Ummm… the dome/convention center and Lumiere bring tons of people downtown. If there were a pedestrian path, they would certainly be two of the main destinations driving traffic.
Go down around the dome any day of the week and you will see it is dead. Sure 8-9 times a year there is a football game — we won't even have that this year. But on a daily basis it is a huge dead zone.
There are at least a few more events than just (10, counting preseason) Rams games I'm sure. It was really crowded around the dome for some High School games and cheerleading events this year. It hosted Sweet Sixteen basketball last year. Plus, it's a good complement to the convention center since for the last few years lots of the rams tickets are sold to out of towners that fill hotel rooms.
What would you have it replaced with, an expanded North Side project?
The question is what could replace the dome that would create more summed activity over the course of a year. The same goes for Lumiere, which in my limited observation does add to the traffic in the landing. Of course, we agree that Broadway and 4th create an insurmountable obstacle to foot traffic. Opening that up would be a game changer for Washington Ave and Lumiere/Landing traffic. By the way, is there a plan to open it up whenever the new I-70 brdige is built?
You want Dead Space just move your camera 4 blocks north.
Yes, we're an autocentric community in an autocentric nation – tell me something I don't know. You can go to many, many other parts of the city and find the same thing, especially around any major sports venue. Pick one – Busch Stadium, Chafietz Arena, that mall on Manchester, the Pruitt-Igoe site, the old Lemp Brewery, Carondolet Park, Fairgrounds Park, etc, etc, etc. On “an average Tuesday morning”, most people are either at work or in school, and not on the sidewalk, anywhere in town. Change it to a nice spring or fall day, on a weekend or over the lunch hour, and you will likely find more pedestrians.
Which gets to your definition of “dead” space. Yours seems to be an absence of pedestrians and/or pedestrian-oriented activities, which is pretty narrow. This example shows multiple vehicles, a variety of structures in a range of architectural styles and a range of audible, olafactory and visual stimulators, including the Lumiere media show – far from “dead”. If you want dead, I'd look more toward the Pruitt-Igoe site, much of East St. Louis or the vacant Ford and Chrysler plant sites.
I get it – walkable, medium-density urban neighborhoods are great and have many advantages, but why should they be considered to be the ONLY “right” answer? If we're going to have pro sports teams, we're going to have “underused” arenas. If we're going to move people quickly in their own vehicles, we're going to have freeways – would you want to drive back to OKC if the quickest you could travel were 25 or 30 mph? If we're going to have casinos, they're going to be gaudy. We live in a country where we all have choices. You've picked what works best for you; why shouldn't everyone else be allowed to pick what they believe works best for them?
It is hard to believe you justify this urban planning nightmare in any fashion. You keep claiming the mantle of choice. The choice is between crap and bullshit. so many people choose bullshit, so what? Apparently you are unaware of what is happening in the United States, how corporate power owns most politicians and by extension policy formation. This has been going on for decades. Standard Oil, Firestone Tire and GM bought up trolleys across the nation in the 50's and shut them down, including St. Louis. Urban policy has been bowing to the big concrete guys, the big land developers, the big chain stores to create an auto centric society. It was not a democratic choice by any stretch of the imagination. Portland is an example of a city with leadership that went another direction, as did other cities, especially outside the US, where corporate money is not allowed to rule. If you want to live in crap that is up to you, I wouldn't expect citizens to support your views though, that is exactly what this blog is about, improving the urban environment. Your faux choice argument is tiresome. When there is evidence of an ongoing, democratic, planning process that includes the community, then perhaps real choices can be made for our future and the future of our children.
And your repeated pronouncements of class warfare and GM killing the strreetcars are tiresome, as well. St. Louis in 2011 is completely different from St. Louis in 1921, just like St. Louis in 1921 was completely different from St. Louis in 1831. In 1921, the city was sprawling way past Grand Avenue and the streetcars and railroads were driving blacksmiths and stables out of business. Teamsters were being forced to give up their horse teams and forced to learn to operate trucks. What had been clear, blue skies were filled with coal smoke and the occasional airplane. Vast forests had been cleared for block after block of brick structures, and the Mississippi riverfront had been paved over to handle all those steamboats. Rivers and creeks were being relocated into tight channels and underground sewers.
All of this happened through a mix of grand planning and private entrepreneurship. There were winners and losers, people who embraced progress and people who couldn't understand, much less accept, all these newfangled choices. Progress happens, and, in retrospect, there will be good decisions and bad ones. When the voters approved financing for building the dome, the majority who voted were convinced that it was better for the city and the region than not building it. When the freeway was being built in the 1950's and 1960's, our leaders were positive that it was what was needed to keep downtown strong, just like they were sure that more parking garages were needed. With the clarity of 20/20 hindsight, maybe not so much.
