Missing: Fourth Crosswalk at Signalized Intersections

A corner island built with only one of two major crosswalks in mind at the intersection of Lindbergh Blvd and Old St. Charles Rock Rd.

MoDOT recently completed a set of projects on Lindbergh Blvd and New Halls Ferry to upgrade the pedestrian facilities. These projects included improving and adding sidewalks and curb ramps, pedestrian crossings, and upgraded access to bus stops. [These projects] also allow for better access for persons with disabilities.

The work MoDOT has performed is mostly commendable. Following a widely reported fiasco on an earlier sidewalk project along Lindbergh Blvd that took 3 attempts and 4 years to get mostly right, the curb ramps and sidewalks MoDOT installed are of very good quality. What is baffling, however, is that MoDOT seems to have purposely omitted one crosswalk at every single signalized intersection within the limits of its various projects. Proof of the purposeful omission lies in the concrete corner islands as seen in the photo at the top.

Left: A pedestrian crosses Lindbergh Blvd at Charbonier Rd where no marked crosswalk exists.
Right: MoDOT failed to install a crosswalk on the south side of Schuetz Rd at Lindbergh Blvd.

Some people argue that since "nobody" actually walks on or across Lindbergh Blvd, there's no need for pedestrian accommodations. People who make such arguments have likely only ever experienced a road's conditions from a windshield perspective.

For example, I spent 3 minutes at the intersection of Lindbergh Blvd & Charbonier Rd to get a photo for this post. In that time, I saw two pedestrians attempt to cross Lindbergh on the south side of the intersection where the crosswalk had been omitted. As seen in the photo above on the left, one woman darted across despite the missing crosswalk; the other woman was pushing a baby stroller and almost did the same until she noticed the lack of a curb cut in the corner island on the far side of the intersection. The young mom then proceeded to cross the other three sides of the intersection to more safely get across Lindbergh Blvd and to her destination.

A rare curb ramp—to nowhere—in Huntliegh.

At regular three and four-way signalized intersections, crosswalk installation should be a rather simple affair: one crosswalk per side unless there are mitigating circumstances. As I recounted above, every crosswalk serves a purpose even when unmarked. To omit a crosswalk at one intersection could be understood as a simple mistake or engineering necessity. To omit a crosswalk at every intersection... perhaps it is spite from MoDOT's battle with Paraquad? Whatever the reason, its logic does not make sense.

Finally, I shall refrain from discussing the "sidewalks" in Huntleigh where MoDOT cried uncle and replaced the majority of the bad curb ramps it had installed with full height curbs: a regression to their original state from 2006.

DeBaliviere's Green and Narrow Future

Concept sketch for the Loop Trolley and greenway along DeBaliviere Ave. Credit: The Loop Trolley.

Back on July 8, the Federal Transit Administration awarded the Loop Trolley project $25 million as part of its Urban Circulator Grant program. Other major streetcar grant winners included Charlotte, Cincinnati, and Fort Worth. The federal funding puts the $44 million Loop Trolley project well on its way toward possible completion in 2012.

Moving in lockstep with the Loop Trolley is planning for the St. Vincent Greenway, a trail project spearheaded by Great Rivers Greenway. When fully implemented, the greenway will stretch from the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park to the North Hanley MetroLink station. The southernmost segment of the St. Vincent Greenway is planned to run alongside the length of DeBaliviere Ave and through Ruth Porter Mall to the north.

According to current plans, the St. Vincent Greenway and single Loop Trolley track will occupy the current northbound lanes of DeBaliviere Ave. The driving lanes of DeBaliviere Ave will be reduced from 5 including median to just 2 or 3 and will be confined to the present southbound lanes. Given the road's present low traffic volume, the reduced lane count should not cause any trouble, whatsoever.

Preliminary plans for the St. Vincent Greenway along DeBaliviere Ave at Waterman Blvd. The Loop Trolley track is in red. Credit: Great Rivers Greenway.

Much Ado About Interstate 70 Traffic Downtown

I-70 approaching the Arch. Credit: MoDOT Photos.

MoDOT is worried about traffic issues that may result from the replacement of I-70 downtown with an urban boulevard as proposed by City to River. From an STLtoday Road Crew discussion:

Linda Wilson: [MoDOT's] position is that after we build the new Mississippi River bridge downtown, there will still be a demand of 50,000+ vehicles per day to drive the section of highway that runs in front of the Arch. [...] We have told the groups that if they can develop a plan to accommodate how these 50,000+ vehicles can get through, we are open to looking at it.

