St. Louis / Elsewhere

Shell on Spring / Rehab in Sydney

2011-08-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

What does this rehab in Sydney remind one of?

This home used to be a church.

These images were pulled off a site called Dornob, which has many other examples of church-to-home-conversions, like this one, this one, and this one. Do click around.

The reason I singled out this rehab is because of the massive skylights. A lot of other church rehabs make great use of the existing stained glass and vaulted cielings, but this is the first I've seen that has ripped off the roof and put in a new one. I don't know the history of this building, but I can imagine reasons why a new roof might be needed. A fire perhaps?

Let's look to St. Louis to the National Memorial Church of God in Christ. Here's the bird's eye view. It's right next to the Contemporary Art Museum.

Here are a series of images originally posted by the Preservation Research Office.

The guts of the building are gone, but what if this 1884 beauty was reborn as a contemporary home or perhaps as an annex of the Contemporary Art Museum? In the mean time, I hope projects like the one in this video happen often.

Avinguda de Mistral / Ruth Porter Mall

2011-06-07T17:05:00.000-07:00

I'd like to talk about this five-block pedestrian mall.

Avinguda de Mistral. Click to Enlarge

Before we talk about it though, let's set up the context. It's in Barcelona, a city many St. Louisans have never been to, so let's learn some landmarks.

Click to expand.

Barcelona is a city by the sea, so begin at the beach (A). Look towards the city and note the statue of Christopher Columbus (B)

Taken at sunset from the beach looking towards Las Ramblas

The center of Barcelona is the old gothic town with a beautiful street called Las Ramblas going through the middle of it between the Placa de Catalunia (C) and the statue of Columbus (B).

Las Ramblas has lots of trees. Note Columbus in the foreground.

The Placa de Catalunia is a huge plaza at the center of Barcelona surrounded by huge stores and hotels with a subway station underneath.

Las Ramblas is the popular center of the city and runs between B and C.

Once outside the walls of the old city, a street grid of beautiful and uniform buildings unfolds called L'Eixample.

To better understand the map, D is the Torre Agbar, E is the Placa d'Espanya, F is the Montjuic fortress, and G is the Sagrada Familia (Gaudi's cathedral that has been under construction for a century). D and E are important for orientation, and F and G are simply landmarks. Here they're pictured in order.

So there's a basic orientation. Las Ramblas is a very popular pedestrian mall filled with street theater and flower venders, and it runs through the heart of the city and between the Placa de Catalunia and the Columbus Statue. The bulk of the urban core of Barcelona is bounded by the sea and the Gran Via (the road connecting the Placa d'Espanya to the Torre Agbar). There's plenty of city beyond the Gran Via, but personally I found it less gritty and lively than the neighborhoods closer to the sea.

I spent 37 days in Barcelona in 2007. I got an apartment and spent every day walking around on self-guided architecture tours. My apartment was right next to the Placa d'Espanya (E), and most days I began my journey by walking towards the center (for a fantastic restaurant called Juicy Jones). That meant that I would often walk by a Botero sculpture (H),

and a huge produce market (I),

and I would always walk along the Avinguda de Mistral.

Click to enlarge. Avinguda de Mistral is outlined in yellow. Note the way the street grid changes between the gothic quarter and L'Eixample.

Now we can talk about the image that this post began with. The five-block Avinguda de Mistral can be seen on google streetview. Here are some images. Click any to enlarge.

When people think of successful pedestrian malls, they very often think of Barcelona and Las Ramblas, which is actually a widened median with lots of car traffic on the sides. The Mistral pedestrian mall is a lot more interesting because it isn't full of popular attractions. It isn't particularly famous. It isn't flanked by youth hostels and museums. It's a quiet promenade in a primarily residential area of the city. It has density, mixed-usage with plenty of shops, wide crosswalks across narrow streets, benches, a playground, transit access, and plenty of trees. Very different from the average American pedestrian mall, the Mistral doesn't actually interrupt the street grid. Look closely at the very first image in this post.

Now I'd like to contrast Barcelona's lesser known pedestrian mall with St. Louis' lesser known pedestrian mall (not 14th street), Ruth Porter Mall.

Porter Park runs between Etzel and Delmar. Click to enlarge.

Plans for the St. Vincent Greenway call for a redesign of the Ruth Porter Mall as part of a bike and pedestrian greenway connecting UMSL to Forest Park.

Concept Plan for Porter Park. Click to Enlarge.

At the moment, it is impossible to ride a bike through Porter Park because there are a lot of curbs to lift your bike over. That isn't very difficult to fix though, especially if the whole place is going to be completely redone. What is hard to fix is scenes like the one on Cates Avenue.

When the greenway is finished, this street will still be blocked. No bus will serve it. It wouldn't be the only closure either.

The St. Vincent Greenway is a fantastic idea that connects a major university to major cultural institutions. The area between however (Pagedale, Wellston, West End), has seen better days. In their relative vulnerability, unfortunate suggestions could have weight, like the idea in the concept plan to expand the park towards Goodfellow through land clearance.

How much difference is there between a pedestrian mall and a linear park? Is it inappropriate to compare a dense European one to an abandoned American one full of broken glass? Both are connectors through residential areas. The difference is that the one in St. Louis is not mixed-use. It isn't surrounded by dense housing. It doesn't allow car traffic. It isn't an integral part of the urban core. It doesn't have people.

There was a walk audit of the West End neighborhood on May 24th with Dan Burden, an international expert on walkability. In his summary of the event for NextSTL.com, Andrew Faulkner wrote some despressing things about the existing challenges.

The most striking barrier to walkability in the West End neighborhood are the rampant street barricades. While these barriers specifically exclude automobiles, they create dead zones that discourage pedestrian use. The majority of residents present at the Walk Audit balanced their opposition to the barriers with an apprehension of increased crime and traffic. Dan Burden specifically addressed these concerns by explaining that the existing street barriers concentrate traffic on Maple Avenue; if these barriers were removed, traffic would be evenly distributed across the other seven east-west streets. In addition, removing the barriers would increase pedestrian traffic and provide more eyes on the street in blocks that are significantly depopulated.
It is evident that the barriers are failing to keep the neighborhood safe. At the intersection of Ruth Porter Mallway and Clemens Avenue additional Schoemehl Pots and limestone boulders had to be deployed on the sidewalk and front yard of 5670 Clemens Ave. to prevent cars from driving across the grass to avoid the street barrier. One of the boulders blocks the sidewalk and cuts off access to the Ruth Porter Mallway and the future St. Vincent Greenway.

Faulkner's photo of obstacles to pedestrians and wheelchairs near Porter Park

I've been following the St. Vincent Greenway for a few years now. I've walked the entire length of it. I've ridden my bike along it. I've talked to the designers and to residents. I've seen students involved in art ideas for the park get their work displayed at the Sheldon. I have no idea what people think the future Porter Park will look like. It's developing to be a slightly better version of what is there now, but perhaps with even fewer people that actually live there.

For me, every time I go to Porter Park, I feel like I'm on the Avinguda de Mistral again, but everything is wrong. Things are missing. It's an orphaned urban space that never matured. Were I Catalan and living for a month on Etzel, I would be very confused by Porter Park. There isn't even consensus on what to call it.

Google calls it Ruth Porter Mall Way, but the sign says Porter Park

Letter Streets / Tree Streets

2011-05-24T10:40:00.000-07:00

On a recent walk around Belleville, Illinois, I noticed something wonderful about the streetgrid.

Rather than numbering the streets away from Main Street, Belleville uses letters. Not only that, but they have a Church Street, which is amazing because downtown St. Louis used to have lettered streets and a Church Street before Missouri became a state. Isn't it interesting that Belleville also has a Walnut Street?

Here's an account from St. Louis historian James Neal Primm,

On July 1, 1826, the board renamed the streets. Their French names, still current with older residents, had already been replaced in general usage by numbers for the north-south streets (except for First--usually called Main). With only a few exceptions, the French had not named the east-west streets. After 1815, those in the original village with Market the point of origin, had been designated North or South A, B, C, and so on. Mayor Lane and Aldermen Henry Von Phul and Thomas McKnight, all Pennsylvanians, persuaded the board to adopt the unimaginative Philadelphia system of naming streets for trees. Northward from Market (the only street reflecting its origins), the east-west streets were Chestnut, Pine, Olive, Locust, Vine, Laurel, Prune, Oak, Cherry, Hickory, Pear, and Willow. South of Market were Walnut (Rue de la Tour [Tower]), Elm, Myrtle, Spruce, Almond, Poplar, Plum, Cedar, Mulberry, Lombard, Hazel, and Sycamore. The olive was not even a native tree, and several of the others had never grown near St. Louis. The recently completed street on the river side of Laclede's front lots was named Front; the remaining north-south streets were First (La Rue Principale [Main]), Second (Rue de l'Eglise [Church]), Third (Rue des Granges [Barn]), and so on to the west. No doubt some of the French and older Americans regretted these changes, but the "go-ahead" spirit had little use for the relics of the past. ------ Lion of the Valley, page 122

If Belleville was founded in 1814 and St. Louis adopted the lettered streets theme in 1815, who influenced who?

Regardless, here's Philadelphia today,

To quote wikipedia: "The major east-west streets in William Penn's original plan for the city [were given] the names of trees: from north to south, these were Vine, Sassafras, Mulberry, High (not a tree), Chestnut, Walnut, Locust, Spruce, Pine, Lombard and Cedar. (Sassafras, Mulberry, High and Cedar have since been renamed to Race, Arch, Market [the main east-west street downtown] and South.)"

For the most part, St. Louis has managed to keep its numbered streets because renaming a few would wreck the whole system. That's true of most cities with numbered streets (NYC, KC, Philly, etc.). New York has consistently numbered lettered avenues as well.

Tree streets in St. Louis and Philadelphia have not lasted over time. Where are Vine, Prune, Oak, Cherry, Pear, Willow, Elm, Myrtle, Almond, Mulberry, Lombard, Hazel, and Sycamore? Hickory, Plum, and Cedar are now obscure.

One tree street name is actually coming back.

The Laurel Apartments at the Mercantile Exchange bear the name that Washington Avenue used to bear. Is that intentional? Apparently yes, they say so right on their website.

