of light rail is the graft, not the service.