In response, City to River wrote a blog post with examples of urban boulevards around the world that currently handle 50,000 vehicles per day or more. In all likelihood, however, a re-imagined Memorial Drive will not be burdened with such high traffic volumes.

Conceptual Math

Road realignments proposed by McEagle's Northside project may reduce the traffic burden on a new Memorial Drive. Source: NorthSide.

Take 50,000 vehicles on I-70, then remove the highway and replace it with an urban boulevard. The result is less than 50,000 vehicles on the new Memorial Drive.

The devil, of course, is in the details. How much of I-70 is removed? How do the stub ends of I-70 and I-55 connect to the street grid? Will any other streets get realigned as part of the highway removal project? Only a full fledged traffic study can predict how much traffic would travel along a reworked Memorial Drive. But the answer will invariably be less traffic than there is now. Just like in electrical systems, if you add resistance to a network, some traffic will scatter looking for alternate routes of travel.

Quick Look at Portland

Waterfront Park and Naito Parkway in Portland, Oregon. Waterfront Park was created from land occupied by a former highway. Credit: freddy and Greg_e.

Portland is one of the most frequently cited cities when it comes to highway removal and for good reason. In 1974, Portland closed and removed the the four-lane Harbor Drive freeway. In its place, the city built Waterfront Park and now enjoys unhindered access to a green oasis and its riverfront.

Prior to Harbor Drive's closure, traffic engineers warned that closing the freeway would cause unprecedented congestion. The Portland City Council was convinced otherwise. The freeway was closed and... nothing. Traffic appeared to be just as if it were any other day. Sound familiar?

All in all, the worry about how to accommodate traffic from I-70 may well be much ado about nothing.

On the Ability My Bike Gives Me to Explore

My bike was stolen sometime between August and November of 2009. I don't know when it was stolen since wedding planning was occupying all of my free time. I had kept my bike unlocked in the locked bike room of my apartment building believing that since only residents could access the room, it was safe. I was wrong.

Aside from being upset at myself for having been so careless, I didn't miss my bike that much at first as cold weather had set in and I wouldn't have ridden my bike anyways. Rather, I soon thought of it as an opportunity; an opportunity to get a road bike instead of a hybrid bike like the Marin San Anselmo that I had before.

With many things, however, I can be prone to procrastination (e.g. posting on my blog). Spring came and I still didn't have a bike—I had yet to even look for one. This is when I began to realize how much having a bike means to me.

Time to Stop and Smell the Pizza

I enjoy exploring. Since moving into the city in 2008, I've taken advantage of the multitude of low traffic city streets to roam through neighborhoods on my bike I've only read commentary about in other forums. I've ridden from Frontenac to the Arch, the Chain of Rocks Bridge to the River City Casino. The thing I notice time and time again is the difference in perspective one enjoys outside the confines of an automobile. The difference is truly astonishing and for the better.

My lovely wife, for example, loves reading Sauce Magazine and highlights new (and old) restaurants we should try. Many restaurants, however, languish on our list while we return repeatedly to our old standbys. We often find ourselves driving by a restaurant's location and telling each other we need to try that place sometime. We often don't.

On more than one occasion, however, the impetus to try someplace has come as a result of my biking past. I biked Pershing one day instead of going through Forest Park and found myself at Atlas, stopped, and saw firsthand how good the food look. The next week we went and had a fantastic dinner! We also finally got around to trying The Good Pie after I whiffed multiple times just how good the pizza smelled from outside.

Drive-by Windshield Perspective

If you're in a car, you generally have a destination in mind. The route you choose is almost always the one that gets you there the fastest, never mind the scenery or the places that may lie in between. There's almost never a moment to stop and look around. At 30 mph, it's impossible to get to know a neighborhood.

At 30 mph, a drive down Locust through Midtown Alley can take as little as two minutes. At those speeds, you could pass by buildings thinking they're vacant and fail to notice businesses like The Fountain on Locust that are transforming the neighborhood. In a car, you'll likely never drive down streets like Nottingham in St. Louis Hills and have a chance to marvel at the beautiful architecture and marvelous tree canopy. Nor can you pull onto the sidewalk and peer into the window of a store on Washington Avenue and find just the just the sofa you were looking for. And by driving, you will never work off the calories of a square of chocolate chip cookie dough gooey butter.

My bike was my means to explore, get to know, and enjoy my community, my home. And while I like to walk, as well, walking never got me to so many places, to see so many sights. I really missed my bike.

Metro Postpones Scheduled Fare Increase

A scheduled fare increase in July for Metro transit services has been postponed. The fare increase would have raised MetroBus and MetroLink base fares by 25¢ to $2.25 and $2.50, respectively. Ray Friem, Chief Operating Officer of Transit Services for Metro, had the details in today's Metro Live discussion on STLtoday.com.

