Where Will the Bowlers Park, The Need for On-Street Parking on Washington Ave

The sign went up last week and the lanes are nearly complete, we are about to have a new bowling alley on Washington Ave. — Flamingo Bowl! I have little doubt that this new venture of the Loop’s Joe Edwards will be successful. People will likely be coming and going during business hours, whatever those may be. The one thing they will not be doing is parking in front of the building.

You see, in our most pedestrian friendly part of town with thousands of new residents we must keep four lanes of traffic free and clear for the rush four hours. On the North side of the 11xx block of Washington Ave, we must keep it open 24/7.

Yes, it is OK to have the intersection of 11th & Washington blocked for a month so that all Westbound traffic is diverted. And yes, construction crews can block the outside lane as needed. But hey, once those are gone we’ve got to get serious about keeping traffic moving. You regular folks can’t even think about blocking traffic here.

Apparently someone at City Hall, the Downtown Partnership or somewhere thinks we have a huge morning and evening rush — enough to warrant two hours of no parking on the street every weekday morning and evening. Any after work folks that want to stop by a place for a happy hour special had best walk or wait until 6pm to do so.

As I’ve indicated before, we do have somewhat of a backlog in the afternoons as drivers head to I-70 and to Illinois. This backlog of cars is caused by poor signal timing as much as anything else. Until the city can manage to time the signals such that cars are not stuck heading Eastbound every afternoon I can see not allowing any parking in that direction. But what about Westbound?

I’ve actually given on-street parking on Washington quite a bit of thought and I want to share this with you. Let’s start over at Memorial Drive and work our way West back to Tucker.

Memorial (3rd) to North Broadway (5th):

In these two blocks, shown above, on-street parking is not currently permitted in either the Westbound or Eastbound direction. Here is what I’d like to see:

• EB Memorial to 4th: Leave this as a right turn only lane, no parking.
• WB Memorial to 4th: Wide area with two lanes going straight ahead and a right turn lane for those going northbound on 4th. I say we allow on-street parking in the current right turn only lane and make the center lane go straight while the other lane would become a right? I’m sure the owners of the hotel that have restaurant/retail space in the base of their building would appreciate it. This would also help create separation from those walking along the sidewalk and passing cars.
  
• EB 4th to Broadway: Allow parking on this entire side of street, but initially prohibit parking for 4:30pm-5:30pm M-F.
• WE 4th to Broadway: Make the area in front of the Missouri Athletic Club a combination no parking/bus stop area. Allow on-street parking on the balance of the block. As Broadway is southbound at this point we don’t need the outside lane for drivers turning right. Potentially prohibit parking for an hour weekday mornings.
• 

North Broadway (5th) to 7th:

• These two blocks are very easy: make provisions for bus stops to connect with the MetroLink stop and allow parking on the balance.
• Consider no-parking for an hour in the AM in the WB direction and an hour in the EB direction in the afternoons.
• Retail space in the buildings on the north side of Washington have not done well. As Pyramid remakes the area into the Mercantile Exchange District we need to think more about the needs of retail business as well as how pedestrians will use the space. On-street parking in these two blocks will help.
• 

7th to 9th:

• EB: Allow on-street parking end to end, except for bus stops and drives. Drivers heading east won’t be turning onto 7th (one-way) so keep traffic moving straight. A couple of spaces just West of 8th could be 15 minute spaces for those running inside the Starbucks. As before, consider a M-F rush hour no-parking provision for the afternoons only.
• WB 7th to 8th: Regular readers know my thoughts on this one. Remove the taxi stand from the sidewalk in front of the convention center and put it on the street, just east of 8th. There is room for a single space between 7th and the circle drive to the convention center — this should be a 15-minute limit “visitor” space for someone wanting to run into the tourist information office on the corner.
• WB 8th to 9th: Place the bus stop between 8th and the exit for the convention center’s circle drive. The remaining space just prior to 9th should be right turn only onto northbound 9th.
• 

9th to Tucker:

