UMSL / UMKC

University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL)
15,543 students
352 acres

University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC)
14,818 students
157 acres

UMSL is a suburban campus near the intersection of I-70 and I-170.  It is between downtown and the airport.  As we move from downtown St. Louis, we might hit it if we happen to be following the highway. If we take public transit we'll be sure to pass its parking lots.

UMKC is a bookend to downtown Kansas City.

The streets are numbered from the river in KC, like St. Louis, but they go a bit farther.  KC is linear and goes south.  To the west is the state line, and to the east is the city limits.  KC goes north and south between downtown and UMKC, they're natural partners.

UMKC is relatively dense,

UMSL is spread out.  The buildings are disconnected from each other, and the university is on a quest to gobble up the denser, but poorer surrounding neighborhoods so that there will be room to spread out further.  Students and faculty often drive between parts of the campus.  No attempt has been made to address the walking problem between the two halves of the campus bisected by Natural Bridge.

UMSL has spent a lot of money to change its entrance from Natural Bridge to I-70.  With its own highway exit, UMSL has established itself as a very large car depot and spends a great deal of its infrastructure expenses on more and more parking.

For whatever reason, UMSL has failed altogether to embrace transit oriented development despite having two train stations on campus.


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At UMSL South, there is nothing visible from the station but parking lots and very poorly landscaped mulch piles.  Though there is a lot of student housing, and even a couple colleges nearby, a new student could get easily lost.
In line with the car-oriented, suburban, anti-community planning, there're also rundown student apartments in a nearby gated community full of international students who thought they were moving to a big American city.

On the east side of the station is a row of inaccessible hedges that can be brushed aside to reveal a dirt path to natural bridge and the library there.  As UMSL buys out the local community, this will no longer be used.  The school will fulfill its public service mission by alienating the public, and Metro will stand by complicit.


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At UMSL North, a poorly planned performing arts center was put between the station and the student center without any regard to the students who would be walking in the space.  Walking to the performing arts center from the student center is puzzling and not at all direct.  Included in this anti-walking plan was a sidewalk in an unusable place and a large unused road as a barrier.  The students, in great numbers pouring from the train each morning, made their own path through the poor landscaping.  Signs were put up to discourage the new path, and those signs were kicked down and walked on by the students.  On rainy days, students preferred walking in the mud over going out of the way to use the sidewalk planned for them.  After a couple years gravel was put down on the dirt path.  Still later a sidewalk was finally put in.

To the north of the station is another dirt path, this one to the Mark Twain Fitness Center, another inaccessible building.  There's another dirt path leading to a cul-de-sac of what used to be a neighborhood before it was bought out and demolished.  If you follow the old streets there, and you're not killed crossing Florissant Road, you can find your way to some car-oriented university housing that the school calls "Mansion Hills."


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As UMSL has bought land to connect them to I-70, they have built a large research park--home of the Fortune 500 company, Express Scripts.  This office park is very close to the North Hanley park and ride lot.  With the land in Bellerive that UMSL is acquiring, they will have North Hanley on their campus in the next few years.
North Hanley was not built to UMSL's specifications.  Metro is the anti-walking planner there.  Passengers alighting at the station can walk to a parking lot or to a highway...  The station is not a destination for anything at all.  The Express Scripts employees who would like to use public transit would find that they cannot cross the tracks separating the vast parking lots.



It is very simple.  If UMSL invested better in its land use, it wouldn't need so much.  If it invested in its walkability and oriented itself clearly to the metrolink stations, more students would ride the train.  Doing the same for the MetroBus stops on campus would have a similar effect.  With less people using their cars on, there would be less need to build parking. 
Money would be saved, that money could be invested in better academics.
A community would be nourished, and that community would yield alumni donations, which could be invested in better academics.

UMSL is a public university with a public mission.  It is against their mission to be uppity and inaccessible.  They paid millions of dollars for a public relations company to come up with a new slogan for them to put on all their promotional materials: "Just Think."  Not sure if they even use it anymore, but it'd be great if they did  just think  about their plans a bit before they put them into action. 


let's look at student per acre density
UMSL:   15,543/352  = 44 students per acre
UMKC:  14,818/157 = 94 students per acre

UMKC serves twice as many students per acre as UMSL.

Portland State University claims to put its money into transit over parking.  It serves 24,284 students with a 49 acre campus.  That's 495 students per acre.  This is why people are moving to Portland.
Look around the map, I challenge you to discover where the university ends and the city begins,


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This is a negative entry, but I am an alum, and I donate to UMSL monthly.