Edward Jones Dome / Faurot Field

2011-05-01T22:20:00.000-07:00

I'd like to commend Post-Dispatch reporter Matthew Hathaway for his recent article, Dome deadline is bearing down on city. Honestly its bearing down on the whole region and state, but the city especially. Hathaway does a great job of setting the historical context. Here's the stand-out quote,

"The Dome was largely financed with $256 million in revenue bonds, and the repayment of that 30-year debt will be $720 million. Every year, Missouri spends $12 million to pay off the debt, and St. Louis and St. Louis County both pay $6 million annually."

But while we still have another ten years to go on our debt, we're facing the tough position of having to spend twice as much as we did originally just to keep the team. New NFL stadia cost as much as three times what St. Louis paid for the dome originally. We haven't paid off our last effort, so paying for the next is troubling.

In response to Mr. Hathaway's article, Alex Ihnen at NextSTL.com posted a study about professional sports teams having no net economic benefit for metro regions. In fact, with the large annual debt they create in public financing, they could be viewed as dragging cities like St. Louis down. His conclusion: Does St. Louis need an NFL team? Obviously they have a role to play in a city's brand and marketing, local pride, and so on as well, but the economics is hard to ignore.

Should a private team be dipping into public funds for a new stadium?
Are we fans of teams that constantly threaten to move in order to extort our local governments?
St. Louis needs to step out of this cycle. It isn't healthy, and it isn't a winning solution.

Contrast and compare St. Louis to a considerably smaller market,

St. Louis Rams, founded in 1936, moved a couple times before arriving in St. Louis in 1995, and might move again in 2015. Play in a below-average stadium paid for by taxpayers with a capacity of 66,965. Represent a metro of nearly three million people.

Missouri Tigers, formed in 1890, never moved, never will move. Play in a stadium with a lot of history expanded slowly over a century with a capacity of 71,004. Play in a city with only about 100,000 people surrounded by farm land.

Is it unfair to compare a college team to a professional team? Why? Which draws the larger crowd? Which costs more? Which does more for the community?

When the Rams leave, we'll have an empty stadium rotting away downtown. If a college team shared their stadium, we'd at least have an alternate use and a caretaker for the building. More than that, college teams get donations. Saint Louis University's Chaifetz Arena was given $12 million from a single alum.

I'm sure it's an unpopular proposal, but why not build a stadium for a local university if we build a stadium at all? Let them share. Look at the way the Rams used to dress,

Rams colors used to be Saint Louis University colors. SLU is a division I school in the middle of the city, and they don't have a football team. What if they did? The next publically financed stadium should be donated to SLU (or some other school), partly paid for by SLU, and maintained by donations and endowments from the community. The Rams can pay some too, and they can share. Then later if the Rams choose to go away or demand a better stadium, the university can add their weight and funds to the conversation.

Where would one put a SLU football stadium? How about here?

There's plenty of room around the new Grand Viaduct to build on air rights above the tracks and make the bridge into a normal street. Depending on what's happening with the plans for the Chouteau Greenway, bike trails could be worked in too. The important thing, again, is to not do what Nashville did. If a stadium could be built above the MetroLink station, then it really ought to be oriented to take in the view of downtown in one direction and BJC in the other, just like Faurot Field is oriented to view Columbia.

Or maybe UMSL or SIUE could be the holders of the stadium. It doesn't matter as long as it's a public body that can use and maintain such a structure and fundraise to improve it. The CVC has a good relationship with the Edward Jones Dome, but they have no long-term interest in it as a football stadium. It could just as easily be converted to basketball or perhaps the seats could be removed, a floor put in, and two levels of trade show space could be created for the CVC's boat shows and other conferences.

The often repeated line is, "NFL teams only use their stadiums 8 days a year, so what are we supposed to do with them the rest of the time?" Adding another team is one option. Why not add a soccer team too? NFL and MLS combinations are common. SLU has a pretty good soccer team.

IFEZ / China Hub

2011-04-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

I've been around the world, slept in dozens of airports, suffered crazy reroutes (the worst being when my flight from Chicago to Hong Kong got rerouted to Houston... Two days of my life I'll never get back), been through security checks of varying sincerity and effectiveness, been detained more than once, and spent countless hours on buses, ferries, trains, and taxis getting from airports to the cities they serve.

Reading Aerotropolis, I find myself generally irritated by a lot of the conclusions drawn, but generally agree that we do need to plan better for our airports and see them less as monsters at the edge of town and more as vital parts of our economy. We should plan for them, not fight them.

The book, like so many discussions about urban planning these days, starts by talking about New Songdo, a new city built on top of what used to be vital migratory bird habitat just south of Incheon (Seoul's sea port). It's part of a development called the Incheon Free Economic Zone or IFEZ.

IFEZ is several things. Foremost it is the filling in of ocean betwen two islands to make one big island for one very big airport for a country filled with mountains and expensive real estate. The airport is now one of the most important in the world and a vital link between North America and Southeast Asia. The other two parts of the IFEZ plan, Cheongna and New Songdo, are business parks built to feed off the airport. The IFEZ is meant to be an international space semi-independent of the rest of the country filled with an international population that could live anywhere but chooses Incheon for the proximity to the airport.

Having been to Songdo (which white people always mispronounce), I would never want to live there. It has been designed for a wealthy car-owning crowd, and I found myself constantly jaywalking across the vast empty roads and walking through hedges for lack of a path. Apparently it is also too expensive for any of the service workers that it relys on. The waiters and janitors must commute in from other areas.

A super airport was needed because the old airport, Gimpo International, was at a bursting point where it needed to be overhauled and greatly expanded, or replaced. With the creation of the new airport, the old one became a relief airport dealing mostly in domestic flights. Across the country, dozens of smaller airports that used to have some international flights, died. Now one big airport serves most of the country and a small satellite airport takes care of everything else.

The two airports serve the same population and often share passengers. Despite their great distance from each other and from the bulk of the population in Seoul, they manage to stay connected through a vast fleet of express buses and one very fast express train.

AREX is an express subway line between Seoul Station and the two airports.

Nearly every passenger train in South Korea goes through Seoul Station including local commuter lines and intercity high-speed rail (KTX). The whole country is connected to Seoul Station, and Seoul Station is connected to both airports. It isn't unreasonable for a business man in Busan to take a local bus to Busan Station, take the KTX to Seoul Station to AREX to Incheon, to Chicago. It's a seamless and comfortable journey,

There's also a lot to look at along the way,

AREX has 38 miles of tracks between Incheon Airport and Seoul Station. There are about ten stations along the route and the trains go about 100 mph, but the important thing is that they are getting faster every year. The route is set, and there's nothing to do now but upgrade and upgrade. That and build more express trains to connect Songdo and other areas...

So here are a few thoughts related to the Aerotropolis idea. Comment if you think any are invalid.

Premise 1) Airports create businesses that rely on fast access to flights
Premise 2) Airports often get boxed in by these businesses and neighborhoods that are built around them
Premise 3) Condemning and demolishing those neighborhoods in order to expand makes for nasty political fights
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Conclusion 1) Successful airports often choke themselves

Premise 4) If an airport can't expand, a new airport is often created elsewhere
Premise 5) Rival airports can either compliment or compete (Seoul or Bangkok for examples)
Premise 6) When airports compete, one succeeds and the other becomes a brownfield
Premise 7) Brownfields are a problem
Premise 8) Successful airports often choke themselves
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Conclusion 2) Airports that work together grow together and have a higher shared capacity

Premise 9) Successful airports often choke themselves with greenfield development
Premise 10) Urban centers need greyfield development
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Conclusion 3) Directing airport business to established urban centers could keep airports from getting boxed in.

Premise 11) Airports should work together
Premise 12) In order to work together, airports need to be very well connected to each other
Premise 13) Economic growth around airports should be directed towards the urban core
Premise 14) Economic growth around airports depends upon fast connections to the airport
--------------------------------------------
Conclusion 4) Airports and Urban Cores need very fast connections.

It is interesting to note that the MetroLink in St. Louis travels 38 miles between Lambert Airport Main and Shiloh-Scott, about the same distance the AREX travels between Seoul Station and Incheon Airport. The difference is that AREX has fewer stops and faster trains because it is an express line, and MetroLink is a light rail commuter mover.

Lambert Airport is now landing cargo flights from China, from an airport with an express train,

The Shanghai Maglev goes about 20 miles between two stations: the airport and the city. It does this in under eight minutes (top speed of 311 mph). If a comparable system were built in St. Louis with three stations, perhaps it'd be less than ten minutes from downtown to either airport. Perhaps it'd be less than twenty minutes to go between the two airports for connecting flights or Amtrak.

Consider that the future of the St. Louis economy may well be decided by the China Hub project. Just as the IFEZ has opened up space for international companies to set up shop in Korea (instead of Beijing or Tokyo), the China Hub would open up our airports for Chinese cargo airlines to set up shop in St. Louis (instead of Chicago or Memphis). Incheon connects North America to Southeast Asia. St. Louis would connect China to Brazil. We want to be the North American entrepot for two continents, a happy taxcollecting neocolony.

When our airports grow how will we grow?
More than a few St. Louis urbanists have suggested that the China Hub deal will create a large tax base around the airports (outside the city limits) and all the city is going to get is a whole lot of big trucks going back and forth destroying roads and running over bicyclists. We'd also get lots of warehouses in North City along the I-70 truckway. It doesn't have to be that way.

What if it was faster and cheaper to take a train from downtown to Lambert than to drive from a house in Hazelwood and find a parking spot at the airport? The business that comes with a successful airport would grow in the city rather than like a noose around the airport.

What if cargo moved along a similar express line between the Northside distribution center and the two airports? Lots of trucks would be taken off the highways and local roads. Big trucks could go to the airports and small trucks to the Northside (my dream anyway).

What if passengers suffering a multi-hour layover at either airport could spend their time at a cafe downtown while they wait? With a fast enough train, it could be quite sensible.

