Moore started her own group, Missouri Coalition for Better Transportation. I wrote this month about her attempts to get the Justice Department to investigate disparities in transportation funding in Missouri.

The column had a mistake. Moore told me Sterman was part of the group.

He’s not. It’s not that he and Moore don’t support the same general goals. They do.

But like many civic projects in St. Louis, the process of breaking up coalitions is easier than building them. Moore and Sterman both want to see the state start participating in funding mass transit in Missouri, as states with big cities all over the nation do. They just disagree on how to get there.

This is where Sterman’s script-flipping comes in.

He’s written a draft of a white paper that he hopes urban leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City consider as a road map to transit-funding success. He thinks the Northside-Southside route can be built for $1.5 billion with better planning. But key to paying for it is getting about 40 percent of the funding from state sources.

“It’s fallacy to think we can expand MetroLink without some sort of support from the state,” Sterman says.