St. Louis’ Grand Experiment is the Norm in Chicago

The norm in the St. Louis region is for roads to have lots of lanes and no on-street parking.  On-street parking slows motorists and the traffic engineers will have none of that, it is all about speed for them.  But multiple lanes of speeding cars are bad for cyclists and pedestrians alike.

While the South Grand retail district (Arsenal to Utah) has always had on-street parking it has also had our lanes for through traffic.  Currently an experiment is being tested — reducing a six block section to three lanes (two plus center turn).  Have to see if these new radical ideas will work you know.

Anyone that has ever driven a car or ridden a bicycle in Chicago knows the configuration will work wonders.  Chicago has 120% more population density per square mile than St. Louis (12,649 vs 5,725).  They have lots of people, cars and bike.  Yet many of their major streets have the same basic configuration — two parking lanes, two travel lanes and a center turn lane.

Above is a view of this configuration on North Halsted.  On the right is Home Depot.  As you can see the travel lane is wide enough to accommodate motorists and cyclists.    New construction is built up to the sidewalk, in part, because streets have on-street parking.

In spaces you have a hole in the urban fabric (left above) with a parking lot here and there.  But they don’t toss out their urban principals and declare the area an auto-centric zone.

The above is a good distance from downtown Chicago.  The newish building on the right, with retail at grade and residential above, can relate to the street because it only has two lanes of traffic and because of the on-street parking.  But go out further into the inner ring suburbs and the pattern continues.

This section of Roosevelt is well outside the City of Chicago and many miles from downtown yet the street pattern is the same with only two travel lanes and on-street parking to support street oriented buildings.  Without the on-street parking you’d get standard sprawl — buildings isolated in their own parking lots.

Further out in the suburbs the two travel lanes become four but the on-street parking remains.  This ensures buildings will be built up to the street.

There is no need to test the 2 travel + turn lane configuration on South Grand.  It works and works well.

I believe if our streets were more like Chicago’s (fewer lanes, on-street parking, urban in-fill) we’d be in a position to re-urbanize & re-populate our city.  We need to extend this throughout the entire city as well as the first ring of suburbs.  Hampton, Kingshighway, Natural Bridge, Market — every street in town.  After a couple of decades we’ll see the change taking root.  If we can’t do it on six blocks of Grand I’m afraid we’ll never get to where I think we should be.

– Steve Patterson

Pro Sports Teams in St. Louis

St. Louis has a long history with professional sports teams, but, except for the Blues and the Cardinals, there’s also been a lot of changes over the years. The Browns, the Hawks and the football Cardinals have all left town. We invested heavily to get the Rams. We were once the epicenter for professional wrestling, and we currently support, among other sports, roller derby (ArchRivalRollerGirls.com).

Supporters of pro sports view them as being critical to a major city’s identity and for attracting new businesses. This is backed up with public investments like those in the Jones Dome, Busch III and Scottrade Center. But there are always groups advocating for more and different. One thing St. Louis lacks, in the traditional sense, is a pro basketball team. The Hawks were here from 1955 to 1968, but they were sold and moved to Atlanta. There are also “newer” pro sports leagues that are growing around the country, in sports that appeal more to the younger generations, sports like soccer and lacrosse.

With some regularity, we’ll see proposals, many times in Illinois, to build a new pro sports facility to support one of these new leagues. The Rams continue to make noises about the need to improve or replace the Jones Dome.  We just had a successful weekend of bike racing and the possibility of bringing the Olympics back to St. Louis is always a remote one.  There are those of us who would like to see a bigger investment in expanding our trail system, and there are others who value motorsports like NHRA and NASCAR.  Heck, there are even people willing to spend money watching monster trucks or lawnmower racing.

This all boils down to priorities.  We can’t be everything to everybody, so choices have to be made.  The Cardinals and the Blues seem to be relatively satisfied, for the time being, which leaves everyone else.  Should we focus our efforts on keeping the Rams or should we try to get an Arena Football team?  Would pro soccer be a better investment than pro lacrosse?  And should St. Louis work to keep any new facility in or near downtown, ar should we let other cities in the region share in both the glory and the headaches any pro team brings?