But the biggest difference between St. Louis (and Stuttgart and Shanghai) of 1921 and 2011 is the availability, and the overwhelming embrace, of the automobile as the preferred choice for daily, personal transportation. It requires roads and parking lots, but it's how 95%+ of every trip is made and it informs our urban fabric at every level. I own one, my wife owns two. Steve owns one and I'm pretty sure that you own one (or more), as well. In 1921, none of us would have, and we'd be lucky to own a horse, given the costs of stabling and daily maintenance, so public transportation or walking would have been our only options. In 1921, a good, connected sidewalk and streetcar system would be a high priority, as would be higher densities, to minimize walking and to maximize transit frequency. In 2011, a good, connected street and highway system is a high priority, as are parking at every destinantion, while minimizing actual travel distances becomes secondary. An extra mile or two is irrelevent if you're driving; it's a big issue if you're walking.
Which gets us back to the original question – what constitutes “dead space”? Is it space dedicated to transportation instead of structures? Is it space without pedestrians? How do people in cars compare to people walking? What role do materials, graphics and electronic media play in the equation? Are parks dead space if there aren't ballfields and roads? Is a lake dead if it doesn't have boats and water-level activity? Is there a difference in our expectations when we're driving and when we're walking? And, as multiple discussions on this blog illustrate, should designing for pedestrians or vehicles be the bigger priority?
Choice. I would hardly call eighty or ninety years of pro-car marketing/PR(opaganda) drilled into the heads of every American citizen “choice”. And, Jim, if you don't think there isn't a class war going on in our Nation today, wealthy against the middle class and the poor, then you may as well gouge out your eyes, because your blindness could not be more profoundly manifest.
How many teenagers aspire to obtain a monthly transit pass? How many college students? How many soccer moms? Is it because of “eighty or ninety years of pro-car marketing/PR(opaganda)” or because most people choose the convenience of their own vehicle? Even if it costs more, a lot more? Even if it means sitting in traffic? Even if it means sprawl makes more sense than higher densities? What sort of marketing does Metro do to counteract all of this “pro-car marketing/PR(opaganda)”? What has Metro done to make transit more attractive to the non-transit-dependent rider? When was the last time one of their vehicles was carjacked? Even the criminals aren't very interested! And, do you own and use a car? I'm not a hypocrite, I'm a realist.
I’d aspire to obtain a monthly transit pass if the MetroLink came to St. Charles! haha. I don’t know how old you are, or what generation you identify with, but most people I know love the idea of “walkable cities” with well developed light-rail. Why do you think so many people my age aspire to get out of St. Louis? It’s because they want to experience life in a “real” city – cities that don’t have desolate nothingness taking up prime real-estate in the middle of downtown!
Look at New York City: Madison Square Garden is a giant arena, but Penn Station is located underneath. It’s like two for the price of one, and they’re located in the center of the city, confined neatly within a single block. In St. Louis we have the giant arena, but next to a hideous expanse of unwalkable boulevards and highways. Does NYC need for Madison Square Garden to be right next to a busy highway for it to be successful? NO! We do rely on our cars in St. Louis more than we have to, even with the Metro system as-is. This photo is evidence of typically poor urban planning in St. Louis, but I don’t think we should just live with it. With the right urban planning, the dome could be even more successful.
FYI, I’m a 58 year old guy who served 5 years on Denver’s Regional Transportation District Board before moving here in 2004. I’m an architect who’s both worked with developers and been heaviily involved as a volunteer in community design issues. I get it. My observations come from both trying to change the public’s behavior, on multiple levels, combined with the perspective of an outsider, looking at St. Louis without a lot of preconceptions.
The least walkable part of the Jones Dome is not the part in the picture, it’s the part on the north side, where the block-long loading dock creates a truly inhospitable pedestrian environment. Compare that to Denver’s downtown Convention Center, where all truck access is located on the second level and a light rail station is located inside the center itself, not two blocks away.
St. Louis obviously has a lot of walkable infrastructure and neighborhoods, since much of it was laid out in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. But it’s also pretty clear that many residents and visitors are CHOOSING the personal convenience of a single-occupant motor vehilce over public transit for the majority of their trips (much like Denver), which, in turn, is informing how our infrastructure is being used, abused and altered. Or, to put it another way, we live in a very walkable environment but many of us CHOOSE not to walk – you can lead a horse to water . . .
