They used to be two empty ships passing in the night, but now MidAmerica St. Louis Airport in Illinois and St. Louis’s MetroLink system will finally connect, to the great joy of nobody but local politicians and contractors.
These two deserve each other. Let’s examine the usage projections that were used to convince taxpayers to approve funding(and various extensions).
Projected passengers for MidAmerica Airport, back in 1997 when the airport was built? Two million.
Plog Research Inc., one of the consultants for the MidAmerica project, estimates 2 million air passengers will be served by the Downstate airport.
Actual passengers in 2022? 163,000. (And trust me, they celebrated that wildly.)
Projected MetroLink ridership after the construction of the cross-county MetroLink extension? 80,000 daily boardings in Missouri alone by 2025.
Actual daily boardings in Missouri in 2023? 16,700.
Public agencies habitually overstate ridership and understate costs to justify these massive projects of all types. High-speed rail, anyone?
It is worth noting that the current five-mile MetroLink extension to the airport in Illinois cost $98 million, while the proposed MetroLink extension in St. Louis, which is also five miles long, is estimated to cost $1.1 billion. A billion-dollar difference for the same length of route. To paraphrase Everett Dirksen—himself a son of Illinois—a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.
It is great that we can finally connect two massive transportation boondoggles that don’t take anyone for a ride but taxpayers.