The Metro board of Commissioners has decided to put off the July fare increase until some future time. We are completely focused on service restoration and rebuilding passenger base, activities that generate far more revenue than the proposed fare increase could recover. Fare increases are necessary to provide the system with additional stability. All fares collected are spent on operating or enhancing the system. Historically we have held the line on fares until the system is so strained it becomes unavoidable. Then the rate of the hike is so substantial that it impacts system users very significantly. We are modelling more regular but less substantial fare hikes that we believe are more in line with consumer expectation and provide for more stability for the system.

The July fare increase was to be the second of a two-part fare increase planned since November 2008 when the failure of Proposition M forced Metro's hand. The first fare increase occurred January 2009 when base fares for MetroBus and MetroLink rose 25¢ to their present levels. The postponement of the fare increase will be made official during the Metro Board of Commissioners meeting later this month.

Peak fare averted

Single trip fares on U.S. light rail systems

City	Fare Price
Boston	$1.70
Baltimore	$1.60
Buffalo	$1.75
Charlotte	$1.50
Cleveland	$2.25
Dallas	$1.75
Denver	$2.00 - $4.50
Houston	$1.25
Jersey City	$2.10
Los Angeles	$1.25
Minneapolis	$1.75 - $2.25
Newark	$1.35
Phoenix	$1.75
Pittsburgh	$2.00 - $2.75
Portland	$2.00 - $2.30
Sacramento	$2.50
Salt Lake City	$2.00
San Diego	$2.50
San Francisco	$2.00
San Jose	$2.00
Seattle	$1.75 - $2.50

As mentioned by Ray Friem above, Metro is responding to the recent passage of Proposition A by St. Louis County. Metro is using the new source of funding to fuel its service restoration efforts. Raising fares immediately after Proposition A's passage would have only served to antagonize the citizens of St. Louis County who showed Metro such goodwill in April.

Amongst light rail transit systems, MetroLink already has one of the highest base fares in the U.S. Only San Diego and Sacramento, at $2.50 for a single trip, are higher. Four other light rail systems have zone or distance-based fares that exceed MetroLink's $2.25 base fare price.

Would a 25¢ fare increase have been too much for St. Louis transit riders to handle? Since beginning a series of fare increases in 2001, Metro ridership has been relatively stagnant, rising only recently to levels not seen in a decade due to increasing fuel prices and the completion of the Cross County Extension to Shrewsbury. The 2009 service cuts and fare increase, however, reduced MetroBus ridership by over 21% and MetroLink ridership by 11%.

Metro is sort of desperate in its need to restore rider confidence and win back the transit riders it lost. And a fare increase will be necessary sometime soon to keep up with ever rising fuel, labor, and maintenance costs. Just, thankfully, not come July.

Trampled Grass

Grass between the two sidewalks will never have a chance to grow.

The new sidewalks MoDOT recently constructed across I-70 and Memorial Dr to the Arch grounds are a welcome improvement over what was there before. There's finally something there that acknowledges that actual pedestrians may want to cross the highway between downtown and the Arch.

Still, it's obvious that some small details were not thought through. For a simple example, have a look at the photo on the right taken at the intersection of Market St and northbound Memorial Dr looking towards the Arch. The height difference between the two sidewalks forced engineers to create a zig for the ADA compliant ramp from Market St up to the sidewalk that parallels Memorial Dr. The engineers then forgot to account for able-bodied people, all of whom continue straight ahead across the grass. The result is barren earth.

Of course, the walk would be made infinitely more pleasant if I-70 could just disappear.

Seventeen Minutes for the Northeast Corridor

Rerouting the Northeast Corridor along I-95 could produce significant trip time reductions.

The northeast corridor is the only true high speed rail line in the United States. Despite the unique distinction, the corridor is still considered painfully slow and unreliable, especially when compared to its perceived potential.

Focusing on the northern half of the route from New York and Boston, an Acela Express train currently takes 3h34 to travel the entire 229 miles for a pokey average service speed of 64 mph. Top speed of 150 mph is maintained for only 15 miles on two sections of track in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

One of the major hurdles to improving trip times on the northeast corridor, as detailed in an Amtrak report and written about by The Transport Politic, is the maintenance backlog which has exceeded $8 billion. Given the huge sum required just to bring the corridor to a state of good repair, there is very little money left to make major trip time improvements.