I'd like to plant the idea now that we should think about setting aside a right-of-way between our two airports for a future express train. Maybe the median of I-70 is a good candidate for most of its route. Maybe space could magically be found along the Wabash alignment. Regardless, we should have the plan on the books now for some future time when we're overrun with Chinese tourists. We need an express train for passengers, and many express trains for cargo. It's something we have to be talking about if we want to avoid Truckmageddon.

Sportsman's Park / Camden Yards

2011-04-01T18:26:00.000-07:00

Consider that,

1) The Saint Louis Brewing Company (Schlafly) sells more bottles than it can make with its current facilities, so it has to contract brew with companies outside of St. Louis to meet local demand. At some point in the next five years, it is reasonable to assume that Schlafly will need to invest in bigger digs. There will be a large brewery built somewhere in the St. Louis region.

2) St. Louis Soccer United has not done well in Fenton. The St. Louis Athletica folded. AC St. Louis folded. The future is questionable. An MLS fanchise can only come with a soccer-specific stadium, and we don't have one of those. Speculation about where to put one has been rampant for years now, but money men have not appeared.

3) The Carter Carburetor building on North Grand is a superfund site that has been sitting for decades waiting to be cleaned. The building is beautiful, but the toxins are not. The popular plan is to simply destroy it and give it to the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls club... probably for a big grassy field similar to their current facility. The EPA is making their move now and funds will be designated, but what should the future look like?

It's a beautiful building and I hope there's a way to clean it without destroying it, especially the large multi-colored windows.

It's interesting to note that the Herbert Hoover Boy's and Girls Club has a soccer field where Sportsman's Park used to be.

The Carter Carburator building has always been next to sports facilities.

Could the site be made into a brewery and soccer park? Is that crazy? The windows would need to be made ball-proof, of course.

If the site could be cleaned, the building could easily accomodate a brewery and parking garage. If a soccer field was pressed flush against it and seating built around the field, more brewing stuff could be put under the stands. True, only having stands on three sides will limit capacity, but also construction costs. A soccer specific stadium doesn't need massive seating capacity to qualify for MLS' standards.

Rio Tinto Field, home of Real Salt Lake, 20,008 capacity

PPL Park, home of the Philadelphia Union, 18,500 capacity

MLS stadiums are not like the soccer stadiums found in the rest of the world, they're simple, low-rise structures.

Just in doing what Schlafly needs to do anyway for future growth, they could easily secure the building (environmental health stuff aside) and put in the basic structure for the stands to be built on. Investment in St. Louis Soccer United could be greatly enhanced with a beloved local craft brewery as an anchor. It'd be a mutually beneficial relationship. Each would enhance the other.

This fits with the legacy of Sportsman's Park. Before our city leaders destroyed China Town to build a baseball stadium downtown, we had two baseball teams at Sportsman's Park. The Cardinals moved downtown, but the Browns eventually moved to Baltimore where they became the Orioles. They play in a place called Camden Yards. That's the stadium that inspired the St. Louis Cardinals to rip down the old Busch Stadium and build the new one. What if a new Sportsman's Park was built, inspired by Camden Yards?

There's something different about Camden Yards that sets it apart from a lot of ball parks.

The B&O Warehouse is a distinguishing part of the stadium and the neighborhood.

The building is now used as offices for the ball club's management, rooms for players, and box seats for those who can pay. Imagine if the building had huge windows and a brewery inside...

There's a lot of land in front of that building. It'd make a nice soccer park. Photo taken from the Preservation Research Office's website

Magnolia Avenue / Commonwealth Avenue

2011-03-21T17:57:00.000-07:00

Dogwood / Sakura, a post that appeared on this blog last April, has proven to be the most enduringly popular thing ever written on this site. The basic statement was that there are certain places in Japan and Korea that are famous for certain kinds of flowering events in the spring, and that those residents of Seoul that can't make it to Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival in the spring go to Yeoiudo.

It's a huge annual event and people flock there in great numbers to be delighted by the changing of the season.

The question asked on that blog post was why my hometown never made an effort to designate a specific street as the go-to place to see a specific species of flowering tree. The Dogwood is the state tree, but many other trees can be found in the St. Louis area that would look lovely in bunches. Perhaps the arch grounds will be the place to go in the future to see tulip trees.

How about the simple redbud tree? There are a few in the Delmar Loop, but there is no St. Louis street that especially stands out as having a lot of them bunched together in pink clouds.

Yet, up in the 21st Ward, we do have a Red Bud Street. Over time, street trees do get sick and die, or Ameren maims them, or residents top them, or some other terrible thing happens to them. What if as a simple matter of policy, every time a tree got replaced on Red Bud, it was replaced with a redbud? In less than a decade, the street's reputation would be cemented.

Walking down Magnolia Avenue today admiring all the flowering trees deep in Tower Grove Park and on the other side of Mobot's barb wire fence, I felt a little confused to see that pretty much none of the trees planted on Magnolia were actually magnolias.

This made me want to return to the Dogwood / Sakura issue. What if every time a tree died on Magnolia it was replaced with a magnolia? Well, eventually Magnolia Avenue might look like Boston's Commonweath Avenue, and people would be drawn to it every spring to stroll around with their mouths open.

It seems like a placemaking slam dunk. A city like St. Louis with so many streets named after trees should really be able to use them to help build the identities of the neighborhoods those tree streets go through. Diversity of the urban forest is important, but breaking that pattern on just a few streets could make a difference in the way people celebrate the season.

It's spring now, and I feel compelled to walk around outside. If I was in Boston or Seoul, I might have a specific street in mind to go to where I could walk around, buy stuff, sit, and wonder.

---------------update by request------------------
I've been asked to name every street in St. Louis named after a species of tree. I don't know every street, but I can name a few. There are many, especially in the Central Corridor and Downtown, but I don't know that all of them are appropriate as street trees. Luckily there are often subspecies and cultivars that might thrive better, but I'm not an arborist. With the Magnolia, for instance, there's a big difference between a Saucer Magnolia and a Southern Magnolia

Pine is an important street that connects downtown to the Central West End. There are many many kinds of pine trees, and surely many of them might fail to thrive as street trees. I can say from my time in Seoul, that pine trees can be beautiful in the right urban setting.

Spruce is an interesting street, but spruce trees are kind of rare in cities.

I assume Olive is named after the tree, but I have no idea if olive trees can grow in STL.

South Grand used to have a lot of honey locust that were poorly planted. Their roots turned in and didn't really fit the sidewalk. They have now been ripped out. The honey locusts in Clayton, however, appear to be just fine. I don't think it'd be a problem to plant locust trees all along Locust Street.

Obviously Walnut Street would be beautiful.

Chestnut Street is an interesting question. The American chestnut tree is slowly making a comeback. Is it a hardy choice for the Gateway Mall though?

There's a Holly Avenue up near Red Bud. A street lined with holly bushes and trees would be fantastic, especially in winter. There's be a lot of happy birds chirping about.

Would tree names matching street names improve property values? That's hard to say. If each tree street gained a reputation for its canopy, then I'm sure buzz would translate a little into dollars.

Village Building Convergence / College Hill

2011-03-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

College Hill is a north St. Louis neighborhood on a hill. To the north is the riverfront. To the east is Hyde Park. To the west is O'Fallon Park. To the south is Fairgrounds Park, Grand Center, and SLU.

In the middle, on top of the hill, are two old water towers. The towers are easily visible for miles, but they, like the College Hill neighborhood, are hidden gems unknown to the average citizen.

Repairing the water towers and using them as observation decks will take millions of dollars. Rebranding them as neighborhood symbols and placemakers requires only dedicated volunteers. Making the towers and the areas around them look nice doesn't fix houses or repair broken windows, but it makes our landmarks and geography visible. It creates a reason to drive through north city.

We should paint around the towers.

We should paint the nearby intersections.

We should adopt our two beacons on a hill and let people know they are there.

Little Dixie Highway / The Great River Road in Louisiana

2011-03-04T13:53:00.000-08:00

Consider these signs.

The Great River Road and the Mississippi River Trail run parallel to each other down both banks of the Mississippi from source to mouth. They are scenic byways. One is for roads and history, the other is for bicycles and nature. Together they make up what should be a continuous National Scenic Byway through ten states.

The Great River Road in St. Louis looks like this,

While Broadway would be a more logical alignment for the Great River Road, the decision is up to MoDot. The scenic depressed lanes of the interstate are the very best way to view that interpretive center and national park, the Gateway Arch. One would think a stately boulevard or some other road might serve the purpose better, but is seems that is not the case. Similarly the MRT, that revenue generating tourism bikeway, is aligned through most of Missouri along roads with speed limits in excess of 45 mph.

There is a difference between a state scenic byway and a national scenic byway in that the latter can recieve federal grants and has proven itself as a national tourism asset. The Great River Road is a national scenic byway along most of its length in all ten states except Missouri. In Missouri it carries a state designation only except for a small section called the Little Dixie Highway.

That small section, is in fact, almost the only nationally recognized byway in Missouri.

Because it is has that federal recognition, the Little Dixie Highway can recieve federal grants. To date, Missouri has been awarded the following grants from the National Scenic Byways Program,

2000 Great River Road-Route 79 Corridor Management Plan and Implementation Strategy $80,000

2000 Great River Road-Route 79 Interpretive Sign Project $38,400

2001 Cliff Drive Interpretive Plan $97,600

2001 Crowley's Ridge Interpretive Development $40,000

2001 Implement Crowley's Ridge Parkway Corridor Management Plan $20,000

2002 Clarksville/Louisiana Natural/Industrial Interpretative Project $229,680

2002 Cliff Drive Interpretation - Phase II $133,485

2002 Hopkin's Schoolhouse Renovation $216,136

2002 Rt. W/WW Cultural and Historical Byway $28,000

2003 Cliff Drive Restoration-Phase II $708,756

2003 Little Dixie Highway - Corridor Management Plan Implementation $24,000

2004 Clarksville Refuge Interpretive Site - Little Dixie Highway $52,000

2004 Georgia Street Historic District Interpretive Site - Little Dixie Highway $79,930

2004 Little Dixie Highway - Corridor Management Plan Implementation, Year 2 $16,800

2005 Little Dixie Highway: Buffalo Fort Interpretive Site $28,089

2005 Little Dixie Highway - Corridor Management Plan Implementation (Year 3) $24,000

2005 Little Dixie Highway: Holcim Cement Plant and Clarksville Refuge Interpretive Site $411,626

2005 Little Dixie Highway: The Slave-Slaveholder Connection $11,110

2005 The Old Trails Road: Corridor Management Plan and Interpretive Booklet $88,000

2006 Historic Route 66 Corridor Management Plan $150,400

2006 State Byway Signage for Historic Route 66 $308,000

2007 Bloomfield Stars and Stripes Byway $200,000

Total: $2,986,012

A full list of grants for each state can be found here. Totals for other states along the Mississippi are considerably higher. Up north, Minnesota got $12,464,833. Across the river, Illinois got $14,302,194. Down south, Louisiana got $11,734,706.

