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“When we did MetroLink everybody was coming from these other cities to come and see how we did it,� recalls Les Sterman. He was executive director of the at the time, which played a major role in getting the system built. “And then somehow we lost our way, and we didn’t learn our lessons that we had been teaching everybody else. It’s been downhill ever since.�

Indeed, since both systems debuted in 1994, Denver’s transit has blossomed, with multiple lines now being built into suburbs in various counties. It helps that those counties all pay into a regional transportation district that spreads the funding around the entire metro area. In St. Louis, transit development has been mostly stagnant, with the overpriced county extension wasting much good will; and plans for the north-south MetroLink extension gathering dust on a shelf. Multiple generations of St. Louis leaders have talked about expanding the transit system every few years, but they mostly spend money on more studies.

This week marks a potential new chapter in the transit discussion in St. Louis. With President Joe Biden signing his signature bipartisan infrastructure bill, hundreds of millions of dollars are headed to St. Louis and the state of Missouri, many of them earmarked for transit. Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, who was at Biden’s signing at the White House, says it’s time to dust off plans for the MetroLink expansion.

“This is the time for us to continue forward on that project,� Jones told reporters after Biden signed the bill. St. Louis County Executive Sam Page agrees. Having the two most important regional leaders on board with transit development, at a time when both the city and the county are sitting on unused transit funds, and hundreds of millions of federal dollars are on the way moves transit development from theoretical to possible.

That’s why I called Sterman this week. More than anybody, he knows what it will take to get an expansion of the St. Louis transit system from theoretical to rails in the ground.

“There’s obviously some reason for optimism,� Sterman says. “But it takes a very high level of regional commitment and cooperation.�

That means not just Jones and Page being in sync, but the Board of Aldermen and the County Council, two bodies that often find themselves at odds with the elected leaders of the city and county, often more for political reasons than public policy differences. That means getting the entire congressional delegation on the same page, as guiding those federal dollars to St. Louis (and Kansas City, which also has transit needs), takes serious cooperation. And it also means getting the state of ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ on board as a partner. That, Sterman says, might be the heaviest lift.

For as long as St. Louis and Kansas City have had transit, the systems have received less state funding than virtually every other similar transit development in the country. A few years back, Sterman wrote a white paper that discussed how much more affordable transit would be in Missouri’s biggest cities if the state would fund at a level near that of other states.

Now, with so many federal infrastructure dollars flowing into state coffers as well as local ones, there is a real opportunity to get past the old Missouri myth that somehow money spent in the state’s cities robs rural areas of their own funding.

“Missouri’s actually an urban state but you would never know it based on the state’s policies,� Sterman says. “Seventy percent of the state’s population lives in urban areas.�

Similarly, about 40% of the state’s economic activity is generated in St. Louis, where employers need workers, and those workers, particularly Black ones who live in north and south St. Louis, need transit to get them to jobs. That’s why the made expanding transit in St. Louis a top priority.

Will millions of federal dollars plus the support of city and county leaders finally equal serious movement toward construction of an expanded transit system in St. Louis?

“I hope there’s opportunities for expanded transit,� Sterman says. “But we’ve got a lot of history to overcome. There’s absolutely a way to make it happen. Somebody needs to take charge and really will this thing across the finish line.