Welcome National Urban League Conference, Please Excuse the Cabs on the Sidewalk
For those of you that don’t know, the 2007 National Urban League Conference is being held in St. Louis this week, attendees began arriving yesterday. It was great to see so much activity near the convention center.
Above, St. Louis Urban League President & CEO James Buford talks with members as they wait for the crossing signal.
The rest of this post is a direct message to our guests in our city, but the rest of you can read along as well.
Dear National Urban League conference attendees:
On behalf of regular citizens of the City of St. Louis and the St. Louis region, welcome! We hope that you enjoy your stay in our city. To make your stay and the conference safe & enjoyable I need to offer a word of advice — watch out for the taxis on the sidewalk in front of our convention center.
I noticed yesterday, as many of you were coming and going between the center and the convention hotel, you were unaware that what looks like it should be the public sidewalk parallel to our Washington Ave is really a taxi stand. Some of you found this out as a taxi would honk at you as you tried to leave. So yes, getting from the convention hotel to the convention center requires crossing four lanes of traffic, then a taxi stand and then the drop-off/pick-up lane. At least crossing the street you get a traffic light and a pedestrian signal but without warning a taxi might be heading toward you just when you think you’ve made it to a sidewalk.
Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, this taxi stand is not some subtle racial discrimination trick aimed at your convention. We genuinely want you here — and your money. No, taxis coming and going on a public sidewalk in one of the most heavily pedestrian areas in our downtown is business as usual in St. Louis. I was able to unearth an interesting policy:
The St. Louis Taxi Cab Commission prohibits taxi drivers, when driving on public sidewalks and nudging pedestrians, from discriminating between pedestrians on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, medical condition (cancer-related or genetic characteristics), ancestry, marital status, age, sexual orientation, citizenship, or status as a covered veteran.
Basically, the drivers cannot aim for someone of a certain race, gender or so on — every pedestrian on what should be our sidewalk is fair game (for anyone reading that is satirically challenged the above ‘policy’ is pure fiction — the drivers are free to discriminate in who they hit). So again, I simply ask that you use as much or more caution going from the curb to the door of the convention center as you do crossing the street.
Should you be so unfortunate as to get hit by one of our taxis I have some helpful information for you. If you witness someone getting hit, please use your cell phone camera to get information such as the taxi company (sometimes the color of the cab alone with help), the driver and all the usual things you’d record if a car was driving on a sidewalk in your city. Of course, make sure someone calls 911 to help the victim(s).
Let me share a few images with you to help navigate this area and to illustrate just how close many of you were yesterday.
Yesterday I noticed that most people were using the crosswalk nearest me as it is more direct to the convention hotel (note the van that crossed in the crosswalk space). In the background you see a group of women that crossed toward the convention center, just beyond them is the taxi stand for two taxis. As you can see, they are pointed westbound means you are crossing their taxi lane (formerly a sidewalk) when you get across Washington Ave.
Above, say you return to the convention area from using our MetroLink light rail system and you are walking back to your hotel along Washington Ave. As you approach the convention center you’ll see taxis, like the green one above, in the sidewalk space. Pedestrians are forced to either side of the taxis. Remember as you get along side or past them, watch for them to take off and they head westbound toward the exit.
Everyone walking westbound from the centerpoint remains fair game. This group above is walking not on a sidewalk but in the taxi exit lane right where it combines with the exit area from the drop-off zone. Don’t stop and marvel at the brick paving — this is no place for pedestrians!
Luckily here we can see the taxi drivers waiting for a fare which allows this group to safely cross what they probably think is a sidewalk area.
Above we see a brave volunteer for Barack Obama talking with one of your fellow conference attendees. In the background we see two women going around the taxis waiting on the former sidewalk area. I know this appears to be a safe place to stop and talk but it is not.
From the other direction we can see, above, how the taxis on the pedestrian sidewalk narrow this area considerably, forcing pedestrians to go around. If you are waiting on a bus at this bus stop, I strongly suggest you do as the woman is doing above and wait behind one of the bollards for protection.
Above, you can see how those using our bus system are placed right in the path of the taxis.
You will see locals and tourists having to do just like you will, walking around the taxis. This forces you to go from walking side by side to in line as the space narrows.
We can’t provide any benches for those waiting for the bus. If you are like the woman on the right, simply use a planter as a bench while waiting on your bus. The only trick is you need to keep looking past the taxis to see if your bus is coming so you can dart in front of the taxis to get out to the curb in time.