Even though Missouri has dozens of potential or semi-recognized scenic byways, we got grants for almost none of them in the past 20 years. The majority of grants were were awarded for the Little Dixie Highway or something along it in Clarksville or another small town along route 79. If the Great River Road's recognition in Missouri covered the whole state, we'd get more money.

Consider Lousiana,

Lousiana has invested in their section of the Great River Road and made great gains because of it.

Here's a year by year comparison of grants to Missouri and Louisiana by the National Scenic Byway Program.

The National Scenic Byways Program is an economic development program for rural America at its root, but many urban exceptions exist like the Las Vegas Strip and Woodward Avenue in Detroit. St. Louis is traditionally the starting point for dozens of trails west, a stop on Route 66 and the Old Trails Highway, the end of the National Road, and symbolically represented by the Gateway Arch. The many scenic byways passing through St. Louis should pass within a block of the arch grounds and the CVC. These trails should anchor the heart of the region to its suburbs and rural hinterland beyond.

Missouri needs leadership on this issue, and downtown deserves better than an anti-scenic interstate highway.

College Hill / Monument Circle

2011-02-25T09:57:00.000-08:00

St. Louis has one of the best city flags in America.

Indianapolis has the best city flag in America.

The flag of St. Louis uses the idea of a French coin at the confluence of two rivers to suggest a meeting of ideas, people, and commerce. The Missouri-Mississippi confluence is north of St. Louis though, so the flag has more of a regional appeal. It has no anchor in the city.

The flag of Indianapolis however, reinforces the idea of the 'Crossroads of America' while conveying an absolute sense of place. It doesn't connect people to a vague sense of the Indianapolis metro area. It connects them to downtown. The flag is downtown Indianapolis.

Monument Circle is the center of Indianapolis.

St. Louisans have a much grander monument downtown (the arch) that reinforces the 'Gateway City' moniker, but that's not the point of comparison here. As the 2010 Census showed, downtown St. Louis and the central corridor are doing ok, but other areas of the city are slipping away. What was once the fourth largest city in the United States has slipped back to its 1880 population. We are gaining in the center and losing the edges. We have other monuments that need to be rallied around.

St. Louis has three historic standpipe water towers along Grand Avenue and all three are accessible by the best bus route in town. They're beautiful, iconic observation towers that are closed to the public and falling apart. Compton Hill Tower, in South City, had a $19 million-dollar restoration, but is still only open to the public one Saturday a month for lack of money and volunteers. The other two have collapsed stairways, rusted insides, and decaying outsides.

These other two are in the College Hill neighborhood, or Bissell Point.

They're both right next to each other and should be major city landmarks. Instead, they, like the College Hill neighborhood are a bit forgotten about.

This beautiful white column in 1957 with its street car wires and open shops now looks like this today,

Some buildings are gone, others are boarded up, and new ones were never built. The Grand Water Tower that was once white now looks like this,

Walking up 20th Street from O'Fallon Park, it shines like a beacon of neglect, abandonment, and poverty. What should be a city or national landmark bringing the neighborhood together is instead a representative example of the north side's disinvestment.

It should be restored. Columns are meant to bear weight, and this one ought to hold up a whole neighborhood.

The idea of the Broken Windows theory is one of perception. Places that look abandoned are abandoned. Places that looked cherished and loved, are.

Stealing an idea from Indianapolis, the street grid could be made into a powerful neighborhood image.

St. Louis Central Corridor / Downtown Chicago

2011-02-03T14:25:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I found myself walking around downtown Chicago with a group of Koreans, and one of them asked me, "Is Chicago bigger than Seoul?"

What an amazing thing for a life-long resident of Seoul to ask. "No, absolutely not." I replied. "Seoul is much larger. The difference is that Seoul has many city centers: Jongno, Gangnam, Yeoiudo, Shinchon, Jamsil, etc. while Chicago has only one."

Seoul is a solid blanket of decentralized density. Look at the subway map.

Chicago, on the other hand, has pushed all of its deveopment into one dense, mixed-use downtown. Look at the Metra and CTA maps.

Seoul is a decentralized city that is uniformly mixed-use and dense, with few places standing out as particularly denser than other places. Chicago is uniformly low-rise neighborhoods with one massively developed spot in the middle. Chicago isn't quite a megacity, but can convey that feeling to people visiting only its downtown, even if those visitors are from a genuine megacity.

So my Korean friend nodded in agreement and then asked me about St. Louis. I replied that St. Louis is smaller than Chicago and has several city centers, so we fail to achieve any kind of meaningful density. It might be argued that we have four or five different centers. Look at our bus and light rail map,

St. Louis has a downtown of great historic density and purpose. As a home for office towers though, the Clayton CBD stands in opposition, splitting whatever towers our business community might muster between two different sites nearly seven miles apart. What's more, when asked, "What is the center of St. Louis," the average resident might offer alternate locations like the Central West End, Grand Center, or Forest Park. There's no clear consensus.

Chicago's downtown has many great universities sharing facilities and renting spaces right next to each other. SLU and Wash U have private campuses stretched along the St. Louis central corridor. Downtown Chicago has Grant Park and the Museum Campus. The STL Central Corridor has the Gateway Arch and its grounds, Forest Park, the ZMD, and Shaw Park. Both cities have many of the same things, but Chicago has them together, and St. Louis has them far apart.

Chicago's CTA held a contest asking how to improve public transit ridership without building new facilities, and the winning idea suggested the obvious: concentrate real estate development around the downtown loop. The idea being that all of downtown Chicago is TOD, and increasing the TOD increases ridership. That strategy would not work the same in St. Louis, because our downtown is ten miles long and not universally supported by transit. The only transfer station in St. Louis for light rail is Forest Park station, where there will also be a street car in the future. Clayton, the Central West End, and Downtown all have bus terminals. Downtown has a rubber-wheeled trolley, Amtrak, and Greyhound, but it isn't that much better connected than the Central West End or other places along the central corridor.

The exception to Chicago's great concentration of density south of the river is Streeterville and the Magnificent Mile. Development has shot out of the Loop towards the John Hancock Building in the form of high rises and luxury apartment stores. It is as if the great success of density shot out along a seam.

The exact same thing could happen in St. Louis along the lines of the City to River plan to remove the elevated lanes of I-70 north of downtown and make an at-grade urban boulevard heading north towards the new I-70 bridge. Or it could happen with McKee's new 12th or 22nd street projects in the NorthSide plan. Or it could happen with SLU and Grand Center better connecting to South Grand. Or maybe it could happen along Brentwood Boulevard as Clayton better connects itself to Richmond Heights.

Will north-south development in St. Louis benefit the central corridor or further decentralize it? It would be nice to see development in north city. It'd also be great to have the north side better connected to the south side.

Before we can really do those things though, we need an unbroken line of development along the central axis. If our many city centers are to fully develop their manifold glory, they would be better served by growing into each other. Lindell and Forest Park Parkway (Market Street) ought to be higher priority development areas.

How could we build a stronger central corridor?

1) Fill in Harris-Stowe's campus and merge their sports programs with SLU's
2) Fill in SLU's campus, rip out the fences, and build on the grassy fields
3) Send the Loop Trolley down Forest Park Parkway or Lindell
4) Build the Sarah Street MetroLink station
5) Redesign and rebuild the 22nd street interchange and the Market/ForestPark Ave/ Compton interchange
6) Build however much of the Chouteau Greenway can be built, and leave the rest for later.
7) Put a bike sharing program in the CWE and expand east and west.
8) Connect Oakland Avenue and the Chouteau Greenway by a bike/ped tunnel under Kingshighway through the highway berm.
9) Double up on the regional investment in CORTEX
10) Establish the coffee district with proper signs and facility tours
11) Establish a downtown campus of St. Louis Community College between Union Station and the Gateway Multi-Modal Transportation Center, and let them grow into the new 22nd street interchange. Let Union Station become the student union for the entire SLCC system.
12) Provide all SLU students with Metro passes
13) Establish Forsyth, Manchester, Oakland, and Clayton Ave/Rd as Bike St. Louis corridors.
14) Plan the proposed I-64 BRT route smartly, investing Maryville and MoBap into downtown while transforming the Galleria, Plaza Frontenac, and the Chesterfield Mall into TOD
15) Restore the Sun Theater and fill in the parking lots of Grand Center with mixed-use buildings

It would also be nice if we could find a way to conceptually add East St. Louis to the Central Corridor,

1) Expand the CVC to include the Metro-East
2) Add ped/bike expansions to MLK, Eads, Poplar Street, and MacArthur Bridges.
3) Activate the many national scenic byways that go through the Metro-East and concentrate them on East St. Louis
4) Establish ESL as the downtown of the Metro-East, perhaps even moving the county seat from Belleville
5) Revisit the arch grounds competition regularly in the future to work on ways to connect East St. Louis to the river.
6) Put an Amtrak station on both sides of the river
7) Establish an express train between MidAmerica Airport - downtown ESL - downtown St. Louis, and Lambert
8) Expand SIUE's campus in ESL
9) Bring Madison and St. Clair Counties into regional taxing districts like the ZMD, Metro, and Great Rivers Greenway
10) Make the head of the new aviary an endowed chair in ornithology at SIUE along the same lines as the botony chair at Wash U that oversees the botanical gardens.

Ted Drewes / Shake Shack

2011-01-26T20:29:00.000-08:00

Tonight the revised plans for the arch grounds were revealed and one of the suggestions was something like a 'Shake Shack' in the new Kiener Plaza.

