It was early 2009 and the Great Recession was taking its toll. Metro was cutting public transit routes in St. Louis, and Gwen Moore started getting complaints from her students.

She was teaching business and international management classes at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and many of her students said they were having a hard time getting to class or to work with the reduced transit routes and schedule.

Moore approached the problem like an academic. She dug into the numbers, trying to understand why there weren’t more transit opportunities in St. Louis, especially in neighborhoods serving people at or near the poverty line. Her research focused on state transportation funding, and what she found made her mad.

“What I discovered was, the funds were not being distributed appropriately,” Moore said.

In fact, like in many areas of state spending, St. Louis and other cities in Missouri — the places where more people live and most of the economic activity in the state is — were getting (and still are) much less than their fair share of transportation dollars. “They need to spend the money where people actually live and drive.”

In Missouri, that’s not the case.