• EB 9th to 10th: This is in front of the hotel ballrooms and the retail space at 10th. Put the bus stop anywhere but directly in front of the retail space — in front of the entrance to the ballrooms (seldom used) — just not in front of the retail store. Allow on-street parking here, with the same exception noted about an hour in the afternoon only.
• 
• WB 9th to 10th: Here we have the newly opened Good Works store selling nice furnishings and accessories. Next door we have the Lammert building with the AIA bookstore on the ground floor. These retail entities need on-street parking. I don’t believe their is any morning rush at this point. Anyone heading into the CBD will be in the left turn lane to turn onto 10th so the right lane can be used for parking.
• 
• EB/WB 10th to 11th: On-street parking is allowed here but it is removed two hours each weekday morning and afternoon. We have zero EB morning rush and zero WB afternoon rush. If folks are going to insist on keeping lanes open rather than fixing the timing on the lights at least limit the no-parking provision to something logical — such as the direction of traffic.
• EB 11th to Tucker: Aside from getting the valets at Copia to understand that the meter on the west end of their valet zone is not in fact in their valet zone, this block is pretty good. Same thing as above, there is no morning rush in the EB direction so there is really no reason to keep this free.
• WB 11th to Tucker: Which brings us back to the block with Edwards’ new project, Flamingo Bowl. When parking was permitted from 10th to Tucker they initially put up signs to allow it here as well. That lasted about a week. Construction began on the loft building and once it returned to normal this side of the street was no parking. Hmmm. If you are a retailer would you prefer a space where someone can potentially park in front of your door or a place where traffic speeds by? Much of this lane is marked as right turn only onto Northbound Tucker. Of course, Tucker is now down to one lane up to Cole and then Tucker is closed due to the age of the bridge that creates the underground tunnel. A right turn only lane is not really necessary, especially at this point.

Basically the city is losing money because they are not out collecting revenue off mostly unused street real estate. We can provide convenient parking to help out retailers and make the sidewalks more comfortable for pedestrians without screwing up traffic — we simply prohibit the on-street parking in the direction the traffic is going — Eastbound back to Illinois in the afternoon and to a lesser degree Westbound in the AM. Furthering the retail and restaurant operations toward the river will be welcomed to visitors at our convention center who, upon visiting, don’t necessarily know about the great things happening further West — the lack of parking in the immediate area gives a dead impression. Having on-street parking, even if full, gives the impression that downtown doesn’t have a parking problem.

The Downtown St. Louis Residents Association (DSLRA) is holding a holiday event at the new Flamingo Bowl on the evening of Thursday December 13th.

Is St. Louis The 2nd Most Dangerous City?

Are we really the nation’s 2nd most dangerous city? In a word, maybe. This year St. Louis dropped from the #1 spot to the #2 slot, behind Detroit, as the most dangerous city in America according to a controversial study. So is it true?

As with any collection of numbers, it really depends upon how you put them together. What do you weigh more heavily? What do you include, what do you exclude? There really is no single right way to analyze the FBI crime data. However, according to the FBI and local officials there are a number of wrong ways to do it.

Do I feel unsafe in the city? No. Are there places where I might feel unsafe at 1am, you bet! But there are likely places I’d feel unsafe in the safest city? Absolutely.

To those of us that actually live and work inside the city we know the truth — the city is really a safe place unless you are dealing drugs or happen to live in an area where drugs & gangs constitute the main form of commerce. So, if you are white the city is pretty safe and if you happen to be poor and black you likely live in a very unsafe area. Our suburbanites are likely thinking in their McMansion’s miles from town, “I knew the city wasn’t safe after all.”

One of the common claims against the methodology of the report is that it looks at cities and not metropolitan areas. Unlike St. Louis, many older cities in the country were able to expand their city limits without changing the state constitution. True enough, but it would likely be true that defining Metropolitan regions might prove a challenge. Should St. Louis’ full 16-county region be examined instead of simply the City of St. Louis? Does every police force keep required FBI records or does that only fall to bigger cities?

Frankly if the citizens of our community don’t like the fact that St. Louis is tiny in geography we need to do something about it. Let’s take a big and necessary step and make the city and county one entity. And I don’t mean have the city join the other ninety some municipalities in the county — I mean make the city and county ONE government entity. Other regions have done just that, gotten over decades of incremental growth and small fifdoms. I can hear the objectors now, “…that is never going to happen in St. Louis.” Fine, stop bitching about the size of the city when cities, not regions, are compared.

