Happy Birthday Marti

Today would have been Marti Frumhoff’s 52nd birthday.  Frumhoff, a good friend to many of us, passed on May 16, 2007 (see post).

Two years ago we celebrated our birthdays together — her 50th and my 40th.  We’re both Pisces.  My birthday is just five days after hers on the 28th.

Marti had a big impact on my life in the last 18 months of hers.  She was among the people that convinced me to pursue a Masters degree in Urban Planning at Saint Louis University. We had a course together in the Fall of 2006.  In April 2007 Marti was at my house and she forced me into her car — she was going to take me to meet Christopher Thiemet who had recently opened Circa Properties.  Circa, she told me, is where I needed to be selling real estate.  She was right.  She died three weeks later.

I made the move to Circa and I’ll finsh my Masters in December.  I will always have Marti to thank for still being an important part of my life.

Her legacy lives on in organizations and events she started such as the Rehabber’s Club and the Big BIG Tour.  This year is the 10th year of the Big BIG Tour:

Big BIG Tour, St Louis’ only FREE City-wide tour of for-sale properties will kick off its Tenth Annual Tour on Sunday, March 29 from 10am to 3pm. The starting point is Mullanphy ILC Elementary School, located at 4221 Shaw Boulevard near Missouri Botanical Garden. Mullanphy School is a great central location, allowing attendees to easily explore the Big BIG Tour properties listed throughout the City.

Go out and do something positive for the city today in honor of Marti.

First Month of Google Analytics

I’ve always had access to stats for my blog since its inception on Halloween 2004.  But until a month ago I had not had Google Analytics.  But I now have had it for a full 30 days.  Here are some of the numbers for January 22nd through February 20th:

• 20,782 visits
• 33,040 page views
• 9,592 absolute unique visitors

More visitors use the Firefox browser than Internet Explorer.

Here are a few more bits of info:

• 97% of the visits were from the United States.  Canada was 2nd with the UK 3rd.
• 68% of the visits came from the state of Missouri. Rounding out the top 10 states were Illinois, California, New York, Texas, Florida, Virginia, Minnesota, the District of Columbia and Colorado.  I had visits from all 50 states.
• The top 10 cities in Missouri were St. Louis (duh), St. Ann, Maryland Heights, Fenton, Ballwin, Lake St. Louis, Columbia, Hazelwood, Arnold, and Jefferson City.
• 84.36% were from Windows with 14.50% from Macintosh  (smart choice).  Linux was 3rd with the iPhone 4th, each with less than 1%
• Of the Windows visits, 79.55% were from XP with only 17.72% from Vista.  Just under 2% were from Windows 2000.
• The most common connection was Charter Communications
• 22% of visits came from Google vs 3% from Yahoo and fewer than 1% from MSN.
• The top 3 blogs referring people to my site are Ecology of Absence, STL Rising and STL Dotage.  Thank you gentlemen!
• More than half the traffic came directly to the site.
• 971 page titles were viewed in the period.

I’m a geek, I just love this stuff.   It will be interesting to see the numbers after I have 6-12 months of stats.  Thank you for reading!

Poll, Should St. Louis’ Municipal Elections Go Non-Partisan?

St. Louis likes to pretend like we have multiple active political parties.  We don’t.  This year the Green party has a Mayoral primary but that is it.  For decades now the real election has been the Democratic primary with the general election a month later simply being a formality — an expensive formality.

We have no good reason to continue to have partisan primary elections followed by a general.  None.  It costs taxpayers additional money and requires two trips to the polls when one would suffice.

In the 23rd Ward we have seven candidates in the Democratic primary.  Reading their answers to my questionnaire you can tell that not all are Democrats.  But to win an election in this city, it is said, you must run as a Democrat. When I ran four years ago I remember talking to an older man going in to vote.  “I’m voting for the Democrat, ” he said.  It was the primary and both candidates were Democrats. There was no Republican, Green or Libertarian ballot as an option.

Please vote in the poll in the upper right corner of the home page and share your comments below.

If Claire Can Twitter So Can The Aldermen

I’m fortunate to have, as my representative on the Board of Aldermen, the youngest (and tallest) member: Kacie Starr Triplett.  She twitters.  That is she sends out posts on the micro blogging site, Twitter.  She also has an infrequently updated blog.  Of all 28 Aldermen she does a far better job them most.  She was just starting grade school when some of her collegues were first elected to the Board of Aldermen.  Micro blogging is so named because the maximum length of a post is 140 characters.

