Justin 🏙️
@lithiumaneurysm
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🥑🔰🌐🚊🇦🇺🇺🇸 Urbanist in the great City of St. Louis. Advocate for progress and abundance. Development is good. Paul McCartney stan. Diet Coke apologist.
St. Louis
Joined April 2014
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A great opportunity to once again share one of my favorite maps of all time: “Intercity Railways of East Missouri and Southwest Illinois” by David Edmondson, showing rail service from St. Louis Union Station in 1921
If Wikipedia is to be believed, the busiest train station in the world at the end of the 19th century wasn’t in Europe. It wasn’t even on the east coast of the US. It was this one:
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I saw this photo of Downtown St. Louis in 1928 and it made me sad, so now you have to see it too
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Typical unsubstantiated, substanceless NIMBY complaining featured here. This city has 575,000 fewer people than it did in 1950. Stop pretending *any* neighborhood is at risk of being overpopulated. This city's biggest issue is underpopulation.
Neighbors worry about congestion from proposed Kingshighway apartments in St. Louis
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at this point, my entire account is just repeating the theme "America had the greatest cities in the world at the turn of the 20th century and voluntarily decimated them for nothing" over and over again
And the endless wrath of the "We Ruined Our Own Cities" file continues with Kansas City
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This is now the most fascinating and heartbreaking book I own
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Canceling I-45 and spending all $7 billion on this map and transit seems like a no-brainer
"A citywide bikeway network can be built for about the cost of a single highway junction."
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"You see, people don't want to go to the Arch anymore because there's not enough parking Downtown"
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The most interesting part of this 1940 photo of Downtown STL (looking south) is what's happening in the foreground. There's an dense urban fabric that's been completely eradicated. It's really incredible how much has been lost. [1]
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Thinking about the juxtaposition here... our cities used to be places for pedestrians first. Vehicles were guests, given low priority in the delegation of public space. Today, cars are at the top of the pyramid, entitled to travel through any part of the city at 30+ mph
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Love how they didn’t end up building that crosswalk in front of Ted Drewes before the start of summer. This country is truly inept at basic infrastructure
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Big step forward for Kingshighway improvements along Tower Grove Park: road diet to 4 lanes, new center median, and a new signalized crosswalk. All great and meaningful changes.
Still wish they'd get rid of the slip lanes at Arsenal.
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The fact that this absurd design was considered acceptable or safe just 8 years ago speaks to the urgent need for reform in traffic engineering—at the city, at MoDOT, and at the national level.
Police are investigating after a pedestrian was struck and killed by a motorist who left the scene early Sunday in Soulard.
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About 26,000 people live within a half-mile of Forest Park. That’s pretty solid, but this population density map suggests there’s plenty of room to allow even more people to live within walking distance of one of the greatest parks in America:
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About once a week I think about how much I enjoy living in St. Louis, despite how it'd probably never place that highly in a ranking of cities according to my own personal criteria
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Incidents like this are entirely predictable if you spend more than 5 minutes walking outside in the city. A small group of incredibly dangerous drivers is wreaking havoc across St. Louis.
We need an immediate and aggressive crackdown on reckless drivers.
Police now say two people are dead and several others are injured after a car struck multiple pedestrians and vehicles in an intersection in St. Louis City overnight.
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Feels like driving in St. Louis has plateaued at an unsettling level of unhinged. I see cars without any type of license plate every day now? Only half of drivers stop at stop signs??
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Reading about Kirkwood rejecting a proposed hotel development. I think it's important for St. Louis City to aggressively reject this worldview and embrace growth, for the good of the city and the region. This sort of small-minded, exclusive thinking only impoverishes us.
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@mattyglesias
we don't even need to develop new land—just make the City of St. Louis' population 850,000 again
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One fun thing about walking places is spotting all the evidence of car crashes everywhere
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spitballing some ideas for improving St. Louis streets... starting with Tucker in Downtown [1/?]
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I'm not a baseball/sports person, but this did inspire me to do a little light reading about Sportsman's Park in north St. Louis. Found this crazy photo from
@mohistorymuseum
—look at how neatly it fits into the neighborhood! (And the streetcar on Grand!)