Of course when cities are compared and we come out on top or near the top you don’t hear any complaining then. Our best water ranking, for example, is based on cities and not an aggregate of the region’s water. How would our water have compared if it was mixed with water from the balance of the region? And when regions are compared we often take credit in the city, not pointing out that we’d never be at or near the top on our own.

What is really sad is that nobody seems to be upset about being #1 in STDs. Where is the RCGA on this one? Relocate your business to St. Louis — if your employees don’t get shot they might get gonorrhea. OK, back to the crime stats.
From the San Jose Mercury News:

This year, the report looked at 378 cities with at least 75,000 people. Its conclusions were based on per-capita rates for homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and auto theft.

OK, so we know what the factors are: per-capita rates for six levels of crime. Again, some people use the false notion that looking at St. Louis as a city (which we are) is unfair because we’ve been unable to grow. So I pulled up some basic data on the top 10 of the list just to see if we can spot a trend.

The numbers are all over the board. Detroit, for example, is twice the geographic area of St. Louis and has a greater population density than us. St. Louis has 13% of our region’s population while the totals range from 1% up to 53%. Oakland California, across the bay from San Francisco, is very close to our same size, has greater density but has a much smaller percentage of the region’s total population. I should note here that Wiki uses total area within a city limits to calculate their density, whereas I listed their land area and excluded the amount of water so if you do the math it doesn’t work out.

So what does all this tell us? First, you can use data to tell any story you want — just a matter of how you arrange the numbers for others. But what I see from the above is that the top 10 list includes a variety of city types — central cities like St. Louis as well as areas like Camden NJ across the river from Philly. All Camden needs to do is lose another 4,319 people and they’ll fall below the 75K minimum threshold for this report.

But what do these cities have in common that I’ve not shown on the chart? Race and poverty. Without checking in each city, I think it is fair to say that whites do not constitute a majority population in any of the ten. This is not to say that if white were a majority the crime rate would be less, as that is certainly not necessarily true. What this does illustrate is a likely “spatial mismatch” between residents and employment — jobs are not in the places where people live.

We already know that affluent whites don’t turn to gangs to survive on the mean cul-de-sac streets of the gated subdivision. For that matter, neither do affluent blacks or anyone else. However, for those on the lower rungs of the region’s economic ladder, sometimes crime may seem the only viable option for a better life.

For me, while this report might have flaws, I think our city fathers should not have spent time trying to get the report shelved rather than published. Instead, we need to take a hard serious look at our city and how wealth and jobs are not shared. The data is based on a per-capita basis so increasing our total population will drop us in the rankings provided our number of crimes remain unchanged. Of course, dropping the total numbers of these crimes must also be a goal.

And while I appreciate the fact that Walgreens and Family Dollar are willing to open suburban-ish stores in some of our poorer neighborhoods to take back the profits to their corporate cities (suburban Chicago and Charlotte NC, respectively), I don’t think turning the city into a generic suburb is the right solution. We are not going to grow the city by making the city look just like everywhere else in our region. We must be urban and act like a city should act. Instead of dinky little houses at the intersection of Natural Bridge and West Florissant we should have 3-5 story structures that scale back into the neighborhoods. Ditto throughout the region.

At a minimum we need to accommodate those of us that chose to get around by means other than the private automobile. This can be a simple as actually planning a sidewalk to connect the public sidewalk to the front door of businesses. I know, simple concept but overlooked in our city and throughout the region. Maybe our market is ready for new commercial mixed-use buildings but we certainly have pedestrians and transit users that need to be accommodated as we expect them to walk to these retailers. Our residents also use bicycles so ensuring they have a place to park and lock their bikes. Over time we can incrementally get more and more urban in our building form, as the market permits. The market, you see, is not a fixed thing. Tastes and shopping patterns shift. Development patterns in the city and region seem etched in stone, never budging.

Something must give or we will continue to have a stagnant population with high per-capita crime rates.

St. Louis’ Planning Director Speaks on Density

This morning Rollin Stanley, St. Louis’ Director of Planning & Urban Design, spoke at the opening plenary session of the Missouri American Planning Association Conference. Stanley took the place of Mayor Francis Slay.

Stanley alluded to spending another week in London coming up shortly — winning another award from an organization that doesn’t disclose the number of entries? Click here to read last year’s post. The topic this time? Who knows. I’m sure I’ll have to do another sunshine law request to get a copy of what is touted as a city-saving plan.