We can argue all we want about the chicken-or-egg status of public transit today. St. Louis, at one point, had a robust investment in privately-financed, rail-based public transit (streetcars and intercity passenger rail), which was both the best alternative for many residents and informed our built environmrnt. That investment was slowly abandoned as its customers found “better” (for them, individually) choices in the automobile and air travel, no different than commerce moving from riverboats to rail to trucks. People do cost-benefit analyses every day, and chose the best option that works for them!
On the transit side of the equation, there are three main viable ridership groups that actually use public transit, here and elsewhere in the USA, transit-dependent riders (the poor, the disabled, the young and the old, who either can’t physically drive or can’t afford to drive), commuters (going between the same two points every day, to work or school, driving the demand for more freeway lanes), and people going to special events (where providing access and parking for everyone becomes impractical – opening day, Rams, Blues, the home show, Mardi Gras, etc.).
Metro’s focus (compared to RTD’s) is skewed more toward meeting the needs of the first group. Part of it is political and part of it is cultural. Few businesses here embrace public transit as an option they want to encourage their employees to use (BJC and Wash U being the two big exceptions). By providing “free” parking, while not providing “free” transit passes, there’s a message being sent and a mesage being received by the employees. Whether this is the “fault” of Metro or the likes of A-B, Monsanto, SLU or Amerern is up for debate, but the results are pretty clear.
As Warren Buffett has said.”There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.” At least I am speaking truth, your constant dismissal of real problems and poor design claiming it is choices people have made is cavalier and arrogant at best. To excuse this dead space in any fashion is ridiculous. Double talk and pretending that somehow it is legitimate by asking what is a dead space is yet another distraction from the bankrupt planning process that is still in place today. The urban form of the St. Louis region and its poor outcomes are the result of favoring policies that put money into the pockets of financial insiders over the interests of citizens. It is simple to see if you are willing to spend any time doing an analysis. Compare this to Helsinki, Finland, a city and country with around the same population as St. Louis and Missouri. Helsinki and all of Finland has a robust transit system, so that 40% of Finn’s decide they don’t need automobiles. That‘s what real choice looks like. And that’s what a government working for the interests of its citizens can accomplish.
You speak your “truth”, I speak mine; my arrogance only serves to offset yours. But I do agree that our “poor outcomes are the result of favoring policies that put money into the pockets of financial insiders over the interests of citizens.” For the life of me, I don't understand why a football stadium is located in the heart of our downtown, even if it tries to be a multi-purpose facility – most other cities put them in less prime areas. I also agree that I-70 creates a major barrier between downtown and the riverfront. But like I've already said, we need to have a discussion and agree on just what exactly constitutes “dead space” before we try and label any part of the city as “dead”. It seems like the main/only criteria Steve has is pedestrian activity, followed by the number of travel lanes. I place a higher negative value vacant land and empty streets, devoid of both vehicles and people – East St. Louis / Granite City is a prime example.
A discussion of dead space characteristics is not the issue. The issue is how such a dead space as Steve has portrayed could come into being in such a prime location in the central business district. To partially answer that question look at the regional transportation body, (East West Gateway). It is divorced from any placemaking planning bodies. What is worse is that the ultimate decision makers are political hacks from munis and surrounding counties. Their knowledge of urban planning could fit in a thimble. Yet they come in toting recommendations from their corporate supporters. Naturally those projects get funded, to the financial benefit of these same corporate insiders, who in turn contribute their yearly bribes to the same political hacks. Unfortunately what I am describing is not hypothetical, but more or less how the process really works. So the community ends up with dead spaces as Steve describes, while drivers, oblivious to what is going on beneath them, take convenient routes. The city and region is sacrificed to outsiders of all stripes, while residents live with the aftermath. There is a looming crisis in St. Louis. It could be as serious as Japan. The potential for oil to become scarce or unaffordable is real, it may take decades this to happen (I don’t think so, we've had many warnings). But in any case it will also take decades for the region to straighten out the short sighted planning models now in place. An early collapse of oil would make much of the region unlivable. The dead space Steve cites is a symptom of these larger failures. It is why St. Louis keeps losing population. I used the example of Finland in a post above. In contrast to St. Louis, Helsinki and the rest of Finland would still function fine on severely limited oil resources. It does no good to blame people for using their car over transit, or say it is the citizens fault because of the choices they make. Alternatives to the current planning regime, and to the dead spaces they create are not offered. The real gap is in leadership, St. Louis has none.