"Baseball teams and their parks end up reflecting their cities—after all, the reason old ballparks have their quirks is because they were built to fit in city blocks." As they should be.
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I've seen a few comments that the old buildings at 1900 Olive aren't worth saving or that more parking is needed in DT West (lol). Think of it this way: what if, in the 1990s, half of the Manchester Strip (the Grove) had been demolished for Barnes Jewish parking?
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To a significant extent, our judicial system simply doesn’t see crimes committed by drivers as “real” crimes.
The south county Maserati driver who killed a man in St. Louis was sentenced to just 120 days in a "shock" sentence. Prosecutors wanted 3 to 7 years.
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Glad this is getting more coverage. Kingshighway is a total mess whether you walk or drive.
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As beautiful as these houses are, it’s still wild that we use the power of the state to preserve mansions and keep apartments illegal across the street from one of the greatest public parks in the country (Forest Park).
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Whitmire is abysmal. He's leading one of the most vicious and reckless backlashes against safe streets I've ever seen in a major American city. Projects like Shepherd-Durham have been in the works for years, if not a decade.
“Marlene Gafrick told the redevelopment authority, which is building the project with local and federal funds, it would only receive city support – and permits – if it redesigned the project”
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This is why my bio says "development is good." Nobody's obligated to do anything with the Crunden-Martin complex; it could all easily be left to disintegrate. Thankfully some enterprising people are willing to place a bet on St. Louis and make it a productive asset for the city.
It’s Thursday and I have some new renderings to share of the Gateway South project.
The first three are of the general master plan.
Looking North on 2nd Street.
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There should not be any new bike lanes constructed in St. Louis without full protection.
If you're going to add bike lanes from scratch, do it properly or don't do it at all. Parking-protected bike lanes should be the standard, not the door zone nightmare proposed here.
In South City there are more additional bike lanes and paths marked with green. This is the intersection of Kingshighway and Holly Hills.
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People really don't realize you can park next to any MetroLink stop and take the train directly to any Downtown attraction for $2.50. It's worked flawlessly for every event I've attended Downtown.
And if there's one problem St. Louis *doesn't* have, it's parking availability.
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I’m a broken record on increasing St. Louis’s population because it really is a fundamental solution to many of the city’s ailments, from retail vacancy to water infrastructure. It frustrates me to no end that people treat growth in the city as optional or even undesirable.
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Living in St. Louis has convinced me that there are (very broadly) two types of drivers:
A) The generally law-abiding, ranging from extremely diligent to extremely careless (95%)
B) Homicidal maniacs who will flagrantly break traffic laws if it saves >1 second of their time (5%)
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Reckless driving is a disease that threatens everyone in this city
Speeding cars keep hitting her historic St. Louis home. She's fed up.
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Maintaining 6 lanes along Tower Grove Park has to be one of the more egregious choices in this plan (and yes, maintaining the status quo is a choice). Anybody who's walked along this stretch of Kingshighway for more than 5 seconds knows how dangerous the outermost lanes are.
Immediately south of the park, KB has fewer lanes. But despite calls from the neighborhoods to remove a lane along the park
@lochgroup
recommended that the city preserve all 6 lanes and made no plans to add a crosswalk to connect the schools on KB to the main park entrance.
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I want to emphasize another point here: a major reason this region spent a billion dollars on a light rail system was to eliminate the need for parking Downtown. The MLS stadium doesn't need additional parking because MetroLink and existing lots can already handle the new demand.
This is a map of parking in downtown St. Louis. Red=surface lots, purple=garages, yellow=buildings with parking podiums, blue=MLS stadium.
We do NOT need any more parking. Clearing out the 1900 block of Olive is a useless waste. Enough is enough!!
#Nomoreparking
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It really feels like all forms of transportation in this region are being undermined by deeply broken people with no regard for the lives of others
Man killed 2 St. Louis Metro bus riders because one looked at him 'the wrong way,' cops say
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This map is shocking, and it doesn’t even show the vacant grassy lots and rights-of-way for supersized streets. Once you realize how overwhelmingly empty Downtown is, it’s not surprising why it’s struggling so much.