But Stanley’s talk this morning was really good. He is, in fact, a really great public speaker. This morning he talked about changing demographics and how we all need to watch out for it. He indicated that increasingly we will see more and more single person households and how the country will be quickly adding another 100 million people. This led to density — and specifically the need for increased density. Or densification as term goes in planning circles.

He is right, of course. Stanley talked about the need for tax revenues to help support city services. He showed the census tracts for the Central West End and how the population has dropped since the 1970s — some 30% if I am not mistaken. A dropping population cannot support local jobs and retail services.

Yet the city continues to build low-density, often single use, projects in highly urbanized areas. Downtown St. Louis has the urban character is does not through good planning but through the re-use of existing buildings. Buildings our current zoning codes wouldn’t likely allow to be built today.

Another speaker on the plenary this morning was the Chief of Staff to Chicago’s Mayor Daly, Lori Healey. Healey shared real projects that demonstrated, for example, Chicago’s commitment to becoming a green city. Stanley, however, could only illustrate what we are not doing — pointing to the attempt to build a high rise building at the NE corner of Lindell and Euclid — that was stopped due to neighbors. Stanley pointed out the location’s proximity to transit and other amenities and asked, “If we can’t build a high rise here, where can we build a high rise?”

Of course we all know that we can actually have good densification without having high rise buildings popping up on random corners. I’d personally much rather see dense corridors, with localized transit like frequent bus service or streetcars, occupied by 4-8 story buildings their length than the occasional high rise. This discussion of what we build, where we build it and how we fund it needs to happen quickly. As you might suspect, this is really about zoning.

Much of the city is zoning one or two family. Basically, we’ve zoned ourself into low density housing. Sure, there is nothing wrong with single family housing but not everywhere. Our major commercial streets needs to be denser — excellent locations for multi-family housing.

Stanley is a smart man, he understands zoning and urbanity. Unfortunately, he has no power and seemingly little influence without our ward based politics in this city. Hell, he can’t even get nice urban projects built blocks from his house, much less throughout the city. So while he talk on the need for densification was good I just have to wonder how far he will get in city hall. Good luck.

BPS Denies Larry Rice’s Request for a Conditional-Use Zoning Permit

This afternoon St. Louis’ Board of Public Service met to hear numerous issues related to zoning. One of the items was an application from Larry Rice’s New Life Evangelistic Center to open an energy center in an old commercial building located in the middle of residential block in South city.
Numerous neighbors came out strong in opposition earlier this month. Ald. Kirner, who initially supported the project, changed her mind once her constituents began to speak out against the proposal.

Rice may appeal today’s decision to the Board of Adjustment.

Larry Rice’s Conditional-Use Zoning Request to be Decided by BPS Today

This afternoon staff of the Board of Public Service will give their recommendation to the Board of Public Service regarding the request by Larry Rice of the New Life Evangelistic Center for a conditional use permit to operate an Energy Center in an otherwise residential block.  Earlier this month a hearing was held where Rice and others spoke for or against the zoning request.  Today’s meeting is just that — a meeting.  No new testimony will be hear.  The staff will present their recommendation and a decision will be made.

Above, Rice held another fair on this past Saturday.  The public was invited to this event but at this time Rice had not secured necessary approvals to hold such events.  This image was taken in the morning as they were setting up.

Rice had reinstalled his sign, also not yet approved, for the Saturday fair.

The white “sculpture” was actually a left over from a prior owner.  But the signs leaning against them are part of Rice’s instructional materials.

Later in the day, as they were closing up, I went by again on my way home.  Numerous vehicles were parked on the grass in the area where he wants to put an 18-car parking lot (original drawings submitted by Rice showed 38 cars).

I suppose out in the boondocks, where Rice has other energy centers, parking on fields is commonplace.  But not so much in residential neighborhoods.
The meeting is to begin at 1:45pm this afternoon in room 208 of City Hall.  I suspect the staff will recommend denial of the request and the Board of Public Service will agree.  If so, Larry Rice can appeal the decision to the Board of Adjustment.  Conversely, if NLEC gets their conditional use permit an aggrieved citizen can appeal to the Board of Adjustment.  I’m sure the citizens in the area will appeal if Rice prevails today, the big question is what will Rice do if he loses?