The question might be framed differently, how would maximize or make space more beneficial? In this case, you can't do much with a freeway running through it. Ideally, you re-introduce a Blvd between Poplar Street bridge and the New Mississippi River Bridge and eliminate this stretch of I-70 outright. Unfortunately, it is not going to happen.
So what do you do. First, I do like the Arch Grounds proposal that creates a new Wash Ave interchange with the freeway and eliminates the existing Park Service Garage (parking should be off Wash Ave or in Laclede's Landing). While its not ideal, it does bring some sense of organization to the current mess of Wash Ave, side streets and Eads bridge. Second, the Arch Grounds proposal does leave open the possibility of a blvd between Wash Ave and the new Mississippi Bridge.
How do you get to the second option, no I-70 between Wash Ave and the new MRB? You start talking to Stan K and Rams. See what he wants, see how you can incorporate it into the stalled Bottle works project and above else, convince him that a BLVD replacing I-70 between the stadium and Laclede's landing/Casino will do wonders. Even if you don't build on the space its a heck of an area to establish a tailgate venue in the meantime
I’d aspire to obtain a monthly transit pass if the MetroLink came to St. Charles! haha. I don’t know how old you are, or what generation you identify with, but most people I know love the idea of “walkable cities” with well developed light-rail. Why do you think so many people my age aspire to get out of St. Louis? It’s because they want to experience life in a “real” city – cities that don’t have desolate nothingness taking up prime real-estate in the middle of downtown!
Look at New York City: Madison Square Garden is a giant arena, but Penn Station is located underneath. It’s like two for the price of one, and they’re located in the center of the city, confined neatly within a single block. In St. Louis we have the giant arena, but next to a hideous expanse of unwalkable boulevards and highways. Does NYC need for Madison Square Garden to be right next to a busy highway for it to be successful? NO! We do rely on our cars in St. Louis more than we have to, even with the Metro system as-is. This photo is evidence of typically poor urban planning in St. Louis, but I don’t think we should just live with it. With the right urban planning, the dome could be even more successful.
FYI, I’m a 58 year old guy who served 5 years on Denver’s Regional Transportation District Board before moving here in 2004. I’m an architect who’s both worked with developers and been heaviily involved as a volunteer in community design issues. I get it. My observations come from both trying to change the public’s behavior, on multiple levels, combined with the perspective of an outsider, looking at St. Louis without a lot of preconceptions.
The least walkable part of the Jones Dome is not the part in the picture, it’s the part on the north side, where the block-long loading dock creates a truly inhospitable pedestrian environment. Compare that to Denver’s downtown Convention Center, where all truck access is located on the second level and a light rail station is located inside the center itself, not two blocks away.
St. Louis obviously has a lot of walkable infrastructure and neighborhoods, since much of it was laid out in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. But it’s also pretty clear that many residents and visitors are CHOOSING the personal convenience of a single-occupant motor vehilce over public transit for the majority of their trips (much like Denver), which, in turn, is informing how our infrastructure is being used, abused and altered. Or, to put it another way, we live in a very walkable environment but many of us CHOOSE not to walk – you can lead a horse to water . . .
We can argue all we want about the chicken-or-egg status of public transit today. St. Louis, at one point, had a robust investment in privately-financed, rail-based public transit (streetcars and intercity passenger rail), which was both the best alternative for many residents and informed our built environmrnt. That investment was slowly abandoned as its customers found “better” (for them, individually) choices in the automobile and air travel, no different than commerce moving from riverboats to rail to trucks. People do cost-benefit analyses every day, and chose the best option that works for them!
On the transit side of the equation, there are three main viable ridership groups that actually use public transit, here and elsewhere in the USA, transit-dependent riders (the poor, the disabled, the young and the old, who either can’t physically drive or can’t afford to drive), commuters (going between the same two points every day, to work or school, driving the demand for more freeway lanes), and people going to special events (where providing access and parking for everyone becomes impractical – opening day, Rams, Blues, the home show, Mardi Gras, etc.).
Metro’s focus (compared to RTD’s) is skewed more toward meeting the needs of the first group. Part of it is political and part of it is cultural. Few businesses here embrace public transit as an option they want to encourage their employees to use (BJC and Wash U being the two big exceptions). By providing “free” parking, while not providing “free” transit passes, there’s a message being sent and a mesage being received by the employees. Whether this is the “fault” of Metro or the likes of A-B, Monsanto, SLU or Amerern is up for debate, but the results are pretty clear.
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“Did I miss anything?”
Yes. You missed the LumiereLink, which ushers people underground rather than encouraging them to walk along the sidewalks and streets.