– Jim Zavist

Defining Urban

The title of this blog is Urban Review St. Louis.  Its subtitle is “a look at urban planning and related politics in the St. Louis region.”  While we can all pretty much agree about what “planning” and “politics” likely encompass, there seems to be a big disparity about what “urban” actually might be.  The dictionary definition is fairly simple: “of, pertaining to, or designating a city or town.”  The reality seems to be much more complex, and likely mirrors the definition of pornography (“I’ll know it when I see it”).  Is the urban threshold crossed when population density or the number of dwelling units passes an arbitrary number per acre?  When buildings exceed a certain number of stories or when the front and/or back yards shrink or disappear completely?  When sidewalks and alleys appear and residential curb cuts disappear?  When true mixed use and viable public transit really function? When parking goes from convenient to a real pain in the a**?

New Town St. Charles and Seaside, Florida, both look a lot like parts of Soulard and San Francisco, but I doubt any of us would describe either of them as being “urban”.  Parts of our north side have fewer dwelling units or residents per acre than parts of Chesterfield.  East St. Louis is closer to our downtown than many city neighborhoods are, yet the only thing urban about the place is the wasteland part.  College dorms, state prisons and high-rise condos all have similar densities, yet have completely different interactions with the urban environment.  The core of every midwestern small town, the part laid out before 1930, is “walkable”, but few would be considered to be “urban”.

My guess is that our individual definition is a direct result of where we grew up. Like Steve, I grew up in a series of residential suburbs.  Going away to college, I experienced and learned to appreciate both higher-density urban living and the joys of owning an older home.  As an architect, I’ve worked on both urban and suburban projects, in everything from single-family residential to high-rise commerical structures.  So my view is that pretty much every part of St. Louis City is “urban”, even places like St. Louis Hills and the private streets in the CWE.  If I’d grown up on the upper east side of Manhattan in New York City, my viewpoint would most likely be much different.

The nearest common denominator for “urban” that I can identify are the old streetcar lines that were the preferred/de facto choice for transportation in many cities during the first forty years of the twentieth century.  They were the genesis for most of the commercial and mixed-use architecture that seems to define the urban ideal today.  They were also responsible for the growth of the many walkable urban neighborhoods that abut these old business districts.  Surprisingly (or not), these districts and neighborhoods were usually built with little direct government design review.  The buildings, both commercial and residential, were built simply because they were what sold, they were what the buyers of the time wanted.  The residential lots were relatively narrow because it maximized the number within walking distance of public transit.  More-expensive, higher-density, multi-family buildings could be justified if they were closer to the streetcar line.

All this changed, drastically, in the last half of the twentieth century, as the private automobile replaced public transportation as the preferred and most-prevalent form of individual transport.  Not surprisingly, architecture and what passes for urban planning evolved to reflect this changing environment.  The question then becomes what exactly is suburban and what is the new urban?  Clayton here and Tyson’s Corner in Maryland are both prime examples of the new urban – both started out as rural crossroads and both are now dense and important economic centers.  And while both are now integrating rail public transit, they remain primarily autocentric urban environments.

Every urban area has shades of grey, places/neighborhoods with very high densities and ones with lower, some even approaching suburban, densities.  Urban, to me, is both simple and complex.  Urban equals dense and diverse, in people, architecture, jobs, incomes and streetscapes.  There are no truly right or wrong answers, just an ongoing, hopefully denser, evolution.  St. Louis’ fundamental challenge is that we were once 800,000, we’re now 350,000, and many of us want to get back to 500,000 or 600,000.  We have the infrastructure.  We have the diversity.  We can focus on what was.  We can focus on a certain urban form.  We can be idealists.  But to really succeed, we need to temper our idealism with making sure we attract both new residents and new businesses AND keeping the ones that already here.

– Jim Zavist

If St. Louis Had the Density of Other Cities

Many think population density is all bad or all good.  To me it depends up0n how the population uses the land.