Among other things, the Shake Shack sells frozen custard. That of course begs the question: If we're going to put a little building in Kiener Plaza that sells frozen custard, why not make it local?

Kiener Plaza is our gathering ground, perhaps the very heart of downtown. Putting up a little Ted Drewes hut in the middle of it would draw people from all over. It has been proven that St. Louisans will drive absurd distances for the express purpose of buying at a window what they could buy at a grocery store.

Arch Competition... buzz
New Museum Entrance... buzz
Gondola... buzz
Downtown Ted Drewes... BUZZ

It'd be a new day in America.

(Anyway, when Kiener Plaza gets destroyed... what happens to the Running Man? I hope he stays in the Gateway Mall somewhere)

Kingshighway Skatepark / Burnside Skatepark

2011-01-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

There are people in my neighborhood doing something amazing under a decaying bridge.

They have built it entirely by themselves from donated materials. Their project is very similar to an older skatepark in Portland.

Skate Oregon describes Burnside Skatepark as,

Built without permission, by skateboarders and later sanctioned by the city, Burnside is the preeminent example of action. Burnside's unique growth and evolution -through the sweat and blood of a handful of dedicated individuals- have matured into one of the best skateparks in the world. Burnside and its creators are true pioneers, setting the stage for community built skateparks across the country.
Burnside is public, free and has no pad requirements. It is also subject to periodic review by the city. Burnside is not permanent. The city can, at any time, with excuse of public nuisance, condemn and destroy it. Park on the street only, not in adjacent private parking lots. Please respect yourself and others.

This lack of permanency is a problem. The Burnside Bridge in Portland is still strong. The Kingshighway Bridge in St. Louis is falling apart and needs to be replaced. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen just recently approved the reconstruction of the bridge. No official mention was made related to the denizens of the bridge's underside, but a plea of help appeared on the King's Highway blog a few days later.

With the looming threats of our bridges demise, KHVT has been feverishly searching out new spots to develop. If anyone has ideas, spots or private property that you think would be a good place for a new park please email us at kings.highway@yahoo.com. Also we are in need of some more members to our team. We are currently looking for anyone with experience in grant writing, accounting, fundraising, sales/donation solicitation, skateboarding advocacy and non profit work to help take our organization to the next level! We are a 501c3 accredited non profit organization but at this time we are only excepting volunteers. If you are interested or know someone that might be, send a brief informal resume of experience that would apply to kings.highway@yahoo.com . Helping us out would be a great resume builder and will give you a chance to give back to our community! We will take all the help we can get! We have a massive site in the works for a new park but we are still in the early stages so i cannot give out any details just yet but know that St. Louis skateboardings future is looking very bright, or should i saw dark?!?!? hint hint..... B.

There are many great places around St. Louis that could easily accomodate this group of DIY community maintainers. It would be nice if the new bridge could be built with them in mind. Otherwise, they could be added to the new Grand Viaduct, MVVA's Underpass Park, or maybe Cementland. I hope they find a permanent home.

Bike St. Louis / Portland Bike Box

2011-01-13T17:06:00.000-08:00

St. Louis is not a rich city, and I understand that. They can't plow the snow off every street or even most streets. That's why we have designated bike corridors. That's why when there is snow I hope to use the Bike STL routes... assuming the bike lanes are not filled with the snow plowed out of the car lanes.

Today, I was waiting for a red light at Shaw and Vandeventer, in a car lane, and the guy behind me honked at me thinking it'd make me disappear. I had no way to tell him that the area where I was supposed to wait was covered in snow, so I just waited it out and went about my business.

I bike Shaw, and I'd like to tell you dear reader about the most interesting part of my route.

Mobot's road of walls, fences, and silence. Click to enlarge

Shaw doesn't cross Kingshighway in a straight path. I start by waiting in this box that the driver's next to me seem incapable of seeing.

Most people get irritated by me biking past them at red lights to get up to the front, but the simple fact is that I don't accelerate as fast as them and the light is short. If I'm in the back, I won't make it across in time, and that's not good for the cars behind me.

I usually bike straight across the intersection to let the cars behind me pass or make thier left turn, then I jerk left to get back on Shaw behind them, which can be a tight squeeze.

Then I bike across MoBot's dead street to Vandeventer where I stop for another light.

Then I'm clear across in a neighborhood again.

There's no bike lane on Shaw, nor does there need to be. But these little boxes at intersections are really helpful. The only problem is that driver's usually don't see them. What's worse is those times when I am biking with friends and I don't know if we should line up or just take up the car lane too. The Shaw bike boxes only fit one rider at a time.

Because this is a designated route, and because we want to advertise it so, we really ought to make my our little boxes highly visible.

No, more than just visible, we should make them stand out.

Bike lanes and crosswalks ought to be colorful. Bike boxes ought to be highly visible. Portland has green. Madison has red. London has blue. I don't really care what color we choose as long as it's consistent across the region.

Having a large, lane-sized bike box doesn't take anything away from the cars, but it makes a huge difference for people on bikes. Every stop light is a five second social moment in peace instead of a fearful pause with the guy behind you making his engine growl at you because he thinks you're doing something illegal and dangerous.

The lesson for today is that the St. Louis snow removing teams do not seem aware of the bike routes, but they probably would if there were a few bright green boxes out there. Further, if they failed to clear the bike lane, they'd probably manage to get the majority of the box that cuts into the car lanes.

Winter in St. Louis is not at all too cold for biking, but the snow and ice is a problem. I got to work today to discover someone cleared all the sidewalks and deposited the snow on top of the bike rack. It was buried, so I used a lamp post instead. Yikes!

Bus Interchanges / Better Bus Stops

2011-01-05T17:39:00.000-08:00

The Central West End bus interchange is a concrete gas chamber that many people like me find themselves waiting in for unacceptable periods of time. It's filled with smoke from cigarettes that Metro seems unconcerned about, and gas from tailpipes that Metro can't afford to separate with glass doors like those in the Ang Mo Kio Hub in Singapore.

I don't blame Metro for their lack of money, but I do question whether they need the expensive inter-modal facilities they've invested in. Last year there was one bus between Dogtown and the Botanical Gardens, and now it has been broken into two that terminate at the same interchange. Now people like me going in one direction or the other must wait (forever!) at the Central West End bus terminal.

We have these interchanges because Metro is trying to plan around their existing MetroLink stations and build little transit towns. Making the buses go to them contributes to a "destination" feel. That's the Singapore model.

This is a picture of the Ang Mo Kio Hub mentioned above. It's the center of one of the many transit towns in Singapore. All attention focuses on the train station, and one would never know that they could walk to other areas if they tried. Each town is an island completely disconnected from the others by all but train and bus. One would never walk from Ang Mo Kio to Bishan because the two towns do not properly blend into each other. They're bisected by large roads and a sizable park.

Delmar, Forest Park, and the Central West End are all great places with lots of buses, but again they are islands to each other. A half-mile walking radius around them is not going to help Porter Park much or Delmar and Euclid for that matter.

Transit villages make sense in disconnected suburbs or commuter towns with historic mainstreets. In an established city mostly full of connected urban neighborhoods, it seems a shame to spend so much money making the best spaces for TOD into vast parking lots of idling buses and smoking drivers. It's a shame to do so when elsewhere in the city we're left with scenes like this,

0.2 miles from Delmar Station

Money spent on bus interchanges don't do much for the quality of a neighborhood unless they're integrated into something actively used. In the case of the AMK Hub above, the bus interchange is part of an indoor mall complete with a full-service grocery store and a movie theater. In the case of most MetroLink stations, they're part of a parking facility of some sort. Here's North Hanley,

click to enlarge

Here's the Central West End,

This is a problem. Metro spends a lot of money on parking structures that contribute very little to TOD or any kind development for that matter. Metro spends very little on bus stops, and those bus stops therefore contribute very little to the streets they're on.

Atlernatives? Nicer bus stops. Bus stops as transfer stations. Transfers on streets all around train stations, not bunched in hidden facilities. They might look like this,

That's Oxford Circus. You may remember it from a post on this blog about the potential of Washington and Memorial as a bus transfer intersection for the landing.

Or maybe they'd look like this,

This bus stop in the middle of the road is next to my old train station in Seoul, which was covered here in relation to Memorial Drive downtown. By having a bus stop in the middle of the road, crosswalks become shorter and easier to cross, and crowds use them instead of blocking the sidewalks.

The shared bus lanes are used by many different buses.

One bus stop may serve many bus routes, and studying them while you wait can help you plan future trips. The longer you wait at a bus stop in Seoul, the more useful you find it to be. Buses come every five minutes though, so it's impossible to read every route.

Seoul and London are megacities with neighborhoods that blend into each other, and real estate by train stations is expensive. Claiming the medians for buses decongests the sidewalks while still maintaining eyes and feet on the street. It calms traffic and activates crosswalks. It takes buses away from parked cars, and on well established corridors creates places for transfers.

Why does the Kingshighway bus travel like this?

At the part of Kingshighway where the crosswalks need the most help, we have taken the bus away. We've also added twenty minutes or more to the north-south commute time.

Again, we could have this,

or this,

Which costs more? Which is better for the city?

First Night Saint Louis / Art Prize

2011-01-02T09:59:00.000-08:00

For the longest time now, Grand Center has been focusing on concentrating activities within its vague boundaries to the disadvantage of the rest of the community. This is true of the efforts to stop the renovation of the Kiel downtown, and of the poaching of programs from the rest of the region, like the relocating of KWMU and KDHX. This is not dissimilar to Jane Jacobs' complaints about Carnaegie Hall shuttering in the name of Lincoln Center. A concentration around the center leaves the rest of the city dry. If that concentration is then too isolated, then it too will dry up. I do not want to see the region's art community concentrated and then bled, and I assume Grand Center doesn't want that either. Hence, this post.

I enjoyed this year's First Night celebration in Grand Center,

but there was one nagging thing that bothered me the entire evening.

