Today I attended the second annual Missouri Joint Transportation Funding Summit in Jefferson City.  The members of both House and Senate Transportation Committees hosted the event to discuss how to fund Missouri’s transportation system in the future.  The need to fund and expand public transit was discussed much more than last year. Kudos to State Senator Joan Bray of St. Louis for repeatedly raising the bike/ped/transit/rail issues today.

One of the more interesting developments was a presentation by Kevin Ketih, MoDOT’s chief engineer.  Kevin is usually perceived to be hostile towards alternative transportation modes, but today he presented MoDOT’s “wish list” for alternative transportation.  It included a desire to spend $80 million a year for alternative modes.

The top of the list is $50 million a year for public transportation, which is a huge increase from the $6 million budgeted today. In addition, MoDOT would like to have $25 million/year for passenger rail, to improve the speed and reliability of Amtrak’s KC-St. Louis routes. He even went further to state that if MoDOT had an extra $1-3 billion it could implement high speed passenger rail in a triangle from KC to Springfield to St. Louis. That sounds really expensive, but it would be as little as $40 million a year over 25 years, the expected life of any future transportation funding program.

Of course, this is just a wish list.  It is up to the General Assembly and ultimately the voters of Missouri to pay for these and all the other highway improvements.  MoDOT often says that they can build anything we want, if we just give them the money.  State leaders are still struggling to find a revenue source to pay for maintaining the current system, not to mention expanding it.