This is a map of parking in downtown St. Louis. Red=surface lots, purple=garages, yellow=buildings with parking podiums, blue=MLS stadium.
We do NOT need any more parking. Clearing out the 1900 block of Olive is a useless waste. Enough is enough!!
#Nomoreparking
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I think it's important to remember that St. Louis is functioning like three separate cities. The city isn't universally in decline—there are growing neighborhoods where demand for new housing and other development is strong.
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One fascinating thing about pre-war St. Louis is how heavily the city’s population was concentrated east of Grand—a ~20 square mile area that probably held more people than the city’s current population. It’s frankly impossible to conceive of what the city was like then.
I once stumbled into a map store on vacation and impulse bought an original 1901 (year my house was built) Rand McNally map of STL. Before I framed it, I took a high-res scan. Here it is if anyone's interested.
Low-res JPG below. High-res TIFF linked.
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Antisocial behavior is a threat to urbanism.
It’s much more difficult to achieve a more dense and walkable St. Louis with incidents like this. This is why I’m a broken record on reckless driving. It’s corrosive and reprehensible.
(tw) I've parked just about everywhere in downtown St. Louis covering games over the years, always felt pretty safe.
So I didn't think to worry about doing a quick video for YouTube walking to my car tonight. I just wanted to tell people that I'm going to bed instead of
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This is the kind of bold, proactive approach to traffic calming we need more of in St. Louis. Focus more on design and less on enforcement. There are affordable ways to make our streets safer.
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When you realize QuikTrip uses bollards more effectively than the large majority of pedestrian spaces in St. Louis
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Density is good because it creates the tax base necessary for us to fund and improve public goods like Forest Park
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I find St. Louis NIMBYs completely abhorrent and despicable. Imagine denying a city that’s spent over half a century losing residents the ability to heal itself.
Two neighbors sued the Board of Adjustment to block the variances for the Fanning School rehab into apartments. They won. Not sure what happens next.
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The state of Kingshighway: a driver just ran off the road at Magnolia and destroyed a pedestrian signal.
@stlcsb
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The clock is always ticking on the next horrifying and entirely predictable traffic death in St. Louis. The city continues to fail to take immediate action to hold reckless drivers accountable and rectify poor street design
Another deadly pedestrian crash in the City of St. Louis.
Just after 5pm on the 4400 block of Chippewa a person was attempting to cross the street. Driver hit them and drove off.
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Some small part of me dies every time I see an old drawing of St. Louis
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Being a NIMBY in a city that's lost 60% of its population is reprehensible, and these people should be ignored outright.
That aside, I guarantee you a church has a far worse traffic/parking volume profile than an apartment building. These complaints aren't even logical.
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"Beyond traffic tickets" is doing a lot of work here given, you know, that he killed 2 people by running a red light. Tickets are not meaningless. We need to call aggressively reckless driving what it is: criminal and antisocial behavior that threatens lives.
Defense attorneys note that the 22-year-old Pattonville High graduate had no criminal history beyond traffic tickets. But prosecutors said he drove recklessly for more than a mile before the crash
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Same in St. Louis. City leadership should set a goal - say 350K by 2030 - and outline their policy agenda to achieve that by encouraging development and investment (especially new housing in the highest-demand neighborhoods) and improving quality of life.
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all the people griping about heat and A/C need to visit a Southeast Asian city sometime. People will walk places if you build a welcoming environment for it, no matter where you are in the world
Houston considers a plan to make the city more ‘walkable’
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The Grand Parkway, east of Houston and north of Mont Belvieu: harbinger of future sprawl
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St. Louis Union Station must've been so cool as an actual train station.
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Can't say I'm a fan of the city's design for the reconstruction of Southwest Ave @ Columbia Ave. Why are we destroying productive, occupied buildings for roads? Why are we removing zero-setback street frontage in favor of a new parking lot?