Blue: Closed Streets Red: Event Venues

Transportation for First Night was not planned smartly. In fact, it was planned with an obvious bias agaisnt buses. Grand Center is pretty much the middle of the city of St. Louis. It's at the intersection of Grand and Lindell, or more specifically the 70 Grand and 10 Lindell buses. The 10 connects our two CBDs in Clayton and downtown. The 70 is the best bus line in the system, runs the length of the city, and has been picked in Metro's long-range plans as the backbone of our future bus rapid transit system.

Grand Center and the Grand Bus are tied to each other. The success of one builds the success of the other. The success of either builds the success of the rest of Grand: restaurants on South Grand, students at SLU, and the great parks at the ends. It's a reciprical relationship, and we need to stop poisoning it.

SLU's shuttles are the biggest poison in the system at the moment. Every day, the 70 Grand goes up and down the street picking up regular people, and the SLU shuttles shadow it picking up students and excluding regular people.  If SLU ditched the shuttle, gave its budget money to Metro, and gave passes to its students, the Grand bus would see increased ridership, better buses, and better frequency.

Just as SLU makes this mistake on a daily basis, Grand Center did it in a big way on New Year's Eve. First Night shut down Grand Blvd and rerouted the 70 Grand bus around Grand Center. Metro did not post anything about this in advance. Instead Metro ran extra trains to Grand MetroLink station where a shuttle waited at the bus stop to take people along the 70 Grand's route to Grand Center. Services were duplicated, and quality was sacrificed.

For the sake of the event, the most reliable bus in town disappeared and a shuttle replaced it.

Our night went like this. We took the MetroLink as we were told, found no shuttle waiting, and simply walked.   At the end of the night we needed to get home to South City and waited with a half dozen others at the bus stop for the 70 Grand to take us home. It never came. Obviously it didn't get the extra service that the MetroLink got. Three of us at the bus stop split a taxi to get home. I guess the others found their own means.

Let's replan the St. Louis event.

Grand shouldn't be blocked off, and the bus should be allowed to take people right into the center of the event along its normal route. Three of the main venues this year (Xavier, Scottish Rite, and the Busch Student Center) were on unblocked streets and worked just fine. If an outdoor block party is still desired, there's a huge parking lot framed by the Contemporary Art Museum, the Shelden, and the Grandel Theater that could hold a crowd much better than comparatively narrow Grand Blvd. Block Washington Avenue, it's smaller and has no buses. Closing Grand ruined the holiday for lots of drivers. I saw them making illegal lefts with the cops screaming at them.

Don't run shuttles. Run extra buses. Moreover, take ownership of the Grand bus. Make people see the Grand bus as an extension of Grand Center. Every inch of every bus should have been covered in First Night advertisements throughout the month of December. It goes the whole length of the city! People could see it and say, "That's the bus I'm taking to Grand Center for First Night." Logistics solved!

On New Year's Day, the shuttles are gone, but the bus remains. Teaching people to transfer to a temporary shuttle taught them nothing about the city. Teaching them to ride the bus connects them to something we're all a part of. Run some extra trains to get the east-west people, but run extra buses too for us north-south types.

Most important of all, let's let First Night expand out of Grand Center and let 70 Grand be the vehicle of that expansion. Add in the bars on South Grand. Add tours of Compton Water Tower. Put outdoor stages in Fairgrounds Park, Tower Grove Park, and Carondelet Park. Shoot fireworks from every other block along the entire bus route and let the whole city see it.

St. Louis is a city of house parties. That's what everyone did over the holiday. I've got my First Night button, but most people I've talked to have never heard of First Night despite its twenty years in St. Louis. It's an isolated block party in a city of isolated house parties.

At the beginning of the new year, we should push ourselves to step out and see new things, not stay home and spend the first day of the year recovering from a hangover. As it is, First Night is an exploration of venues not usually entered. One must look at the list of peformances and the map, and find venues perhaps unfamiliar. Yet even these are confined to the relatively small and safe Grand Center.

ArtPrize up in Grand Rapids is a scavenger hunt for art that covers the town in art and sends people looking for it based on rumors and advice from friends. They hunt down obscure oddities in parts of town they usually never frequent.

When ArtPrize is over, random pieces of art are left hanging around Grand Rapids, like this bunny in St. Louis from a previous First Night.

Why not increase the frenzy of exploration at our First Night? Why not send people hunting for venues along the entire length of Grand? Why not leave a legacy of art, effective transportation, and better linked communities?

Let's celebrate the city as a city with city things: buses, sidewalks, and accessible streets. Big events like First Night should be a shot in the arm for the city and for Metro, not a punch in the face.

Wash U's Shuttles / Drury Bike Loans

2010-12-27T18:41:00.000-08:00

Springfield Bike Sharing

Drury University recently announced that their free bike loan program was an immense success. Missouri State University announced at the same time that they'd be implementing a bike rental program on their campus soon.

If the two universities were in isolated separate towns, this news would be great.

They are, however, right next to each other, which makes this news evidence of a communication problem.

What if the two directors of the two bike programs sat down and had coffee together, decided to pool resources for one bike program (perhaps like ZotWheels at UC-Irvine), and allow students at both universities access... Who would benefit most? The answer is Springfield.

It'd be like two silos becoming one.

But what if they made an open agreement with opt-in terms for anybody interested in joining. Who might join?

Two other colleges are in easy biking distance!

With four institutions of higher ed acting as the pillars of support for a bike program, local businesses might as well step in and let regular citizens participate. Perhaps that's the direction these two programs may one day go. Obviously a strong biking culture at any of these four campuses will influence the others. Furthermore, if all four colleges agree on something, the town will go along with it.

Wash U Shuttles

Silos and turf battles create duplicated effort. Think, for instance, of a private shuttle with a route similar to a public bus. In St. Louis, this might be SLU's shuttle and Metro's 70 Grand. Students ride one bus, regular people ride the other. Neither service has great frequency or capacity. SLU's shuttle doesn't just go up and down grand. It goes in a loop over streets also served by Metro's 8, 80, and 32. If SLU stopped running a shuttle, diverted the money to Metro, and gave every student a free bus pass, all four lines could gain funding and passengers. Grand could be made into a proper BRT line. New bus lines might be added, and SLU would be better because of it.

This is what Wash U did. Wash U uses MetroBuses instead of shuttles. Students get the benefit of the entire public transit system. Citizens get better buses around Forest Park, Clayton, and the Central West End.

The opt-in idea is established. The CVC started a downtown trolley operated by Metro. CVC's tourists get better access to the attractions in Forest Park, Wash U students get a downtown circulator, and citizens get a better city.

Summary,
Silos = Poor Service and Wasteful Duplication
Open Platforms = Synergy, Scalability, and Viability

St. Louis Bike Sharing

Bike sharing systems make sense as scalable systems. They work well only when the stations are clustered together. To be successful they demand a density of use.

If Wash U started a small bike sharing program with a station at the Danforth Campus and one at its South Campus, then Concordia and Fontbonne adding stations between would add flexibility and varied use to the system, which would in turn demand more stations nearby in Forest Park.

If a station is added at Wash U's Medical Campus, then people would be zipping back and forth across the park all day. Forest Park Forever, the SLAM, the Zoo, and the History Museum all putting up stations would add to the density of transit options. Forest Park Community College might join in with the Science Center.

A station at the History Museum might inspire one at Forest Park MetroLink station, which means Metro would be involved, and therefore everyone. It could telescope out to Belleville, UMSL, SLU, and Webster could opt-in, and eventually SIUE would dump the small private system they have now.

Bike sharing is a form of transit. Like shuttles, public transit is more effective than private. If Wash U created a bike sharing system for only Wash U students, then it'd never expand to a critical mass. Allowing for others to opt-into the system creates unlimited potential and synergy which is better than any individual effort alone.

WeCar

Wash U's car sharing program, WeCar, suffers from the same failure to scale. It operates on a "one car to one parking space" model which makes it rigid and unappealing for people that live outside of Clayton or Downtown and need to go to places other than the grocery store. It can only expand as fast as new cars are added to the system, which is slow because of the small user base.

If WeCar operated on a "any car to any parking space" model and ditched the silly booking and gas refilling system, it'd be immediately appealing.

Imagine an electric WeCar system that operated thus: I see a WeCar parked in front of an induction charging station, I walk up, put in my pin and slide my card, it opens, I drive off with it, I do my thing, I see an open charging station somewhere else, I park it, and I get out. An hour later I need to get somewhere, so I look at my iPhone that tells me there's a WeCar parked two blocks away, and I walk to it and repeat the process.

Every business in town would be scrambling to install a parking spot by their front door. They'd pay WeCar to do it, and the city would be the better for it.

Operation Brightside's Demonstration Garden / Telok Ayer Park

2010-12-19T18:52:00.000-08:00

I took this picture in Singapore in 2008 and uploaded it to wikipedia.

Capital/Capita Tower is nice. It has a fitness center and pool half way up, some incredible views accessible to the public, and a restaurant on top. There's a subway station under it, a nice public square in front, and a complicated intersection around it.

Every parcel of land interacting with this intersection manages to embrace it or calm its wildness to some degree. The section outlined in green on the map is Telok Ayer Park (next to Capita Tower), and it's especially interesting because it is one of those rare public parks with what Jane Jacobs called "intricacy." It's complex and serves many purposes. It demands to be explored and enjoyed.

Let's start with where I was standing when I took that picture.

Right where that sunny spot is, that's where one can look up and see the well-framed building. The botanical atmoshere is pleasant and the paths to the sides encourage people to walk around and enjoy the hidden benches.

On the corner facing the intersection, there's a small island which is friendly to pedestrians, shaded, and accessible by bus.

The corner of the park proper has a staircase to the subway station, and the sidewalk mentioned above.

Along Telok Ayer Street, there's a covered walkway which is nice in a country that's hot and rainy year-round. There are also more short-cut paths through the park leading to those hidden benches mentioned above.

Though it is a heavily used urban space full of people, Telok Ayer Park still has the power to hit a person in the face with nature and stop them in their tracks. I found myself walking through it every few weeks, and never failed to stop and gawk.

So what does this have to do with St. Louis?

Singapore bills itself as a "City in a Garden," and I now live in the Garden District near a comparably complicated intersection.

