^[1]Stanley Coffey is on the night cleaning crew at the Bank of America branch on Broadway and Chestnut Street downtown.

Each evening, he boards the No. 30 Soulard bus at Kingshighway to head to work. The bus takes him east on Arsenal Street, then north on Broadway, stopping right in front of his building.

Starting Monday, the bus will carry Mr. Coffey only as far as Chouteau Street. Henceforth, in fair weather or foul, he’ll have to walk nearly a mile before and after his shift.

Still, under Metro’s impending service cuts, Mr. Coffey can count himself lucky. At 58, he’s physically able to slog his way to and from work. He can keep his job. Thousands of St. Louisans who depend on public transit — directly and indirectly — are out of luck.

Starting Monday, St. Louis’ mass transit system will reduce service radically. The service area for this multibillion-dollar regional asset will shrink by two thirds, literally overnight.

The Metro transit agency faces an operating deficit of $45 million this year, which is expected to reach $50 million next year. Nearly one in every four of its 2,300 employees will be laid off in the coming weeks. Many highly skilled and productive employees already are being poached by transit systems in other regions.

Service will end at 2,300 of the 9,000 bus stops and shelters on Missouri’s side of the system; service in Illinois, which is fully funded, won’t be affected. A bus fleet of 320 will shrink to about 140. MetroLink light rail riders will see one-third fewer trains during rush hour. Call-A-Ride service for the disabled will be slashed.

Most city and inner-ring suburban service will be cut 25 percent to 75 percent. Most of St. Louis County outside the Interstate 270 loop will receive no service. Limited service to the Chesterfield Valley was salvaged through the end of the year as a result of a last-minute deal between Metro and far-sighted municipal leaders and local businesses.

This is historic in a very bad way. No other metropolitan public transit system has ever been whacked as deep and as fast.

What’s been the community’s response? Compared to the weeping and gnashing of teeth that preceded temporary closings of U.S. Highway 40/Interstate 64 for reconstruction, there’s been hardly a whisper. That may change as the pain radiates out.

Nearly 40,000 residents of the region use public transportation to commute to work. That’s in addition to the students, the elderly and disabled — and their families and caretakers — who depend on the system.

As they are displaced, the community’s social fabric may weaken in ways that can’t be fully predicted.
There’s long been a perception that Metro’s collapse won’t affect middle-class and more affluent residents who never ride public transportation. That perception is misguided.

Local health providers rely heavily on workers who commute to and from work via public transit. Limited bus schedules suddenly become a factor in the region’s quality of care.

The same holds for home health workers. Children of elderly parents who rely on in-home help had better have a back up plans.

Metro’s critics cluck that the system has caused its own problems — by extending the MetroLink light rail line without nailing down operating funds, and then foolishly engaging in a costly lawsuit with its contractors.

The criticisms are fair, but go only so far. They did not cause this crisis. This reckoning has been inevitable since the system’s inception — in part because state and regional political leadership always has put highways and roads first, treating public transit as a neglected step-child, allowed to lurch along from one temporary, last-minute fix to another.

This time, no last-minute solution has emerged.

A book called Mapping Decline has created a considerable amount of buzz among serious students of public policy in St. Louis.

University of Iowa history professor Colin Gordon took a map of St. Louis and superimposed layer upon layer of municipal boundaries, zoning ordinances, housing restrictions and redevelopment projects as they accumulated and as the region sprawled over the last 100 years.

Many of these official actions were designed to enforce racial segregation or to protect economic prerogatives and prevent economic mobility and diversity. These changes show up graphically on Mr. Gordon’s maps, as do census data revealing massive white flight. Wide swaths of once-stable communities and neighborhoods have become virtual ghost towns or repositories of grinding poverty.

The final maps reveal a mosaic of foolish choices and bitter consequences.

Metro’s map of service cuts — should the cuts be allowed to stand — would take its place among the most egregious of St. Louis’ historic blunders.

Vibrant mass transit offers one of the few means of reversing these mistakes by connecting people to jobs, education, retail hubs and other opportunities.

And this crisis still can be reversed. With imagination and leadership, the system could emerge with renewed resilience.

Since late 2007, Robert J. Baer, the retired CEO of UniGroup, has served as Metro’s “temporary” president.

In those 16 months, he has restored confidence in the agency’s management and worked doggedly to bridge the budget gap.

St. Louis County voters narrowly defeated a half-cent transit tax in November. It would have put the system on a sound financial footing.

Mr. Baer hopes to take another run at a ballot initiative in April 2010 — and meanwhile find $35 million to quickly restore routes pending the vote.

Local taxpayers have done all the heavy lifting in support of mass transit. Missouri state government, meanwhile, under both Democratic and Republican rule, has failed profoundly to do its fair share. Metro gets less state support — a paltry $1.4 million a year — than any other metro transit system in the nation.

Now’s the time for Missouri to turn that around. It’s the last clear chance.