Standing up every so often will help to see if the bus is arriving. In the background, a group of young men foolishly walk on what they think is the sidewalk, walking directly in the exit route for the cabs.
Pedestrians coming from the east, from the west, waiting on the bus, two crossings over Washington Ave. Just remember, you are not really safe until you hide behind a bollard or dash into the convention center.
Oh, the bus has arrived so the woman that had been using a planter as a bench cuts in front of the sitting taxi to catch it. The older woman in the far left walks slowly with a cane, she remained leaning against the light standard for about 15 minutes while waiting for her bus.
Above we see two attendees of the conference walking on one side of a taxi while a young man who just exited the bus on the other.
And below is a short video showing the cabs navigating the space:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_ij5CTxZ8I[/youtube]
Well, I think you get the point. I want you to enjoy your visit to our city but just because something looks like a sidewalk do not assume that is the case. A few years ago a nationally known pedestrian expert, visiting St. Louis, was tragically killed by a tour bus as the woman crossed the street returning to her hotel a few blocks away.
However, should you get hit by a taxi while visiting St. Louis I want to offer some helpful information for your attorney, just email them a link to this post.
Here is a shortlist of the people and entities to consider suing for damages due to negligence:
- D. Michael Tully, Director of the St. Louis Metropolitan Taxi Commission
- Kathleen Ratcliffe, President of the St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission
- Mayor Francis Slay and Alderwoman Phyllis Young, City of Saint Louis.
Your lawsuits against the city should be sent to Patricia A. Hageman in the City Counselor’s office. The Taxi Commission and the Convention & Visitors Commission are separate entities so they have their own counsel but I’m not sure who that is — I’m sure your attorney can find out easily enough.
As a sort of “convention special” to you, our guests, I’m making a limited time offer to waive any fees as an expert witness in any case arising out of getting hit by a taxi in front of our convention center. So if you are hit this weekend, I’ll gladly work with your attorney sharing my hundreds of photos that fully document how the area is dangerous, poorly designed and lacking proper warnings. Furthermore, I will share videos taken at the site as well as private emails to and from the above and others regarding this issue which helps illustrate they’ve been given notice as to the problem. You know, I am feeling generous, so I will forget any limitations — I will voluntarily be an expert witness to anyone hit by a taxi in front of St. Louis’ convention center regardless of who you are (local or visitor) or regardless of if it happens this weekend or anytime going forward.
If you, or your attorney, cares to read more about this situation check out my prior posts on the subject from January 12, 2007 and May 30, 2007. My full collection of photos on this subject, ranging from January through yesterday, can be viewed here.
I hope that those of you visiting our city will use extra caution when coming and going from the convention center this weekend. I’m sure the speeches from presidential candidates and the many other speakers will be uplifting but you will need to come down to earth when venturing back outside.
Autocentrism gone wild! Yes even our sidewalks are not for pedestrians (that’s written policy?!) These may be signs of an illness more than urban policy gone awry and perhaps should be treated as such.
The area (city and county) needs to be educated on what determines liveable and prosperous communities. But don’t expect results soon as the design of the New I64 guarantees years of delays, the destruction of pedestrian and cycling routes and a lower quality of life for those who live and work in the central corridor. The city and county are setting up the area for expensive lawsuits and higher infrastructure costs to reconfigure the mistakes being created. Too bad our visitors have to see and experience what we live with daily.
Y’know, looking at these images at first, I was kinda appalled. Living here all my life, I guess you just learn to adapt/ignore what we would characterize as ‘competing’ with automobiles.
But as I looked at these images longer, I began to think that the activity and mix of people, activity, buses, taxis, and autos reminded me of a woonerf. Just brainstorming here, but one could effectively create a woonerf between the convention center and the hotels giving the impression of a continuous area of pedestrian, bicycle, and SLOW vehicular traffic. You could make taxis and cabs wait off the defined woonerf area and only enter once another cab has left.
What looks like a dangerous mess could become a social mixing valve on a narrowed, curbless street with the help of some bollards, planters, the possibility of light commercial activity.
This is some fucked up shit. Steve, I bet your blood was about to boil and understandably slow. How can someone with moderate intelligence think that using this sidewalk for a taxi stand is a good idea? Not only is it unsafe as you show, but it makes for a very unpleasant pedestrian experience.