The buildings at Kingshighway and Vandeventer do not interact much with the intersection. The library is turned away from it towards a parking lot. The car lot and the gas station do a lot to add to the nightmarishness of the place. Like the rest of the city, the crosswalks are implied but not marked. If that weren't enough, there's a big vacant plot that's supposed to be an Operation Brightside garden that would also be turned inward.

As much as I want to be excited about Operation Brightside's plan, I actually think it'd mess up that intersection even more. As it is, there is no sidewalk, and I cut across the field quite a lot. The Operation Blightside plan would provide a narrow sidewalk around a fenced off garden accessible only from the parking lot. A blank face of inaccessibility would be presented to the street.

We're giving up on the intersection as a space for people, and we're perpetuating the worst possible idea of what a garden should be. Do we want a neighborhood in a garden or private gardens in a disconnected neighborhood?

I don't blame Operation Brightside for their unfriendly ambitions. Look at the examples they have to follow.

The Earthways Center's new home is in a building oriented to two parking lots with a cold shoulder presented to the abandoned street named after MoBot's founder.

Mobot's fenced off library on Vandeventer is barely a step up from the empty parking lot(s) across the street.

Nothing says Botanical like cul-de-sacs!

The barbwire and mud sidewalk combination on Alfred is comforting as well.

...

Operation Brightside is trying to get a $250,000 grant from Pepsi to build their demonstration garden. Please do vote for them, and sign up for a membership with MoBot while you're at it. They are our neighborhood assets and we should support them no matter how misguided they are.

While supporting, remember to complain a lot. They need to be reformed and urbanized.

Engelholm Creek / 3rd World Urban Waterways

2010-12-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

This is the Engelholm Creek Watershed. It flows from UMSL's South Campus into a big underground pipe at Skinker and Olive.

On UMSL's South Campus and in St. Vincent Park, the water is relatively clean with significant evidence of healthy wildlife, including deer prints in the creek bed. Just slightly south, it gets really dirty really fast. The descriptive term I've heard most is, "3rd World."

As this is a comparison blog, I'd like to use a few random pictures from my travels to convey what is meant by 3rd world and see how appropriate it is. Let's start in Malang, Indonesia.

By most estimates, Malang would be considered decidedly 3rd World, and the trash in the urban stream would kind of support that. But check out the tires in St. Louis at Ogden and Wagner.

The railroad in Malang doesn't look too bad either, waterwise.

compared to the MetroLink at Etzel anyway...

In Cambodia on the Tonle Sap, I saw some very scary water, and some pretty badly eroded banks too,

Elsewhere on Etzel, other eroded banks are visible.

Here are some random shots from Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philipines,

Ho Chi Min City

Chiang Mai where I saw a guy cleaning cement covered tools by the bank

The Pasig River in Manila

Here are some random shots taken of the Engelholm Creek and its watershed,
<>

Guess where these hydrocarbons and heavy metals go when it rains

This asphalt recycling facility pins the creek against the MetroLink tracks and piles stuff like this in the flood plain

This is not a rain garden

It's very simple dear friends. Engelholm Creek is supposed to flow into Forest Park. It's too dirty, so we pipe it under the park and fill the park with filtered tap water instead.

Engelholm Creek is just one part of the larger River Des Peres Watershed, which to our great shame is still a public toilet. Is it 3rd World...?

It's full of tires!

Under the Page bridge over Engelholm Creek

South County Connector / Cheonggye Highway

2010-12-09T09:59:00.000-08:00

There was once a highway through the middle of Seoul, and it was called Cheonggye after the stream that once flowed there.

It was a huge highway that connected different parts of the central core. It was needed. It was used. It was... actually a huge wall cutting Jongno in half. It was dirty, loud, and promoted the wrong kind of transportation.

So why is this man laughing?

As mayor of Seoul, he ripped out the highway and replaced it with a simulacra of the stream that traditionally flowed there. It was an international success. It made him president of South Korea. It gave him the nickname, "Cheonggyecheon Lee Myung-Bak." It made his career.

Now that stream is one of the most important strolling and gathering places in the city.

The success with Cheonggyecheon triggered an unstoppable program of daylighting streams throughout the country, a reinvestment in the Han River, better bike paths, more community spaces, and better air quality.

Once upon a time, there was a river in St. Louis called the River Des Peres. It was used as a toilet. The region dumped all its sewage into it and grew to hate its smell. They buried it and added a concrete drainage ditch on top of it. It flooded every so often. It dumped raw sewage into the Mississippi.

Yet, nature cracked the old concrete, something like a natural stream slowly began to emerge, citizens began to care about the watershed, a bike trail was added to the side of it, and a new future seemed possible.

It is still a far cry from Seoul's Yangjaecheon,

but it could be argued that the River Des Peres has been on its way back to a natural state... ever so slowly.

Now this,

I-170 never made it south of I-64, but people have been planning to finish it for years. They will make Hanley into a highway and then hop it right onto the River Des Peres. It will be called the South County Connector and be Cheonggecheon in reverse. We will further destroy an already badly damaged waterway, and we'll put a highway on top of it.

Seoul and South Korea are moving forward.

St. Louis is conspiring to undermine itself. While the urbanists of other cities push progressive projects, urbanists in St. Louis must spend their time fighting destructive projects. One moment we're shutting down a casino downtown to build a new one in a wetlands conservation area, the next we're trying to cover up a river with a highway.

Get to the public meeting tonight and speak your mind.
"The meeting runs from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Affton White-Rodgers Community Center on 9801 MacKenzie Road."

St. Louis Cardinal / Northern Cardinal

2010-12-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

Are there any cardinals here?

Sports stadiums are empty most of the year

No it's winter and the St. Louis Cardinals are resting before their big migration to Florida.

Are there any cardinals here?

Cardinals Care Field attached to Adams School in FPSE

No, school ball fields sit empty even more often than the professional fields.

But how about that fence around the field?

Ah right, that other cardinal, the one that belongs to the whole US, not just St. Louis. He's beautiful. Why isn't he the official St. Louis mascot instead of this clown?

Perhaps our priorities are mixed up. Why did we pay for this vacant lot with its attached vacant building?

Why didn't we instead invest is providing cover in low trees and bushes for that other Cardinal?

Wouldn't that have been more enjoyable year round? Why don't we put out water for our friend?

Let's face it, the average St. Louis Cardinal stays with the team only a few years, and only appears in the summers. The average Northern Cardinal stays year round and lives up to 16 years.

Frozen Wasteland

Vibrant Color outside the window

A St. Louis Cardinal requires millions of dollars a year to keep happy. A northern cardinal requires any of about a hundred different food providing plants, a bit of water, and good cover in which to raise her young.

The northern cardinal doesn't belong to St. Louis, because it has better habitat elsewhere, but it takes only a minimal amount of effort to make the city a lush paradise for our little red friends. The term is birdscaping, and it seems like such an obvious thing to do at the many baseball fields we have around town. Obviously the fields themselves are only good for robins and starlings, but the edges have plenty of room for hollys, sunflowers, and whatever else our friends desire.

Come on Cardinals fans, look at your backyard and see it from a bird's perspective. Come on Mayor Slay, why would any cardinals want to hang out downtown? Where's the food? We haven't planted any.

Grass, pavement, bricks, and trees do not make a complete ecosystem.

Vandeventer Avenue / Lincoln Avenue

2010-11-23T09:35:00.000-08:00

The Great Streets program in St. Louis reveals our minds. A successful Delmar Loop inspired us to try the same on South Grand, then on Cherokee Street and Manchester Road. Next, we'll attack Gravois, Natural Bridge, or maybe Memorial Drive. This is how we will rebuild our city!

Streets are only half the picture though. We also need Great Intersections. An intersection, perhaps more than a street, can define a place. Let's start with this flag,

This is perhaps the best city flag in the US (next to STL, of course). It's the crossroads of America. It's this,

The flag of Indianapolis and the center of Indianapolis are the same. Great intersections create a sense of place, and this particular type of intersection, is too absent from the US. Is it a traffic circle, rotary, or roundabout? It's the same idea regardless. Roundabouts are small, rotaries are big, but you still drive in a circle. At the risk of offending traffic engineers, I will conflate the terms here.

This video appeared last summer on urbanSTL and is worth seeing again for those unfamiliar with the concept.

There are several in St. Louis: near the zoo, in Tower Grove Park, and where Halls Ferry meets Goodfellow.

Usually I think of rotaries as important for framing important civic landmarks. Perhaps Paris has one of the best examples of this,

In St. Louis, we have a few nice towers that can be similarly framed.

Roundabouts can do more than just frame landmarks. They can also render impossibly scary intersections into smooth flowing circles, and that's the message I'd like to give to the next mayor of Chicago.

In a recent trip to Chicago, I found myself constantly facing six-way intersections that made no sense at all. How can Chinatown be centered on Cermack and Archer? How can anyone possibly navigate Lincoln Avenue?

At every major intersection on Lincoln Avenue I found myself thinking, "Wow, they need a roundabout here!" People turn in all directions, even 45 degrees. So many lights, cars, and jaywalkers...

That's a lot of US cities though. Now that I'm back home in St. Louis, I see two intersections in my own neighborhood that ought to be roundabouts. Vandeventer Avenue's semi-great streetscape improvement project has left it unwalkable for months (no sidewalks), but what it really needs is two bookend roundabouts.

It might be argued that Shaw and Vandeventer already have a roundabout,

but that's not quite the case. There are still four sets of lights, and turning onto Castleman is kind of confusing. Most roundabouts are one-way, but traffic in front of the Bug Store goes in both directions.

Then there's Kingshighway and Vandeventer.

It isn't a nice intersection because Operation Brightside's field is still empty, the library is oriented towards its parking lot, car lots and gas stations don't add much, and the sidewalk is still torn up and closed. The intersection just isn't meeting its potential. It'd be a great place for a landmark roundabout.

Where else in St. Louis would you like to put a roundabout?

What kind of landmark would you put in the Halls Ferry Circle if you were a bilionaire philanthopist? Fountain? Statue? Spire?

