Vandeventer Avenue / Lincoln Avenue

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

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

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