Dead Sidewalks Won’t Come Back To Life With Overhead Walkways Gone

Enclosed walkways over public sidewalks are generally a bad idea — removing pedestrians from the public realm. However, with these elevated walkways often comes the real culprits to killing sidewalk life: blank walls, inward focus, etc.

A prime example of what not to do in a downtown was downtown St. Louis’ St. Louis Centre indoor mall.

It was 8 years ago today that a big event was held to begin the removal of the very oppressive walkway from over Washington Ave — the first step in transforming the inward-focused mall into outward-facing MX retail with the interior becoming a parking garage.

See:

• 2010: Undoing a huge mistake from the 1980s
• 2012: MX Rises From Former St. Louis Centre, Pi Now Open

 

Two other walkways have been removed in the last year, one on each side of the former Southwestern Bell headquarters, later an AT&T building on Chestnut between 9th & 10th. The walkways connected the now vacant tower, now longer owned by AT&T with an older Bell building to the West and a 90s data center to the East.

These walkways were very different than those at the former St. Louis Centre — up high, small, transparent, These allowed employees to walk to/from all 3 buildings without having to keep going through security. With AT&T’s significant reduction in the number of downtown employees the center towner became unnecessary. The tower’s new owners needed to reconfigure the tower from a single-occupany headquarters into a multi-tenant building. For them and AT&T that meant disconnecting the three buildings.

The exteriors are all repaired now, though all three buildings are lifeless at the sidewalk level. This us by design. The removal of these two walkways won’t have the dramatic results we’ve seen at MX.

St. Louis has systematically killed street life block by block, neighborhoods by neighborhood. Attempting to bring back vibrant sidewalks for more than a few blocks here or there is likely a waste of time at this point.

— Steve Patterson

Deutsch Family Profiting From Public Right-of-Way…Again

A couple of weeks from now will mark two years since my post titled: Deutsch Family Has Profited From Public Right-Of-Way For Nearly Two Decades. It was a more detailed follow up to an April 2009 post called Stealing a Sidewalk.

From the 2016 post:

In the late 1990s, Larry Deutsch was finally allowed to raze the historic 4-story building at 1101 Locust St. that housed Miss Hullings Cafeteria for decades. After the demolition crew left, new sidewalks were poured and the lot was covered in asphalt for surface parking. That’s when the line dividing private from public property was moved more than 3 feet. Legally the lot is 121 feet x 102 feet 6 inches. But by narrowing the public sidewalk, they made their lot 124.33′ x 105.83′ — a gain of 6%! This is roughly 750 square feet of public space that has been used privately for years.

This allowed them to have 5 additional parking spaces. The current daily rate is often $10, but let’s say $5/day. With about 300 revenue days a year, that’s $7,500 in additional revenue per year. Over 18 years the total estimate is $135,000. Serious money made by taking from the public right-of-way.

After my May 2016 post they put orange cones in the parking spaces that were partially on public property.

Each time I’d go past the cones would be out — not as good as pouring new concrete sidewalks at the actual property line. But the other day I noticed they were back to stealing public right-of-way for their profits!

Ownership hasn’t changed. As I said two years ago, the city needs to force the Deutsch family to pour new concrete sidewalks that extend all the way to the property lin. They also need to bring this surface lot up to current standards for surface lots — with physical barriers between sidewalk & parking so cars can’t park on or drive on public sidewalks.

I’ll be reminding 7th Ward Alderman Jack Coatar about this today.

 

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Crosswalks Meet At One Curb Ramp, Rather Than Two

Recent work downtown has been mostly good for pedestrians, but Saturday night my husband and I found an awful corner: the NE corner of Market & Broadway.  This is the SW corner of the Old Courthouse. I;m not sure who gets the blame, the possible culprits are city streets dept, city board of public service (BPS), MoDOT, National Park Service, or Gateway Arch Park Foundation.

Most new work has gotten away from placing one curb ramp at the apex at the corner, instead doing a ramp/crosswalk to cross each street. This improves ADA-compliance and reduces inconveniences for all pedestrians.

We had to cross the ramp on the NE corner of Market & Broadway as we crossed Broadway. Both times the ramp was full of pedestrians waiting to cross Market. Both times I had to ask others to move.

The idea is to get Arch visitors to start in Kiener Plaza, so this corner should see many pedestrians. It amazes me each crosswalk doesn’t lead to its own curb ramp.

No, I’m not amazed. I’ve experienced first hand how even brand new work ism’t designed by people who think like pedestrians.

— Steve Patterson

16th & Market Curb Ramp Slightly Less Shoddy Than It Was

Over a year ago I posted about one of the many poorly design/constructed curb ramps in this city, see Shoddy Curb Ramp/Crosswalk At 16th Street & Market St  from May 2016. Here are a couple of images from that post:

At some point in the last year I was told the city will be correcting this ramp. I’ve been through this intersection a lot over the last few months and hadn’t noticed a change — until the other day. While I was glad to see the city hadn’t forgotten about it, I was disappointed by what was done.

So the city has gone from an “F” to a “C-“. How much did this cost? What does it take for the city to do A or B work?

I know, I should just accept this city doesn’t care about pedestrian like it does motorists, crappy pedestrian infrastructure has been the norm for too long.

— Steve Patterson

 

Crossing Hampton At Elizabeth

Four times per year I visit my doctor on South Hampton, 45-minutes each way via public transit to/from downtown. As a regular transit user and pedestrian I actually enjoy the time. What I don’t enjoy is crossing Hampton upon arrival.

The last five years I’ve taken MetroBus to my doctor — except maybe 2-3 times when my husband wasn’t using our car. So at least 15 times I’ve crossed Hampton at Elizabeth — West to East. The bus stop is in the 24th Ward, my doctor is in the 10th Ward.

Looking at older versions of Google’s Street View I know the pedestrian & traffic signals were added sometime between September 2007 and October 2009. The bus stop and curb ramps were all existing in September 2007.

Crosswalk and pedestrian signals, so what is there to complain about? Plenty.

The issue is the timing of pedestrian signals. First I need to cross the SB lanes of Hampton to the center median — not s problem — a walk is given when Elizabeth Ave traffic gets a green light. The walk signal might require pressing the activation button — I don’t remember. I reach the NB lanes og Hampton just as the pedestrian signal switches to don’t walk. While it would be nice to cross without having to wait I do realize the median is wide.

NB traffic gets a green light soon. After a while they get a red light. I should get a walk signal now that NB traffic has com to a stop, right?  No, that’s too logical. The NB traffic has been stopped because SB Hampton traffic has a left turn arrow. No traffic is crossing the crosswalk but the pedestrian signal on both directions of the NB Hampton lanes says “don’t walk.”No conflict at all — the city just didn’t think about the user or thought about it and didn’t care.

Weeks ago I mentioned the city’s bike/ped Twitter account while venting about this issue. The reply was

E-W peds conflict w N-S traffic…no time to cross if wired for xtra xing during SBL, safest to run w E-W traffic. Plenty of time to cross. 

Again, not enough time to cross all of Hampton at once. There must be a better solution, but I know the traffic engineer in charge of pedestrian infrastructure isn’t the person to figure it out.

It might take some new wires, but the pedestrian signals for NB should act independent of those for the SB lanes. If so, pedestrians wouldn’t get stuck in the median for a complete cycle of the traffic signals. This should have been the case when these were installed.

— Steve Patterson