Much is said about St. Louis’ peak of 856,796 in 1950 and how over the last 50 years we lost over half a million people out of our small 61.9 square mile city.  We will never again be at that level but how we use our land with our current population level is important.  I think we can do better with the population we have.

For grins I thought it would be interesting to what the population of the City of St. Louis would be if we had the recent density of other major cities.  I picked 13 cities that came into my head and used density figures available from Wikipedia.  The results were both surprising and intriguing:

Portland OR has lower density than St. Louis?  Interesting.  I think they have a different mix — a very high density center transitioning to a very low density edge.  Oklahoma City is massive in total land area but with only a few rare exceptions it is uniformly low-density.  St. Louis of 1950 had greater population density of current day Chicago? Yes, St. Louis, in 1950, was more densely populated than Chicago today!

I’d like to think that with good planning (form-based zoning) we could aspire to a Seattle or Baltimore level of population density – at least 7,000 persons per square mile.

What this looks like is increasing the density along our major corridors such as Olive, Jefferson, Kingshighway, Natural Bridge, etc.

Goal posts should be something like:

• 6,000/sq. mile (371,400) by 2020
• 6,500/sq. mile (402,350) by 2030
• 7,000/sq. mile (433,300) by 2040
• 7,500/sq. mile (464,250) by 2050
• 8,000/sq. mile (495,200) by 2060

This growth will not happen organically like it did a century ago. Our current zoning and other policies prevents such growth.  It will require hard work to create the plan & zoning for dense corridors.  These will need, and will support, excellent mass transit.  Our tidy streets of single family, 2-family and 4-family buildings need not change from their current density levels.  The growth will occur along the corridors that last century changed into to-centric.  Hell, basically.

I doubt I’ll be around for the 2060 Census but I want to steer us in the right direction so by that time we can reach this goal.  Plus the US population is expected to grow some 45% by 2050.  If we grew at the expected national rate we’d have 514,000 by 2050.  So to have 464,250 by 2050 (31% growth) seems like a reasonable expectation.

We have the vacant buildings ready for new occupants.  We have the vacant land for in-fill construction. Still need to work on the schools to educate the youngsters.

– Steve Patterson

New Crown Food Mart Strip Center Lacks Required ADA Acess Route

Just North of downtown at Cass & North 13th (map link) an entire block has become a Crown Food Mart strip center with gas station & car wash.  Food choices are very limited in the immediate area so this will serve a need.  The problem is the auto-centric/suburban design.

I’m not talking about the design of the building.  I’m talking about the site design.  The site is surrounded on all sides with streets.  At one time buildings were built up to the street.  A modern example is the strip at Grand & Arsenal — store in front, parking in back.

The sidewalks are generous and have street trees.  They’ll see lots of use too because the area is surrounded by residential with residents that don’t all have cars.  Besides, why drive to a place you can see just a few blocks away?

The problem for the pedestrian is the sidewalk is great if you want to walk around the perimeter of the site but not actually approach any of the stores.  Like so much new construction, this development completely ignores the concept of an ADA access route.  In the short time I was taking these pics I saw a woman walking North and a man heading toward the development in a wheelchair.  He was on Florissant Ave because the area’s sidewalks are in such poor condition, if they exist.

But the incompetent designers of this development wrongly assumed that all customers would arrive by car and that real pedestrians would not use their new sidewalks to get to the businesses.  You may recall the wheelchair bound woman who was struck & killed by a motorist on Delmar at Jefferson after leaving the Crown Food Mart at that intersection.  The city was to blame in that case because the sidewalks were non-existent or not passable.  But like this new location, that location doesn’t have provisions to get from the public sidewalk to the front doors of the businesses. Pedestrians are subjected to enter/exit in the same spots as cars.

Cars & pedestrians are not mutually exclusive, or at least they shouldn’t be.  The way we do it here is we design for cars at the exclusion of pedestrians.  Good design designs for both pedestrians and motorists.  It is possible.  It just takes that as a goal — or a requirement by the city.

– Steve Patterson