You're so right! The area above ground is so bad they had to build an expensive tunnel.
Ummm… the dome/convention center and Lumiere bring tons of people downtown. If there were a pedestrian path, they would certainly be two of the main destinations driving traffic.
Go down around the dome any day of the week and you will see it is dead. Sure 8-9 times a year there is a football game — we won't even have that this year. But on a daily basis it is a huge dead zone.
There are at least a few more events than just (10, counting preseason) Rams games I'm sure. It was really crowded around the dome for some High School games and cheerleading events this year. It hosted Sweet Sixteen basketball last year. Plus, it's a good complement to the convention center since for the last few years lots of the rams tickets are sold to out of towners that fill hotel rooms.
What would you have it replaced with, an expanded North Side project?
Dead spaces can be artificially enlivened by major events, the real test is activity level on an average Tuesday morning.
The question is what could replace the dome that would create more summed activity over the course of a year.
The same goes for Lumiere, which in my limited observation does add to the traffic in the landing.
Of course, we agree that Broadway and 4th create an insurmountable obstacle to foot traffic.
Opening that up would be a game changer for Washington Ave and Lumiere/Landing traffic. By the way, is there a plan to open it up whenever the new I-70 brdige is built?
You want Dead Space just move your camera 4 blocks north.
Yes, we're an autocentric community in an autocentric nation – tell me something I don't know. You can go to many, many other parts of the city and find the same thing, especially around any major sports venue. Pick one – Busch Stadium, Chafietz Arena, that mall on Manchester, the Pruitt-Igoe site, the old Lemp Brewery, Carondolet Park, Fairgrounds Park, etc, etc, etc. On “an average Tuesday morning”, most people are either at work or in school, and not on the sidewalk, anywhere in town. Change it to a nice spring or fall day, on a weekend or over the lunch hour, and you will likely find more pedestrians.
Which gets to your definition of “dead” space. Yours seems to be an absence of pedestrians and/or pedestrian-oriented activities, which is pretty narrow. This example shows multiple vehicles, a variety of structures in a range of architectural styles and a range of audible, olafactory and visual stimulators, including the Lumiere media show – far from “dead”. If you want dead, I'd look more toward the Pruitt-Igoe site, much of East St. Louis or the vacant Ford and Chrysler plant sites.
I get it – walkable, medium-density urban neighborhoods are great and have many advantages, but why should they be considered to be the ONLY “right” answer? If we're going to have pro sports teams, we're going to have “underused” arenas. If we're going to move people quickly in their own vehicles, we're going to have freeways – would you want to drive back to OKC if the quickest you could travel were 25 or 30 mph? If we're going to have casinos, they're going to be gaudy. We live in a country where we all have choices. You've picked what works best for you; why shouldn't everyone else be allowed to pick what they believe works best for them?
It is hard to believe you justify this urban planning nightmare in any fashion. You keep claiming the mantle of choice. The choice is between crap and bullshit. so many people choose bullshit, so what?
Apparently you are unaware of what is happening in the United States, how corporate power owns most politicians and by extension policy formation.
This has been going on for decades. Standard Oil, Firestone Tire and GM bought up trolleys across the nation in the 50's and shut them down, including St. Louis.
Urban policy has been bowing to the big concrete guys, the big land developers, the big chain stores to create an auto centric society. It was not a democratic choice by any stretch of the imagination.
Portland is an example of a city with leadership that went another direction, as did other cities, especially outside the US, where corporate money is not allowed to rule.
If you want to live in crap that is up to you, I wouldn't expect citizens to support your views though, that is exactly what this blog is about, improving the urban environment.
Your faux choice argument is tiresome. When there is evidence of an ongoing, democratic, planning process that includes the community, then perhaps real choices can be made for our future and the future of our children.
And your repeated pronouncements of class warfare and GM killing the strreetcars are tiresome, as well. St. Louis in 2011 is completely different from St. Louis in 1921, just like St. Louis in 1921 was completely different from St. Louis in 1831. In 1921, the city was sprawling way past Grand Avenue and the streetcars and railroads were driving blacksmiths and stables out of business. Teamsters were being forced to give up their horse teams and forced to learn to operate trucks. What had been clear, blue skies were filled with coal smoke and the occasional airplane. Vast forests had been cleared for block after block of brick structures, and the Mississippi riverfront had been paved over to handle all those steamboats. Rivers and creeks were being relocated into tight channels and underground sewers.