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Walk/biking around the city this weekend and half the pedestrian beg buttons I’ve pushed have been broken. Every intersection in St. Louis should have automatic pedestrian phases, it’s ridiculous how much we deprioritize pedestrians even in the most walkable areas
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If you want new buildings to fit in better with the "context" of your historic neighborhood, consider supporting a repeal of St. Louis' minimum parking requirements:
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This photo makes me so sad. It's not just the historic riverfront razed for the Arch—it's the erasure of dozens of grand Downtown buildings and entire North City neighborhoods in the background.
Downtown looks less dense today than it did in 1940, despite the skyscrapers.
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Whining about red light cameras is downstream of one of the most common habits of bad drivers: responding to a yellow light by speeding up rather than coming to a stop.
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Reminds me of one of the most incredible diagrams I've ever seen (credit David Edmondson)
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Man, I'm so tired of hearing about security on Metro. You know what really erodes community trust in public transportation? A transit network that doesn't run frequently, punctually, or during off-peak hours.
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The City of St. Louis only has two bus routes that operate with sub-30-minute headways.
About 47% of the MetroBus system (by total route length) runs at a 60-minute frequency. Only 9% of the system runs every 20 minutes or less.
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If St. Louis wants a practical bus system that doesn't torment riders who depend on it with extreme trip times, then frequency on nearly every route needs to double at a minimum.
What would that require? Is there any hope of achieving that in the next 10 years?
The City of St. Louis only has two bus routes that operate with sub-30-minute headways.
About 47% of the MetroBus system (by total route length) runs at a 60-minute frequency. Only 9% of the system runs every 20 minutes or less.
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Hopped over to Spain for the week and noticed several street design ideas that St. Louis could easily borrow and adapt…
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This is exactly the type of development St. Louis needs on its vacant lots. An unambiguous win for the city
Developer Spitzberg-Lassen
Rendering by architect Design Alliance.
14 2-story townhomes over 14 garden apts. 28 parking spaces, the max.
No tax incentives.
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honestly, if Houston had more blocks with buildings that come up to the street and awnings/canopies/colonnades/street trees over the sidewalk, it'd be a thousand times more walkable because it'd be a solid 20 degrees cooler at ground level
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I really do believe that if St. Louis took a strong, proactive stance on transit and active mobility, it'd stand out among its peer cities and move its economy in a bold new direction. The city has the ingredients (street grid, historic bldgs). It needs to tie it all together.
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To me, the relevant question here re: awarding tax abatement isn’t job quality or the “need” for another hotel.
The only question that actually matters is: what action maximizes future tax revenue for the city?
$125M St. Louis hotel project ‘looks dead’ after aldermen balk at incentives
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I support increasing our spending on bollards by at least an order of magnitude. Let's build stuff that can withstand St. Louis drivers.
That didn't take long.
We salute these bollards sacrificed at the alter of haste and recklessness. 🫡
@WorldBollard
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Came across this insane step forward in Street View in Philly (2011 -> 2014)
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It's insane how many people used to live in the city. The population of many (probably all) of these districts today is a fraction of what it used to be. The numbers here add up to about ~750,000.
#FridayFunFact
: In 1926 the St. Louis City Health Dept. designated 26 Sanitary Districts. The department tracked population, sanitation and health data to help combat the spread of diseases.
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I'm annoyingly repetitive about building more housing in St. Louis because this is very bad.
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Great. The legislature should shift its focus to boosting state funding for public transit instead.
Missouri’s hyperloop dreams derailed as Virgin picks West Virginia for test site
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Watched a driver casually run a red at Jefferson and Shenandoah while heading home tonight. So normalized that it’s a banal observation. Love the complete lack of accountability for drivers in this city
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This illustrates why I’m such a booster for development in STL. The city will remain 66 sq mi for the foreseeable future and has the infrastructure for a population 3x what it is today. Every vacant lot or building that’s converted to productive use is a massive win for the city.
Compact, walkable, mixed-use development raises more tax revenue and is more resilient than car-centric development everywhere, every time.
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Shortsighted, rampant demolition is a net negative for St. Louis. Downtown is suffocating on parking and more vacancy will make revitalization even harder to achieve.