But it is not just the kids doing the Twitter thing.  Missouri’s junior Senator Claire McCaskill also posts regularly to Twitter.  McCaskill is 55.

Here are a few samples of Senator McCaskill’s tweets:

New Chief of Staff on board March 1. We will miss Sean(went to WH), but Julie Dwyer is gonna be terrific.Change is good.

Things look good on compromise. Officially got sub committee on contracting. Going to basement to grab lunch while walking.

So Senator McCaskill gives little tidbits here and there.  Ald Triplett does the same.  Here are a few of her recent entries:

Just left a meeting with the owners of Union Station. Discussing upcoming renovations and new Marriott hotel

I really liked this one:

My eyes are burning from cigarette smoke in Loop restaurant. Ingrain in Brain: SmokeFree. SmokeFree

During a recent meeting of the Board of Aldermen she posted:

Friday board meeting. Nothing too interesting or out of the ordinary today.

Less than a half hour later she posted:

I spoke too soon. Troupe vs. Bosley on advance warning signage for red light cameras. Several point of orders throughout debate

McCaskill now has over 6,000 followers on Twitter.  Triplett has 93.  I have 118.  Bill Streeter is a mad man on Twitter and has 1,081 followers.The Post-Dispatches’ Jake Wagman has 286 followers. For the most part my blog posts are my only tweets — posted automatically using my feed so the follower gets headline and link.  I sometimes post commentary. Facebook gets more updates than Twitter.

But the beauty of Twitter is that you can follow the tweets of others without them needing to approve or reciprocate.   I like seeing tweets from both my U.S. Senator and Alderman.

One is middle fifties and one is late 20s.  Both realize they are in public office and they have an obligation to communicate with the public.  While each likely has constituents lacking internet access, I’m glad they do not limit their communications to the least technological.

In our current times using only one avenue for communications just doesn’t cut it.  Neighborhood meetings are great for those able to attend.  Newsletters are costly to produce and are not timely.  Pols can’t call everyone to give verbal updates.

Twitter is free.  For elected officials good communications need not mandate a large staff or a big budget, just a smart phone.

Here are links to the Twitter posts of the folks mentioned above:

• Claire McCaskill
• Kacie Starr Triplett
• Steve Patterson
  
• Bill Streeter
  
• Jake Wagman

Lost?  Confused?  If so read more about Twitter on Wikipedia here.

Seven Lanes, No Waiting

Seven lanes, no waiting.  No, not the checkout, that has plenty of waiting.  I’m talking roads.  We’ve got ridiculously wide roads around here.

Jefferson & Market come to mind.  Jefferson North of I-64 and Market West of Jefferson each have seven lanes — three travel lanes per direction and a center turn lane.  Seven!  These wide roads pre-date our interstate system.  Roads like these two, Natural Bridge and others were widened to serve a city with a population over 800,000 and expected to top a million by 1970. Instead of passing a million residents we were at 622,236 in 1970 and by 2000 we were under 350,000.  Yet our roads are still designed for much greater traffic than is typically present.

When the highways like I-70, I-64, I-55 and I-44 these excessively wide roads returned to their prior status as local arterial roads.  Except that somebody forgot to come back and trim down the road width.

The new Jefferson viaduct between I-64 and Chouteau is finally open in both directions.  It contains two travel lanes per direction, a reasonable number.  I can think of no arterial roads in the City of St. Louis that need more than two travel lanes per direction.  It is no surprise that the areas adjacent to these wide roads are lifeless.

Formerly wide streets like Delmar (West of Kingshighway) have received new planted medians to consume excess width.  Ditto for Grand between Arsenal & I-44.  I’ve expressed before my wish to use the width for modern streetcar lines.  However, medians can be built down the center now and streetcars run in the outside lanes later.  One thing is certain, these streets are not going to magically reinvent themselves.  Government intervention created the current widths and it will take government intervention (aka $$$) to remake them in a more reasonable for.

Of course funding projects in the city today is more challenging because we have fewer people to split the cost.  Back then they were clearing away obstrucxtions to make room for an increasing number of automobiles.  Today we’d be spending money for different purposes — to reactivate the streets and the private property along them.  Some of the adjacent land is public such as the long vacant Pruitt-Igoe site at Jefferson & Cass (map).  Redoing Jefferson & the Pruitt-Igoe site go hand and hand.

If only we had slimming these streets ready to go as “shovel ready.”