Even then, it is frustrating to see how little gumption Amtrak has to propose truly transformative projects. Amtrak's long-range goal for 2030 is to reduce trip times from New York to Boston by 34 minutes primarily by improving existing track conditions, capacity, and reliability throughout the corridor. While such improvements would be fantastic news, they would hardly be remarkable. Another report from Amtrak that may include proposals for further trip time reductions is due in October.

Significant improvements require significant investments

For an example of what could be a transformative improvement, lets focus on the segment between New London and Westerly. The corridor hugs the coastline most of its length with lots of curves and even a few grade grade crossings that limit service speed to around 60 mph. This segment will never be capable of supporting high speed operation as admitted by Amtrak:

Curvature along the coast between New Haven, CT and Westerly, RI will be difficult and very expensive to modify to accommodate higher speeds, particularly because of community and environmental mitigation requirements along a sensitive coast line.

The solution, obviously, is to move the rail corridor away from the coast. The likely alternative, as shown on the map at the top, is to closely follow the significantly straighter I-95 immediately to the north. And the trip time improvements such a realignment would produce are dramatic.

Amtrak currently takes 34 minutes to travel the 35 miles between New London and Kingston. If a new alignment were built along I-95 that supported 180 mph operation, a Siemens Velaro E train would be able to make the 31 mile journey in 16m17s. That is a trip time reduction of more than 17 minutes for just this small segment. And if a similar new alignment were a built between New Haven and New London, a further 25 minutes could potentially be shaved off the New York - Boston trip time.

Significant improvements often require significant investments. And if these projects were implemented, the Northeast Corridor could be recognized as a true high speed rail line instead of just being scoffed at.

Where to Next for MetroLink?

MetroLink tracks looking west from Jefferson Ave. Credit: Herkie.

With the passage of Proposition A, expansion of MetroLink is a real possibility. The sales tax increase has allowed Metro to escape a "death spiral" and has put the agency on a firm financial footing. The question everyone is asking, therefore, is where should MetroLink go next?

The recent Moving Transit Forward plan put forth by Metro and East-West Gateway provides a menu of options for expanding MetroLink within Missouri. However, Metro has also stated that MetroLink expansion will not occur without federal aid. That means environmental impact studies (EIS) will be required for each potential corridor.

Below is a look at the five potential MetroLink corridors mentioned in the Moving Transit Forward plan and the level of planning that has occurred for each one. Reports for some of the corridors can be found on East-West Gateway's website.

• Northside-Southside has the most fully developed plans of all MetroLink corridors. It was also the most highly favored corridor in Moving Transit Forward public meetings throughout the region. The EIS for Northside-Soutside was completed November 2008 and is thus the only MetroLink corridor eligible for federal funding. This entirely new line would stretch up to 17 miles from downtown north to I-70 & Goodfellow via Natural Bridge and south to I-55 & Bayless via Jefferson and I-55. Its cost is estimated at $971 million (2007 dollars) with an expected ridership of 14,913 trips per day.

• MetroSouth would extend the Blue Line from its terminus in Shrewsbury to as far as I-55 & Butler Hill. A draft EIS was completed back in 2005, but did not select a locally preferred alternative. The two major options on the table include extending MetroLink via the Union Pacific railroad corridor or via the River Des Peres and I-55. One option is more direct whereas the other integrates quicker with the potential Southside corridor. The age of the draft EIS means it will likely require updating before a corridor can finally be chosen. Its cost is estimated at $586 - $700 million (2010 dollars) with an expected ridership of 9,100 - 9,600 trips per day, depending on the corridor chosen.

• The Daniel Boone corridor had a preliminary MTIA study completed in 2000, a study that looked at a wide swath of west St. Louis County. This study selected an alignment out to Westport from Clayton via I-170 and the Terminal Railroad while simultaneously rejecting a parallel alignment along I-64. This corridor is widely thought to be St. Louis County's first priority due to the proclamations made by County Executive Dooley in the lead up to the Proposition M vote in 2008. Such proclamations were notably absent during the recent Proposition A campaign replaced, instead, with a promise to judge each corridor based on its merits. An EIS would still need to be performed before federal funding could be pursued for this corridor.

• MetroNorth would branch off the existing Red Line at North Hanley and follow I-170 north to Florissant. No planning has yet been performed on this corridor.

• Madison County completed a feasibility study in 2004 that identified several possible MetroLink corridors in the area that extended as far as Alton and Edwardsville. A minimum build option would extend MetroLink only 4 miles into the Tri-Cities area. This option would cost about $160 million (2005 dollars) and attract an estimated 7,000 daily passengers. Madison County, however, lacks a local source of funding. Voters rejected a sales tax increase back in 2004 that would have paid for such an expansion.