The Loop / Ang Mo Kio

This is Singapore.  The red area is an area called Ang Mo Kio.  Ang Mo Kio is one of the many New Towns in Singapore.  A New Town is an interesting urban planning term for a community that has been planned and created fresh.  Ang Mo Kio, as any Singaporean will tell you, is quite old though.  They've been covering the island with new towns though so Ang Mo Kio was retrofitted into one. 

This is Ang Mo Kio from the sky.  The red box is the town center, train station, bus interchange, and mall.  The yellow box is the town library.  The light blue box towards the bottom is the public swimming pool (less than a dollar to use).  The three other blue boxes are parks.  The yellow-green lines are park connector bicycle paths.  The pink boxes are community centers which offer classes in martial arts, dance, foreign languages, and more.  They've got badminton courts, rooms to rent, and all sorts of services that the people take advantage of.  All those other buildings are HDBs.  These are 12 story apartment buildings owned by the government's Housing Development Board.  Every one has virtually the same floor plan.  It's a good floor plan, I lived there for over a year.

Here we see a Ang Mo Kio MRT station and AMK Hub.  Every new town has something like AMK Hub.  The Hub connects to the station by a tunnel under the road.  In the lower basement there is a FairPrice, which is like a government run Super Wal-Mart.  In the upper basement, there are retail shops and a big area for 'Road Shows' which are common in American malls too.  On the 1st floor there's a bus interchange.  The 2nd floor is retail.  The 3rd floor has educational tutoring services, music lessons, etc. and a huge food court.  The 4th floor has a club/casino/thing I never entered and a movie theater.  The building has bakeries, several banks, and an information kiosk.  An adjoining building has another movie theather and a large bookstore called Popular.

The Hub's bus interchange is L shaped.  It curves around the bus coral with waiting areas for each numbered bus.  When your bus pulls up to the doors, your line moves forward and gets on.  Nearly every MRT station on the island has a similar bus interchange.  Each of the buses coming here will probably stop at two or three of them.  The local buses that only serve Ang Mo Kio drop off on the street outside.

The Hub was built as a bus shelter, but is half open-air since the bus emissions would be troubling otherwise.  In this way one can transfer from the train to the bus very easily. 

Singapore is a top-down society.  Everything tends to come from the government.  They own the housing, they plan the built environment at least 15 years ahead in minute detail, and even tell people to be artistic with directives and bizarre investments in art education.

As AMK stands in for Signapore's New Town concept, I'm going to use the Delmar Loop as a stand-in for St. Louis's Transit-Oriented Development.

 

The loop was put together in a more grassroots manner and though signifantly less populated has a lot more life to it (in my opinion).  I left Skinker and Big Bend off of this map because I want to compare a one-to-one by train stations.  Now, there is no mall here, but there is a strip of interesting businesses, a movie theater, a bank, a library, a bakery (bread co), etc.  It too has parks, though they are far away.  There are no community centers in the Singaporean sense, but there are places like Coca and the St. Louis Ki Society that offer classes in similar things.  There's also Wash U, which for the sake of this entry we'll consider part of the TOD for Skinker and Big Bend.  The nearest Barnes and Noble is by 170, but Sub Books is right there on the Loop.  There's even a farmer's market.

The park connectors are weak, but the Centennial Greenway should change that.

The main problem is the lack of a grocery store.   The nearest Schnucks is not in easy walking distance.  I walked there from my old apartment on Westgate often, but I could only buy what would fit in my backpack and shoulder bags.  I read that the light company across from the Pageant is moving and a grocery store may be opening, that would be very good.

Overall, the Loop's TOD is going well.  It has two train lines, and perhaps a street car.  The street car's traffic calming, parking removing, and scenic nature might encourage enough foot traffic and development to push to the other side of Delmar station as well.

The one thing to resolve is the bus situation.  Waiting for the bus can take a very long time anywhere in St. Louis.  The buses that service Delmar Station pool in the wrong spot and threaten pedestrians.  There is a huge parking lot nearby.  Turning it into a parking garage, bus interchange, and an urbanized big box store (like downtown Schnucks) could be a possible solution.  Mall construction is not innately bad if it serves diverse needs beyond retail.  If the roof of said Loop Hub had a huge public swimming pool on top, I wouldn't mind at all.