Mass transit and suburban home market
There’s a connection, or so say the sources in this piece in the Washington Post:
Federal spending is about 4 to 1 in favor of highways over transit. Today, more than 99 percent of the trips taken by U.S. residents are in cars or some other non-transit vehicle, largely as a result of decades of such unbalanced spending.
The policies — building so many highways and building so many houses near those highways — have had a direct bearing on how and where people live and work. More Americans, 52 percent, live in the suburbs than anywhere else. The suburban growth rate exceeded 90 percent in the past decade.
But there’s been a radical shift in recent months. Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer highway miles in May than a year earlier. In the Washington area and elsewhere, mass transit ridership is setting records. Last year, transit trips nationwide topped 10.3 billion, a 50-year high.
Home prices in the far suburbs, such as Prince William and Loudoun counties, have collapsed; those in the District and inner suburbs have stayed the same or increased. A recent survey of real estate agents by Coldwell Banker found an increased interest in urban living because of the high cost of commuting.
Brookings says transportation costs are now second only to housing as a percentage of the household budget, with food a distant third.
The people are leading the revolution, but land-use experts wonder whether a government policy so etched into the American fabric will follow.
“When people bought homes, they punched the numbers and said can we afford the mortgage payment and taxes,” Katz said. “This new paradigm is going to have families being more deliberate about the cost of transportation spending and energy costs. That’s a new phenomenon in the United States. That will be the change that will change development patterns.”
Katz and others said high fuel prices will increase demand for transit-oriented development, where homes, townhouses and office buildings cluster around transit hubs that link jobs with population centers.
(Pictured: Jennifer Olmstead (left) Daughter, Sarah Baybeck and husband, Brady Baybeck, (right) walk to the MetroLink station in the Delmar Loop in 2005 from their home in the 6000 block of Washington Boulevard. The couple chose this location because of its proximity to the light rail system. The couple walks together in the mornings and travel opposite directions. Olmstead went southbound towards the city and Baybeck went northbound with daughter Sarah.–Photo By Dawn Majors/Post-Dispatch)
Eddie Roth writes about education, social justice, public safety, transportation, legal affairs and historic preservation. He joined the Post-Dispatch editorial page in 2008 after six years as an editorial writer with the Dayton Daily News. But he is not new to St. Louis. Eddie grew up in Webster Groves and south St. Louis County. He's a lawyer who for many years practiced with a downtown firm, and was active in civic affairs, including serving a term on the St. Louis Police Board. He and his wife, Jeanne, and their three daughters, Emily, Julia and Alice, live in the Shaw Neighborhood.
When it comes to community organizing, he endorses Quentin Crisp's advice: Rather than keeping up with the Joneses, it's better to pull them down to your level. 
I have long been against using federal or state funds to build commuter highways. If St. Charles county needed 370 and the Page Extension, they should have paid for it with county funds.
But that doesn’t mean that running transit lines into Chesterfield and St. Peters isn’t a stupid idea. Subdivisions in these areas are built in a way that makes efficient transit service impossible. Expanding transit into these places will bankrupt your transit agency, and have no significant effect on traffic or the environment.
I once lived in Skinker-DeBalivier, and appreciated the same service that you show my old friends Sarah and Brady using. But that area has an urban street grid, which is designed for access to transit on arterial streets. It also has a higher population density than Chesterfield or Wildwood. Same can be said of the area of Ferguson where I live now. In order to continue to serve these areas, we need to freeze further expansion of Metrolink, and direct current resources toward maintaining and sustaining the great transit system we already have. That’s why those who use and love transit should be the first in line to vote against the Metro expansion tax they are proposing this fall.
See http://www.stoptheprop.com for more information.