Memorial Boulevard / Congress Parkway

2010-11-20T19:27:00.000-08:00

I'm a non-driver. Owning a car is an expensive and stressful thing, and I've never had any interest in it. It was therefore quite strange for me to find myself in Chicago last weekend with the burden of a car. Chicago has always been easy to get to by bus or train, and a 3-day CTA pass gets me anywhere I need to go. Yet I found myself constantly thinking about parking and navigating for a car. Spaces previously very accessible became nightmares to reach, but parking the car at a Metra station was not an option.

At one critical point, after driving around in circles on one-way streets downtown, my frustrated driver suddenly demanded that I find a way to get us out of there and back towards our hotel. I said, "Ok, just take Michigan Avenue to Congress and make a right." To my driver's great disbelief, it actually worked out, and we zipped right out of town on I-290.

It's a really beautiful thing actually. Congress Parkway begins at the Buckingham Fountain.

It heads west through downtown, and spontaneously becomes an interstate. No merging, no ramps, no hassle. It simply transitions.

On minute you're driving at a reasonable speed through stop lights and walkable streets,

and less than a minute later, you find yourself gradually increasing speed and shooting out of downtown.

Going the other direction, one is speeding from the suburbs into downtown,

and they find themselves slowing down a little and presented with the full street grid of downtown instead of just two or three exit ramps.

Keep going, and you're at that landmark fountain again.

This is wonderful for Chicago, but not every city is so fortunate.

St. Louis is kind of messy. As I-290 goes into downtown Chicago, it becomes a beautiful boulevard. As I-64 goes into downtown St. Louis, it rises high and destroys block after block with expensive on and off ramps.

ramp, ramp, money, wall, wasteland, lack of access

It is especially sad that many consider the boundaries of downtown to be Jefferson, Wash Ave, the river, and I-64. Dear friends, the boundaries are Jefferson, Cole, the river, and Chouteau. I-64 goes through downtown, it doesn't frame it.

Downtown St. Louis is not a terribly confusing place, but to the average Cardinals fan in town from rural Illinois or Missouri, it's surely a bit scary. What if there was a Congress Parkway between Jefferson and the Poplar Street Bridge? That would mean there'd be 15-20 cross streets, and anyone lost downtown would know they could take any north-south street to one of those intersections and hop on the boulevard that becomes the interstate.

I-70, in its current alignment, similarly zips through downtown tearing a jagged scar in the urban fabric as it goes, but the biggest problem is one of access and connectivity. Biking to downtown from Old North last month, I was amazed to see the backed up traffic on 10th street only to realise that it was one of the only ways people from the north could into downtown from I-70. A lot of people need to get in and out of downtown, but an interstate with a limited number of access points only known by locals makes that a challenge.

City to River has proposed that the I-70 alignment between Cass and the Poplar Street Bridge could become an at-grade boulevard when the new I-70 Bridge is completed (rerouting I-70 across the river north of downtown). This would mean that a 1.4-mile scenic boulevard right in front of the arch grounds would become the obvious navigation point for anyone lost downtown. Head to the river (make the street numbers go down) and turn left to get on I-70 and right to get on I-44/55. Turn left to get onto Eads or the MLK bridge. Turn right to take the Poplar Street Bridge. It doesn't matter what street you're on. If it goes to the river, it'll get you where you're going.

Memorial Boulevard would get you in and out of downtown fast. Or if you're trying to get into downtown, you'll get where you're going much faster. For those driving through downtown from north to south or south to north, their highway will become a boulevard and five minutes later become another highway. Easy.

City to River's plan would be the salvation of non-city drivers who want to get in and get out, it'd be an even greater blessing to city drivers who want to get somewhere downtown in a timely fashion, and it wouldn't be a big deal at all to the rest of the commuters in the region that want to breeze through it. They'd see the arch on their way to work instead of a concrete wall.

MSD's Lawsuit / Philly's $1.6 Billion

2010-11-18T12:53:00.000-08:00

Aaron Renn, the Urbanophile, recently blogged about a $1.6 billion dollar plan in Philadelphia to transform the city over the next 20 years into a stormwater absorbing sponge. That seems like a lot of money, but it's actually quite small in comparison to what other cities have been spending on band-ade solutions like interceptor tunnels. In fact, St. Louis has been spending money on these tunnels as well.

The idea is that old cities like Philly and St. Louis have pre-Civil War sewer systems that are extremely expensive to update and replace entirely. When a lot of rain comes down, the stormwater fills the sewers, mixes with waste water, and the dirty overflow goes into local rivers. That overflow goes against the Clean Water Act, and the only way to prevent it is to either replace the entire sewer system (impossible) or trap the stormwater somewhere during peak periods. In St. Louis, where we are already blessed with a number of water-holding caves, we've built a few interceptor tunnels to meet peak demand. In Philadelphia, they're hoping to stop the water where it falls in rain barrels, rain gardens, and the ground itself. The idea is that it is easier and greener to absorb the water where it falls, than to put it all in one mega tunnel.

In his blog post, the Urbanophile offered a few criticisms of interceptor tunnels in general.

•They are ridiculously expensive. Washington, DC is spending $2.2 billion on one, Indianapolis $1.6 billion, Cincinnati $3.5 billion, and Cleveland $5 billion – or thereabouts. The prices seem to vary depending on the source you read, but the operative term is always “billion”.

•Like all projects designed to deal with peak of the peak capacity, it will be un-utilized or under-utilized 90% of the time. It’s mostly wasted capacity. If you can, it is generally better to use demand management techniques to smooth out demand spikes, such as congestion pricing for roads.

•It’s a hack. We’re still basically taking clean water (well, not entirely clean, but that’s another post), combining it with raw sewage, and creating even bigger amount of, well, sewage. That doesn’t sound too smart.

•It adds zero to the city. What does your city get for a deep tunnel no one can see? Not much. The environmental benefits will never generate a rational economic or recreational ROI and no one even attempts to justify it on that basis. We are simply doing this because we’ve decided it is the right thing to do.

The idea is that building these tunnels is like adding an expensive band-ade to a problem that fails to fix it and ends up costing citizens a lot of money.

The Metropolitan Sewer District in St. Louis is not totally foolish. They're working from both ends. They added some peak overflow tunnels, and they are out there looking into rain gardens and rain barrels. They've just been put at a disadvantage recently by an unfortunate lawsuit.

Philadelphia has a progressive stormwater billing charge based on the amount of impervious surface a property owner has. The idea is that a large land owner like a Wal-Mart will pay for the amount of water that runs off his or her property and have an economic incentive to add a green roof and a pervious parking lot.

MSD's had the exact same kind of policy until very recently when it was defeated by an absurd lawsuit. St. Louis has been set back into an older fee collecting scheme with no incentives for smart property development.

St. Louis is water rich, and could be said to have an advantage because of local fear related to the Great Flood of 93 and the fact that all the local environmental groups are lined up on the same page due to the annual Earth Day Symposium. Yet at the same time, the best we can do is a series of token projects around town like the now slightly water absorbing parking lot at the Botanical Gardens or the single poorly designed rain garden installed downtown... in the middle of a sidewalk.

It has already been accepted by the local community as a supplemental garbage can.

St. Louis has been ripping up sidewalks all over town as part of the Great Streets program, but we've been replacing them with yet more concrete. Our trees are raised above the sidewalks so water runs away from them. The ground cannot breathe. Why can't we see that part of the solution is in our civic DNA?

Dear citizens, no mortar is required. We are a city of bricks. In the 1821 inventory of our fair city by John Paxton there were 651 houses, 57 grocers, 5 billiard tables, and 2 brickyards... among other things. Our bricks have always been with us. A brick sidewalk drains. If it's pushed up by tree roots, it can be relaid in an hour with no extra materials needed. It can be repaired, arranged in seasonal/neighborhood patterns, or temporarily removed for the price of a few laborers and maybe a truck. Brick paths = healthier soils, healthier trees, healthier government budgets, and better looking sidewalks.

I'm not saying we need to go back to cobblestone streets (hard to ride a bike on), but we could recognize that there are cities around the world (Seoul comes to mind) where bricks and pavers are the standard. Our cracked and annually jackhammered and replaced walkways are silly and expensive.

This,

Could look like this on a rainy day,

Seoul, where I lived before moving to St. Louis in September

American Truck / Korean Truck

2010-10-22T18:02:00.000-07:00

Hanging around after UMSL's "What is a City?" conference, I found myself talking with a Sierra Club member that was opposed to the proposed I-70 truck corridor in Missouri. For those unfamiliar, the truck corridor would put a four lane priority interstate for cross-country trucks in the median of I-70 and push the current interstate out wider and designate it for cars. Trucks could move faster, and cars could be less scared (except when trucks are slamming into the sides of them). The initial proposal is between the suburbs of Kansas City and the suburbs of St. Louis. The future would stretch over four states.

Now, this is obviously a terrible idea in terms of return on investment. Billions would be spent widening the roads and eating up land. Billions more would be spent on maintaining all that eventually crumbling concrete. Many would die as the trucks merge left unable to see little cars in their blind spots. The environmental impact would be huge, and the entire thing would be far better justified as a high speed rail freight line. Why send a truck across three states for a lot of money and fuel on expensive infrastructure, when you could send it faster for cheap on designated rail? Nobody dies, and rain water permeates into the ground.

The point that this Sierra Club member made to me was about truck size. She said that the trucking lobby was constantly trying to expand the size and weight limits for their fleets, which would mean even bigger trucks on the road smashing, killing, and polluting. Why not, Caterpiller makes such machines. If there was a large truck-only interstate for long range trips, it would justify larger trucks, but those trucks would have to use regular roads as well.

Cross-country Distribution = big trucks for big trips
Local Distribution = small trucks for small streets

That point struck home with me.

In Korea trucks look like this.

The Bongo Truck is a staple of Korean logistics. Absolutely everything gets moved around the city and country in these tiny trucks. Larger trucks are not to be seen. Seoul is as big as New York, and South Korea is a first world country the size of Indiana.

I just moved to the US from Korea, and I bike everywhere now. It is troubling to see how large the trucks are along Morgan Ford.

If you've ever biked with a full-sized semi next to you, you'd be uncomfortable with large trucks as well.

St. Louis can be a cargo hub without huge trucks on neighborhoods streets. Kingshighway is one thing, but smaller streets should be for smaller trucks.