The Rock Road MetroLink station was designed in the early 1990s as a drive-to station with 183 parking spaces. For twenty years now pedestrians have endured horrible conditions to reach the train platforms and MetroBus lines.
On Sunday I joined a Citizens for Modern Transit (CMT) Ten Toes walking group as it did a walk audit in the neighborhood to the south.
Again, it baffles me that we could spend hundreds of millions to build transit infrastructure and, after two decades, not do what it takes to make it accessible nearby to pedestrians. No wonder we’ve not seen any new development around this busy station.
What this illustrates has less to do with Metro and more to do with our many layers of government, how they’re funded and how they decide / choose to spend their finite tax dollars. Any network – highway, pedestrian, transit, computer – is only as good as its weakest / missing links. 125 years ago, St. Charles Rock Road, here, was a two-lane dirt road. There were no sidewalks and no traffic signals. Pedestrians only competed with horses. Since then, many things have been “improved”, multiple times, by the highway department, by the local governments, by Metro and by private property owners. There is no master plan, no ultimate goal. Each entity does what they think is “best”, at least within their current budget, in their own little part of the world. Could it be better? Absolutely! Is it better than what was there before? Most likely, it is. Can we identify multiple hurdles / missing links, especially to pedestrians with physical limitations? Certainly!
The real question is how do we catalog, prioritize and (most importantly) FUND the fixes that are needed. Your third photo shows a dirt path that’s apparently a shortcut from the original concrete sidewalk. To me, paving that is a much lower priority than installing curb ramps or installing sidewalks to replace the dirt paths in your last two photos, but the odds are Metro will find the funding for the former before the local city finds funding for the latter. I don’t see a real compelling need, based on capacity or major new developments, for any major infrastructure projects in the area, so any new work will be more like what MoDOT is doing now along Manchester and Chippewa. Can we count on MoDOT to do the same thing here? What about along streets that aren’t MoDOT’s responsibility? (St. Louis County seems much less willing to invest in ADA retrofits.) This all gets back to the reality that pedestrians are a minority in the transportation matrix, and pedestrians with disabilities are a minority within a minority, and our funding reflects that.
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What this illustrates has less to do with Metro and more to do with our many layers of government, how they’re funded and how they decide / choose to spend their finite tax dollars. Any network – highway, pedestrian, transit, computer – is only as good as its weakest / missing links. 125 years ago, St. Charles Rock Road, here, was a two-lane dirt road. There were no sidewalks and no traffic signals. Pedestrians only competed with horses. Since then, many things have been “improved”, multiple times, by the highway department, by the local governments, by Metro and by private property owners. There is no master plan, no ultimate goal. Each entity does what they think is “best”, at least within their current budget, in their own little part of the world. Could it be better? Absolutely! Is it better than what was there before? Most likely, it is. Can we identify multiple hurdles / missing links, especially to pedestrians with physical limitations? Certainly!
The real question is how do we catalog, prioritize and (most importantly) FUND the fixes that are needed. Your third photo shows a dirt path that’s apparently a shortcut from the original concrete sidewalk. To me, paving that is a much lower priority than installing curb ramps or installing sidewalks to replace the dirt paths in your last two photos, but the odds are Metro will find the funding for the former before the local city finds funding for the latter. I don’t see a real compelling need, based on capacity or major new developments, for any major infrastructure projects in the area, so any new work will be more like what MoDOT is doing now along Manchester and Chippewa. Can we count on MoDOT to do the same thing here? What about along streets that aren’t MoDOT’s responsibility? (St. Louis County seems much less willing to invest in ADA retrofits.) This all gets back to the reality that pedestrians are a minority in the transportation matrix, and pedestrians with disabilities are a minority within a minority, and our funding reflects that.
CMT, have they ever gotten anything done or do they just complain and then Metro does nothing?
I didn’t assign any blame for this failure.