All of this happened through a mix of grand planning and private entrepreneurship. There were winners and losers, people who embraced progress and people who couldn't understand, much less accept, all these newfangled choices. Progress happens, and, in retrospect, there will be good decisions and bad ones. When the voters approved financing for building the dome, the majority who voted were convinced that it was better for the city and the region than not building it. When the freeway was being built in the 1950's and 1960's, our leaders were positive that it was what was needed to keep downtown strong, just like they were sure that more parking garages were needed. With the clarity of 20/20 hindsight, maybe not so much.
But the biggest difference between St. Louis (and Stuttgart and Shanghai) of 1921 and 2011 is the availability, and the overwhelming embrace, of the automobile as the preferred choice for daily, personal transportation. It requires roads and parking lots, but it's how 95%+ of every trip is made and it informs our urban fabric at every level. I own one, my wife owns two. Steve owns one and I'm pretty sure that you own one (or more), as well. In 1921, none of us would have, and we'd be lucky to own a horse, given the costs of stabling and daily maintenance, so public transportation or walking would have been our only options. In 1921, a good, connected sidewalk and streetcar system would be a high priority, as would be higher densities, to minimize walking and to maximize transit frequency. In 2011, a good, connected street and highway system is a high priority, as are parking at every destinantion, while minimizing actual travel distances becomes secondary. An extra mile or two is irrelevent if you're driving; it's a big issue if you're walking.
Which gets us back to the original question – what constitutes “dead space”? Is it space dedicated to transportation instead of structures? Is it space without pedestrians? How do people in cars compare to people walking? What role do materials, graphics and electronic media play in the equation? Are parks dead space if there aren't ballfields and roads? Is a lake dead if it doesn't have boats and water-level activity? Is there a difference in our expectations when we're driving and when we're walking? And, as multiple discussions on this blog illustrate, should designing for pedestrians or vehicles be the bigger priority?
Choice. I would hardly call eighty or ninety years of pro-car marketing/PR(opaganda) drilled into the heads of every American citizen “choice”. And, Jim, if you don't think there isn't a class war going on in our Nation today, wealthy against the middle class and the poor, then you may as well gouge out your eyes, because your blindness could not be more profoundly manifest.
How many teenagers aspire to obtain a monthly transit pass? How many college students? How many soccer moms? Is it because of “eighty or ninety years of pro-car marketing/PR(opaganda)” or because most people choose the convenience of their own vehicle? Even if it costs more, a lot more? Even if it means sitting in traffic? Even if it means sprawl makes more sense than higher densities? What sort of marketing does Metro do to counteract all of this “pro-car marketing/PR(opaganda)”? What has Metro done to make transit more attractive to the non-transit-dependent rider? When was the last time one of their vehicles was carjacked? Even the criminals aren't very interested! And, do you own and use a car? I'm not a hypocrite, I'm a realist.
I’d aspire to obtain a monthly transit pass if the MetroLink came to St. Charles! haha. I don’t know how old you are, or what generation you identify with, but most people I know love the idea of “walkable cities” with well developed light-rail. Why do you think so many people my age aspire to get out of St. Louis? It’s because they want to experience life in a “real” city – cities that don’t have desolate nothingness taking up prime real-estate in the middle of downtown!
Look at New York City: Madison Square Garden is a giant arena, but Penn Station is located underneath. It’s like two for the price of one, and they’re located in the center of the city, confined neatly within a single block. In St. Louis we have the giant arena, but next to a hideous expanse of unwalkable boulevards and highways. Does NYC need for Madison Square Garden to be right next to a busy highway for it to be successful? NO! We do rely on our cars in St. Louis more than we have to, even with the Metro system as-is. This photo is evidence of typically poor urban planning in St. Louis, but I don’t think we should just live with it. With the right urban planning, the dome could be even more successful.
FYI, I’m a 58 year old guy who served 5 years on Denver’s Regional Transportation District Board before moving here in 2004. I’m an architect who’s both worked with developers and been heaviily involved as a volunteer in community design issues. I get it. My observations come from both trying to change the public’s behavior, on multiple levels, combined with the perspective of an outsider, looking at St. Louis without a lot of preconceptions.
The least walkable part of the Jones Dome is not the part in the picture, it’s the part on the north side, where the block-long loading dock creates a truly inhospitable pedestrian environment. Compare that to Denver’s downtown Convention Center, where all truck access is located on the second level and a light rail station is located inside the center itself, not two blocks away.
St. Louis obviously has a lot of walkable infrastructure and neighborhoods, since much of it was laid out in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. But it’s also pretty clear that many residents and visitors are CHOOSING the personal convenience of a single-occupant motor vehilce over public transit for the majority of their trips (much like Denver), which, in turn, is informing how our infrastructure is being used, abused and altered. Or, to put it another way, we live in a very walkable environment but many of us CHOOSE not to walk – you can lead a horse to water . . .