This is just another example of a) not thinking through the details when the project was first designed (conventioneers want taxis – duh!) and b) taking a low-rent, “expedient” route to “solve” the problem. There’s nothing “magic” about having cabs here, either – they could be at the other main entrance (7th & Convention Plaza), they could close a lane on the street for big conventions like this (watch what the Secret Service does tomorrow), they could move the buses and let the taxis have the circular drive, or they could just widen this circular drive so both buses AND taxis can be accomodated. Like many things here, it just gets down to money and attitude . . .
“(conventioneers want taxis – duh!) ”
But, aren’t they NOT staging there for the convention, but rather the hotel around the corner?
probably both . . .
i talked to my friend after running into him yesterday (he was one of the Obama volunteers) about the problem, since i was witnessing it for the first time in person. when i asked him about the post today, he said you were really concerned about his welfare out there. he said he was glad somebody was trying to do something about it. nice work
Sadly, even downtown hotels park cars on the sidewalk. Check out Crown Plaza (fka Radisson) on North 4th Street almost any afternoon/evening.
“The area (city and county) needs to be educated on what determines liveable and prosperous communities” -john
Liveable and prosperous is extremely subjective. Sorry, but you did not establish the universal definition. For example, a place like Town & Country is liveable and very prosperous despite the fact its autocentric. Just because it’s not your cup of tea doesn’t mean the whole region needs to be “educated”. You have your own preferences for your community and that’s great. But please save your “education” for other forum.
Geez, I’m sorry the I-64 project is going to destroy the “quality of life” in the central corridor by enhancing connectivity and removing dangerous interchanges.
I completely understand the need for the taxis and the shuttle buses to the convention center. It’s just a shame they didn’t think far enough ahead to cut the curb in to mark the lanes for them so that pedestrians can at least see enough to expect a bus or cab to be headed their way. I work downtown and there are people walking everywhere. The last thing we need is to have to watch out for unnoticed cars.
I don’t have a problem sharing the city with them… but I’ll make a deal… you keep off my sidewalk and I’ll only cross at the cross walk when I have a signal.
Dangerous interchanges will always exist. The only way to make automobiles safe is to not drive them.
Great post, Steve. That video tells the story.
I’ll again add my willingness to testify on behalf of any plaintiffs that this egregious pedestrian safety issue was brought to the attention of convention management five years ago when I was pres of the Downtown Residents Association. The official response was to enforce the limit on the number of cabs in the space. And I used to wonder why St. Louisans are so cynical.
Risk managers of St. Louis, are you listening? When the good citizens of St. Louis have to pay a huge award for this officially sanctioned negligence, who will be held responsible?
I’m not sure I agree with the following, but I thought I’d add it to the mix (from http://governing.typepad.com/13thfloor/)
The Naked Road
posted by Christopher Swope
What happens when you rip out all of the pedestrian “safety” features of a city street–the guardrails, the signposts, the white lines on the street–and let cars and people mix it up? Bloodbath, right?
Wrong. Turns out, the street actually gets safer. That’s what they concluded in London, where accidents on one “naked” street dropped by 44 percent. According to the Evening Standard, cities around Britain now want their own naked roads. (Thanks to Streetsblog for the tip).
This, of course, is not what traffic engineers like to hear. When it comes to safety, sometimes less actually is more. As London councilman and backer of the naked road concept Daniel Moylan puts it, “It is about re-establishing eye contact between road users. They are now looking at each other instead of just signs.”
This reminds me of a talk on traffic safety I heard last week by Mark Rosenberg of the Centers for Disease Control. Rosenberg studies traffic fatalities as a public health issue, mostly in developing nations–traffic accidents kill more people than malaria. He talked about how dangerous traffic signals actually are. Why? What do you do when you approach a yellow light? You speed up, increasing the potential lethality of any crash. Worse yet, some people simply ignore red lights altogether, putting themselves and everybody else at risk.
Rosenberg prefers roundabouts to traffic signals. In fact, he said traffic signals are so dangerous that cities would do well to simply cover them with hoods and place giant barrels in the middle of intersections. If nothing else, he said, a “poor man’s roundabout” gets drivers to slow down.
