Poll: What activity do you want to see added to the Gateway Mall?

Now that I have been appointed to serve on the Gateway Mall Advisory Board I’m thinking about the master plan and what details still need to be worked out.  One of those is activities in some of the blocks.  As a representative of the people I know to get a sense of what you think is needed somewhere along the linear park.

The question is:  What activity would you like to see added to the Gateway Mall? Pick only one:

• Tennis
• Ice skating
• Skateboard/BMX park
• Picnic/BBQ area
• Basketball
• Level field for kickball, etc
• Minature golf
• Farris Ferris wheel
• Dog park
• Unsure
• Other

I have some strong feelings about what will work better than others but I want to get your viewpoint before I share mine.   The poll is open until the morning of Sunday March 28, 2010.  I will share the results on Wednesday March 31, 2010.  Please vote in the poll on the right and share any thoughts you have below.

– Steve Patterson

Unexpected green on St. Patrick’s Day

On St. Patrick’s Day I had the opportunity to witness something remarkable in a most unlikely place:

St. Louis’ MSI houses over 750 inmates who stay roughly 80 days.  Built originally for men only, it also has a female section (apprx 10-15% of the total). So what was so remarkable?  Let’s go out back and see.

I couldn’t walk the distance from the front door to the back so they drove me through the gates and series of fences to our destination.

At left is Jerome Fields, the Correctional Program Manager for the City of St. Louis.  The three women in orange are inmates at MSI.  They were all working to take this pile of soil and get it into new garden plots, from the press release:

MSI received a neighborhood greening grant from Gateway Greening for the project.  The grant provides lumber and soil for five 4’ x 20’ x 10” raised beds, one wheelbarrow and one sprinkler.   The garden will be maintained by five to 10 female residents who volunteered for the project, some guards at the facility, along with assistance from Gateway Greening staff and volunteers from Lincoln University and UMSL. The food grown will be donated to two local food pantries:  St. Vincent DePaul and Church of God at Baden.

The facility attempted a garden last year but did so by trying to plant just in the existing ground.

Charles Bryson, Director of Public Safety helped out in the morning.

Cardboard was placed over the grass to kill the grass underneath. The facility tried gardening last year but it failed because they tried planting in the existing ground.

The base of one guard tower will serve as the tool shed for the gardening equipment.  Click here to see the Fox 2 story.

– Steve Patterson

Walkability/accessibility in auto-centric suburbia

I was in Chicago last weekend.  Saturday night we stayed at the new ALoft in Bolingbrook (map), near Ikea.

The location is highly auto-centric) but walkability/accessibility was given some minimal attention.  From our room I could see the sidewalk along the public road as well as the private sidewalk to the hotel. The above is the minimal I’d accept, not the goal.  All the buildings in the area are so far apart that no amount of perfectly green grass or upscale landscaping will make it a good walking environment.  These sidewalks are decoration, a feel-good measures to imply walkability.  Don’t get me wrong, it is better to have them than not, but hopefully we will cease building such environments completely.

To create walkable areas we must:

• Reduce the amount of auto parking in private lots.
• Reduce the distance between buildings.
• Reduce the distance from the public sidewalk and the building entrance.
• Allow on-street parking.

With every business having a huge parking lot the distances become to great to walk.  But if parking were scaled back they can be closer to each other and walking becomes a viable option.  The total parking in this area far exceeds the total number of cars at any given time.  By significantly limiting private off-street parking but permitting on-street parking you introduce affordable shared parking.  Shared parking is often thought of as a parking lot or garage structure but taking all the cars and spreading them out in a linear fashion along roads reduces the impacts from massive parking lots that  spread our destinations apart to the point we must drive to reach them.

– Steve Patterson

Minimum width sidewalks are less than optimal

I recently stopped at 7-11 located at 17th & Pine to rent a movie from the RedBox.

As I was standing there a customer came out of the store and needed to get past me, he was using a motorized wheelchair similar to my own wheelchair and the sidewalk was at the minimum width so I had to move to the side so he could pass.  Not a big deal but I’m not the most mobile person in the world.  When you build walkways to the minimum standard you inconvenience pedestrians.

– Steve Patterson

Water is wet and readers prefer Google Maps

Online maps it is not the most riveting subject, but still interesting.  I too use Google Maps as my online mapping service.  It is not always accurate; Google never did figure our the 2 year closure of I-64 while other mapping services offered alternate routes.  I assumed most everyone used Google Maps but I didn’t realize to what extent:

• Google Maps 113 [76%]
• MapQuest 25 [17%]
• Other answer… 5 [3%]
• Yahoo Maps 4 [3%]
• MSN Maps 1 [1%]
• I don’t map directions online. 1 [1%]

Four other answers were Bing Maps and one was the iPhone map, which is Google-based.  I had to look up #2 MapQuest to see who owned it: AOL.  I was never on AOL so that would explain why I never got hooked on their maps.

Competition is a good thing so hopefully other map services will keep Google on their game.  During the week the poll was conducted Google Maps made a big new addition:

“Google Maps started life in 2005 offering directions for drivers, added transit routes in 2007, expanded to pedestrian navigation in 2008 — and now it covers bicycles, too.” [Washington Post]

This service will need improvement but I’m very pleased to see the addition.  Happy mapping!

– Steve Patterson