We can argue all we want about the chicken-or-egg status of public transit today. St. Louis, at one point, had a robust investment in privately-financed, rail-based public transit (streetcars and intercity passenger rail), which was both the best alternative for many residents and informed our built environmrnt. That investment was slowly abandoned as its customers found “better” (for them, individually) choices in the automobile and air travel, no different than commerce moving from riverboats to rail to trucks. People do cost-benefit analyses every day, and chose the best option that works for them!
On the transit side of the equation, there are three main viable ridership groups that actually use public transit, here and elsewhere in the USA, transit-dependent riders (the poor, the disabled, the young and the old, who either can’t physically drive or can’t afford to drive), commuters (going between the same two points every day, to work or school, driving the demand for more freeway lanes), and people going to special events (where providing access and parking for everyone becomes impractical – opening day, Rams, Blues, the home show, Mardi Gras, etc.).
Metro’s focus (compared to RTD’s) is skewed more toward meeting the needs of the first group. Part of it is political and part of it is cultural. Few businesses here embrace public transit as an option they want to encourage their employees to use (BJC and Wash U being the two big exceptions). By providing “free” parking, while not providing “free” transit passes, there’s a message being sent and a mesage being received by the employees. Whether this is the “fault” of Metro or the likes of A-B, Monsanto, SLU or Amerern is up for debate, but the results are pretty clear.
As Warren Buffett has said.”There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.”
At least I am speaking truth, your constant dismissal of real problems and poor design claiming it is choices people have made is cavalier and arrogant at best. To excuse this dead space in any fashion is ridiculous. Double talk and pretending that somehow it is legitimate by asking what is a dead space is yet another distraction from the bankrupt planning process that is still in place today.
The urban form of the St. Louis region and its poor outcomes are the result of favoring policies that put money into the pockets of financial insiders over the interests of citizens. It is simple to see if you are willing to spend any time doing an analysis.
Compare this to Helsinki, Finland, a city and country with around the same population as St. Louis and Missouri. Helsinki and all of Finland has a robust transit system, so that 40% of Finn’s decide they don’t need automobiles. That‘s what real choice looks like. And that’s what a government working for the interests of its citizens can accomplish.
You speak your “truth”, I speak mine; my arrogance only serves to offset yours. But I do agree that our “poor outcomes are the result of favoring policies that put money into the pockets of financial insiders over the interests of citizens.” For the life of me, I don't understand why a football stadium is located in the heart of our downtown, even if it tries to be a multi-purpose facility – most other cities put them in less prime areas. I also agree that I-70 creates a major barrier between downtown and the riverfront. But like I've already said, we need to have a discussion and agree on just what exactly constitutes “dead space” before we try and label any part of the city as “dead”. It seems like the main/only criteria Steve has is pedestrian activity, followed by the number of travel lanes. I place a higher negative value vacant land and empty streets, devoid of both vehicles and people – East St. Louis / Granite City is a prime example.
A discussion of dead space characteristics is not the issue. The issue is how such a dead space as Steve has portrayed could come into being in such a prime location in the central business district.
To partially answer that question look at the regional transportation body, (East West Gateway). It is divorced from any placemaking planning bodies. What is worse is that the ultimate decision makers are political hacks from munis and surrounding counties. Their knowledge of urban planning could fit in a thimble. Yet they come in toting recommendations from their corporate supporters. Naturally those projects get funded, to the financial benefit of these same corporate insiders, who in turn contribute their yearly bribes to the same political hacks. Unfortunately what I am describing is not hypothetical, but more or less how the process really works.
So the community ends up with dead spaces as Steve describes, while drivers, oblivious to what is going on beneath them, take convenient routes. The city and region is sacrificed to outsiders of all stripes, while residents live with the aftermath.
There is a looming crisis in St. Louis. It could be as serious as Japan. The potential for oil to become scarce or unaffordable is real, it may take decades this to happen (I don’t think so, we've had many warnings). But in any case it will also take decades for the region to straighten out the short sighted planning models now in place. An early collapse of oil would make much of the region unlivable. The dead space Steve cites is a symptom of these larger failures. It is why St. Louis keeps losing population.
I used the example of Finland in a post above. In contrast to St. Louis, Helsinki and the rest of Finland would still function fine on severely limited oil resources.
It does no good to blame people for using their car over transit, or say it is the citizens fault because of the choices they make. Alternatives to the current planning regime, and to the dead spaces they create are not offered. The real gap is in leadership, St. Louis has none.