I agree it is poor planning that has caused the present situation to arise. In many ways it is similar to Loughbourgh Commons that Steve has cited so often with both failures and potentials of the site. The common thread is poor planning. The building department covers the safety of the building (although they seem to miss ADA compliance). Who is responsible for making sure the project in integrated with the city fabric? Apparently no one, or maybe it’s the aldermen. It is frightening to think if details are missed at this level, what is being missed at the larger city scale?
I also agree there are other people that park on sidewalks. There is even one guy on South Jefferson that has painted a parking space on the sidewalk with the word reserved.
Interesting post JZ, I read somewhere once that more complicated interesections (not the typical 4-way at right angles) actually have less accidents than the usual kind. We spend all this money trying to make things streamlined for automobiles and getting pedestrians out of the way…with the result being that motorists feel more comfortable driving fast leading to more (and worse) accidents. Counter-intuitive, and interesting.
I would like urban areas in the U.S. to start exploring pedestrian areas and woonerfs more seriously, I’m tired of this accepted wisdom that “they don’t work in the U.S.” The reason that this perception gained traction was that most of the pedestrian plazas were created in the 60’s and 70’s when U.S. cities were also implementing all sorts of other policies to get people out of cities and cars in. As long as the fundamentals are similar to a more traditional european city (residential density, transit, good mix of uses) I don’t see why we can’t try it more often here…if not a pure pedestrian plaza than at least some restrictions on private autos in the most popular areas.
The classic local example in residential areas is the four-way stop, installed because “it makes things safer”. They’re used a lot less in Denver simply because they don’t do what their advocates claim they do. Because a certain percentage of local drivers will “roll” through a 4-way stop, assuming that any other drivers will actually stop (or be going slow enough to avoid a collision), the number of accidents increases. With two-way stops, there is no question that you do need to stop and look both ways. The answer here seems to be a 4-way stop on every corner. The Denver answer is a two-way stop alternating direction every other block. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but I’m guessing that the actual statistics aren’t much different, but the aggravation and the starting and stopping is higher here.
I am a cab driver here in St. Louis. I have sat at the convention center cab stand many, many times. I have NEVER, EVER, seen or heard of a perdestrian being run over by a taxi at the convention center cab stand. Relax guys most adults have learned to cross the street, and even though I’m “just a cab driver”, I know its not ok to run over people on the side walk or the street. So whatever your agenda is Steve, blow it out your…….
Hrmmm, Steve, so something didn’t work back in the ’60’s so now we shouldn’t use anything from Europe and apply it here. That’s expansive, generative thinking for ya.
By the way, you don’t need to ‘train’ anyone on how to act in a woonerf, people in autos naturally slow down when they’re choked off and forced to share space with pedestrians and bicyclists. And as far as, pedestrians waving to motorists to go ahead, your experience must be unique because I almost never see that. Rather, it’s the other way around.
Coming from someone who thinks dropping a streetcar line to the Pruitt-Igoe site will spur development or proposing that we drop all highways to grade, your thinking on this is uncharacteristically conservative.
To cab driver- I don’t think Steve has any agenda against cabs besides the fact that they just happen to be involved in the situation. But it’s not the cab drivers that chose that spot, so calm down. He’s not trying to hurt your business, just protect the space that should be set aside for pedestrians.
ICHW …. I’d like to agree with you that American drivers don’t need training to use a woonerf, but I live in the CWE and I watch how people actually drive in a pedestrian area carefully, because my life depends on it. Fact of the matter is that most people drive way too fast–above the speed limit–and many treat red lights and stop signs as optional, particularly if they’re turning right. That’s why I (and many, many other pedestrians) wave cars on through the intersection: the only truly safe car for those on foot is the one that’s moving away from you.
Conversely, as a driver I frequently wave pedestrians across in front of me, because I know I won’t hit them and my car is between them and at least a few of the lunatics.
With all due respect, I believe there are more important issues to be addressed than taxi stands and the confusion they may cause to convention attendees. It is almost as if to cover a deeper lying fixture in St.Louis’s scenery,poverty,homelessness,and the hundreds of thousands of normal educated people seeking services to prevent being homeless or unemployed from many of the agencies such as the ones who attend conferences like this. My advice to our city and it’s struggling economy is to stop being ashamed and show what is really happening to us. Open the doors to the people who seek such services and gain much more insight on what practicums could actually work, let us speak, because we are not seeing results,we are seeing socialites. (Of course that is not true) but we see CEO’s,living comfortably and continously discussing the same subjects…please take action…shed awareness reach out,and facilitate spending to help the people it was meant for.