This row of buildings on Olive Street, between 19th and 20th, have demolition permits issued. A parking lot will more than likely replace them.
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st. louis nimbys are just some of the most incomprehensible people. how could you possibly complain about overdevelopment when your neighborhood's population history looks like this
At the Skinker DeBaliviere meeting for the 14-Story OPUS development tonight, public comments are being read. Lots of opposition due to:
1) Parking
2) “Transient” college residents
3) Traffic (from theoretical cars that won’t have parking)
4) Size
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There was a similar phenomenon when lanes were closed and shifted on Kingshighway at the medical center a couple of weeks ago.
Traffic calming is not technically difficult—getting administrators and policymakers to embrace it is.
Check out the calm traffic on Gravois & Pestalozzi today. A natural experiment in traffic calming, and crossing by bike / ped is a breeze (if you avoid the ditch!). We talk about stopping traffic violence - why can’t we always have this?
@streetsblogkea
@RyanWKrull
@Trailnet
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A city that has experienced population loss for 7 consecutive decades simply cannot afford to reject new residents and investment like this.
The Preservation Board voted to withhold preliminary approval for the proposal at Morgan Ford and Juniata 3-1.
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Part of what makes me so viscerally angry about this is that it truly could happen to any of us. Every time you see someone in this city blow a stop sign/red light at speed, just think about how differently it could've gone if they hit something - and you were in the wrong spot.
A horrifying video shows the downtown St. Louis crash that killed a Chicago mom and daughter after the Drake concert -- and the terrible toll of traffic violence in the city
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This is what we need all over St. Louis... not more Jersey barriers and fences blocking downtown crosswalks.
.
@ChicagoDOT
has installed dozens of quick-and-cheap paint-and-post sidewalk bump-outs and pedestrian islands, as well as "Don't Block the Box" intersection markings and signs, around downtown Chicago.
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I suppose my expectations were too high—the plan for Kingshighway is extremely modest and unlikely to fundamentally change the experience of walking or driving along the corridor.
Below is Tower Grove Park--the second largest park in Saint Louis and a gem to the region. This is a story about
@STLCityGov
and its engineering consultant
@lochgroup
sacrificing access to that park and the safety of the children who play there to cars.
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1. There is nothing in O’Fallon that looks remotely like this, and that’s not a reason to ban new housing
2. I wish the media would stop amplifying the falsehood that new housing raises rents. It has no empirical basis and it defies basic logic.
Nearby residents worried that the apartments would raise rents in the area. (They also said the style of the apartments looked more like O’Fallon or Creve Coeur than TGS.)
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Completely absurd that St. Louis is giving tax incentives to low-intensity, automobile-oriented development like fast food restaurants. Delmar should be an obvious target for higher-density, pedestrian-friendly land use. The city's incentives are broken.
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of course, the average Houstonian's walking experience is in an environment like this, so I understand why people are skeptical if they've hardly experienced a nice shaded sidewalk
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Folks, St. Louis is good
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The only mistake Houston made when legalizing these townhomes in the late 90s was not more closely regulating driveway curb cuts. The Inner Loop would be immaculate if they'd incentivized rear/alley-facing garages.
An interesting feature of non-zoning in Houston is that they do a lot of TALL single-family homes.
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I hear incredibly loud (clearly modded) cars accelerating on Kingshighway or Vandeventer about once an hour every single night. I hope whatever we do about reckless driving also mitigates this noise pollution—it’s an underrated quality of life issue
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reckless driving is a threat to historic preservation, among other things
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Typical fragmentation bickering about "geographic inclusivity" in job distribution, which is a meaningless and misguided term. Cities that push jobs out into inaccessible, unattractive suburban sprawl instead of developing dense cores are doomed to fail.
Critics Say New Metro Jobs Plan Isn’t Inclusive Of Surrounding Counties
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Routine repaving and restriping projects are a great opportunity to rethink street design and implement low-cost solutions (e.g., crosswalks, curb bulb-outs). It’s clear the relevant depts at the city aren’t prioritizing this to the extent they should be
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