The question might be framed differently, how would maximize or make space more beneficial? In this case, you can't do much with a freeway running through it. Ideally, you re-introduce a Blvd between Poplar Street bridge and the New Mississippi River Bridge and eliminate this stretch of I-70 outright. Unfortunately, it is not going to happen.
So what do you do. First, I do like the Arch Grounds proposal that creates a new Wash Ave interchange with the freeway and eliminates the existing Park Service Garage (parking should be off Wash Ave or in Laclede's Landing). While its not ideal, it does bring some sense of organization to the current mess of Wash Ave, side streets and Eads bridge. Second, the Arch Grounds proposal does leave open the possibility of a blvd between Wash Ave and the new Mississippi Bridge.
How do you get to the second option, no I-70 between Wash Ave and the new MRB? You start talking to Stan K and Rams. See what he wants, see how you can incorporate it into the stalled Bottle works project and above else, convince him that a BLVD replacing I-70 between the stadium and Laclede's landing/Casino will do wonders. Even if you don't build on the space its a heck of an area to establish a tailgate venue in the meantime
I’d aspire to obtain a monthly transit pass if the MetroLink came to St. Charles! haha. I don’t know how old you are, or what generation you identify with, but most people I know love the idea of “walkable cities” with well developed light-rail. Why do you think so many people my age aspire to get out of St. Louis? It’s because they want to experience life in a “real” city – cities that don’t have desolate nothingness taking up prime real-estate in the middle of downtown!
Look at New York City: Madison Square Garden is a giant arena, but Penn Station is located underneath. It’s like two for the price of one, and they’re located in the center of the city, confined neatly within a single block. In St. Louis we have the giant arena, but next to a hideous expanse of unwalkable boulevards and highways. Does NYC need for Madison Square Garden to be right next to a busy highway for it to be successful? NO! We do rely on our cars in St. Louis more than we have to, even with the Metro system as-is. This photo is evidence of typically poor urban planning in St. Louis, but I don’t think we should just live with it. With the right urban planning, the dome could be even more successful.
FYI, I’m a 58 year old guy who served 5 years on Denver’s Regional Transportation District Board before moving here in 2004. I’m an architect who’s both worked with developers and been heaviily involved as a volunteer in community design issues. I get it. My observations come from both trying to change the public’s behavior, on multiple levels, combined with the perspective of an outsider, looking at St. Louis without a lot of preconceptions.
The least walkable part of the Jones Dome is not the part in the picture, it’s the part on the north side, where the block-long loading dock creates a truly inhospitable pedestrian environment. Compare that to Denver’s downtown Convention Center, where all truck access is located on the second level and a light rail station is located inside the center itself, not two blocks away.
St. Louis obviously has a lot of walkable infrastructure and neighborhoods, since much of it was laid out in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. But it’s also pretty clear that many residents and visitors are CHOOSING the personal convenience of a single-occupant motor vehilce over public transit for the majority of their trips (much like Denver), which, in turn, is informing how our infrastructure is being used, abused and altered. Or, to put it another way, we live in a very walkable environment but many of us CHOOSE not to walk – you can lead a horse to water . . .
We can argue all we want about the chicken-or-egg status of public transit today. St. Louis, at one point, had a robust investment in privately-financed, rail-based public transit (streetcars and intercity passenger rail), which was both the best alternative for many residents and informed our built environmrnt. That investment was slowly abandoned as its customers found “better” (for them, individually) choices in the automobile and air travel, no different than commerce moving from riverboats to rail to trucks. People do cost-benefit analyses every day, and chose the best option that works for them!
On the transit side of the equation, there are three main viable ridership groups that actually use public transit, here and elsewhere in the USA, transit-dependent riders (the poor, the disabled, the young and the old, who either can’t physically drive or can’t afford to drive), commuters (going between the same two points every day, to work or school, driving the demand for more freeway lanes), and people going to special events (where providing access and parking for everyone becomes impractical – opening day, Rams, Blues, the home show, Mardi Gras, etc.).
Metro’s focus (compared to RTD’s) is skewed more toward meeting the needs of the first group. Part of it is political and part of it is cultural. Few businesses here embrace public transit as an option they want to encourage their employees to use (BJC and Wash U being the two big exceptions). By providing “free” parking, while not providing “free” transit passes, there’s a message being sent and a mesage being received by the employees. Whether this is the “fault” of Metro or the likes of A-B, Monsanto, SLU or Amerern is up for debate, but the results are pretty clear.