For students and faculty with cars, the building contains a 3-story parking garage. For everyone else, the 8th & Pine MetroLink station is little more than a quarter-mile walk away. SLU also has tentative plans on running Billiken shuttles every half hour between its main campus and the downtown Law School building.

But instead of paying for the cost of a shuttle, SLU should invest in Metro to help increase the frequency of the 10 Lindell bus line. The 10 Lindell currently runs every half hour and runs from the Central West End transit center down Lindell and Olive to the Civic Center station downtown before proceeding into south city via Gravois. On its way between the two MetroLink stops, it travels directly past the length of the main SLU campus and within two long blocks of the new Law School building.

With help from SLU, Metro could conceivably increase the frequency of the 10 Lindell from every 30 minutes to every 15 minutes (the 10 Gravois portion of the route would continue to run 30 minutes). Rerouting the bus two blocks east from 14th St to Tucker Blvd would also help encourage use of Metro buses by putting the bus line at the Law School’s front door.¹ Buses that run 4 times every hour would be a boon for not just SLU students, faculty, and staff wishing to travel to the Central West End in addition to the Midtown and downtown campuses, but for everyone else who uses or depends on the 10 Lindell for getting around St. Louis.

1. The 10 Lindell currently takes 29 minutes to travel between the Central West End and Civic Center transit centers. The line’s 30 minute headways mean that any small route deviation that increases the route’s length may necessitate the addition of another bus and driver, thus increasing operating costs.

What’s Old May Become New Again

Plans from the 1984 draft environment impact study for what would become MetroLink did not originally call for a Central West End station at Euclid. Rather, they show drawings of the station located just east of Kingshighway underneath the garage for Childrens’ Hospital. The primary station entrance would have taken people from street level at Kingshighway to the eastbound platform below (at the time, MetroLink stations were being planned with 4” high platforms with mid-station(!) crossings to reach the far-side platform). The station would have also been accessible from Euclid, but only after a long walk not to dissimilar to the walk from Taylor to the existing station.

By the time the final EIS report was published in 1987, the proposed location for the Central West End station had moved to its present day spot at Euclid. No explanation is given in the FEIS as to why the station was moved.

Entering Through the Back Door

MetroLink opened for service on July 31, 1993 and was an immediate success. Since then, the Central West End station and its surroundings have grown to become the powerhouse of the system.

The Central West End station is the busiest in the MetroLink system with almost 6000 boardings per weekday during the summer. It is 50% busier than the Forest Park-DeBaliviere station, the second busiest in the system. The station’s existing location not only efficiently serves the vast majority of BJC’s medical campus, but it’s place on Euclid allows it to serve the southern reaches of the Central West End neighborhood to the north.

Still, the shine had barely worn off the region’s new light-rail system when BJC made its first request to relocate the Central West End station. From a 1997 St. Louis Business Journal article, a time when vehicles could still travel the length of any road within the medical campus:

BJC Health System wants the Central West End MetroLink station on Euclid Avenue relocated to Kingshighway as part of its $225 million redevelopment project at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

BJC has asked its architect, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum Inc., to look at the feasibility of relocating the station as it develops the master plan for renovation and development at Barnes-Jewish. If the project gets on track, BJC will pick up the tab.

“The station would be located at our front door instead of our back door,” said BJC Health System spokeswoman Kathy Bretsch. “Euclid is really congested, and we’re hoping to ease some of that.”

It’s interesting to look back and see BJC complaining about the level of congestion on Euclid and within the medical campus then caused by an overflow of cars and buses competing for space with pedestrians. Many years later, BJC would begin the process of closing off streets that has recently turned Euclid into a kind of urban oasis.

It’s also interesting to see how BJC perceived it’s campus, that Euclid was its backdoor and Kingshighway its front door. At the time, the congestion and dreary landscape along Euclid certainly offered little respite whereas Kingshighway, with Forest Park nearby, could offer a glimmer of calm and serenity, that is if you could get away from the din of traffic.

But what is truly fascinating within the excerpt above—the line regarding BJC’s perceived front and back doors—is that it would be repeated… almost 15 years later.

Like Minds Think Alike

Last month, BJC released a video showcasing the work of a trio of urban design firms and collaborators. The video presented a vision for inspiration for how BJC and CORTEX could and should expand and fill in to become a true hub for health sciences and technology.

Perhaps the most impressive presentation is the second clip performed by SOM. Aside from providing a fantastic overview of their work through flyovers and stills of the future BJC campus and CORTEX area, an excellent narration helps provide detail on some of the thoughts they put into the planning process.

One of the most intriguing parts of the narration given by SOM is a line at the 6:40 mark: “We imagine Kingshighway as a front door to the medical center.”

Though perhaps without knowing it, SOM repeated an idea first voiced by BJC 15 years ago. The idea is interesting because it seems to perfectly capture how BJC and the general public view and have viewed the medical campus, that it’s public face fronts Kingshighway and looks upon Forest Park.

But the opinion that Kinghighway is the front door to the BJC medical campus is grounded on a fallacious perspective. BJC’s campus spans over 1500 feet along Kinghighway. In that span, there is only a single door designed as a main entrance to the buildings. That door, which leads to the Emergency and Trauma Center, is tucked behind a small circular driveway and lacks a direct sidewalk connection. The assumption is that you will drive or be driven to the hospital.

And that is the perspective BJC has taken with it’s campus: a driver’s perspective. The hospital’s skyscrapers look their best and most impressive when viewed from afar whether it’d be approaching the med campus from Kinghighway, down I-64 or from Steinberg Rink or the the athletic fields in Forest Park (the best view, and the preferred view of architecture firms everywhere, is from a helicopter flyover).

Euclid is another matter entirely. Here on the “back” side of the med campus where the Central West End MetroLink station currently resides, BJC has carried out a marvelous transformation. Whereas Euclid and its side streets were once dark and bleak congested with the conflicting movements of cars, buses, and pedestrians, today the streets are a kind of urban oasis. This oasis was the product of a collaboration between MVVA and Maya Lin and built at the same time as the new BJC Institute of Health, a building which replaced a parking garage and sits atop the MetroLink tracks.

The transformation of the space occupied by the new BJC Plaza is no doubt relished by the thousands of MetroLink riders who walk through the space everyday. Since day one, the station has been extremely well used owing to its proximity to the vast majority of the buildings in the medical campus. It is also well used by residents and patrons of the Central West End. Tom’s Bar and Grill, Wildflower, and Brasserie are just some of the great restaurants located about a quarter-mile from the MetroLink stop.

But these restaurants, and the commercial heart of the Central West End, would be much farther away from a high quality line of public transit were the MetroLink station to move to Kingshighway. So would many medical buildings. Whereas a station located on Kingshighway would still efficiently serve the main part of the medical campus, many of the buildings east of Euclid would require significantly longer walks to reach. Bus riders transferring at the transit center on Taylor would see their walks increase to longer than a quarter-mile (the transit center would be forced to move.) And while having such easy access to Forest Park could be seen as a boon for transit riders, the lack of large attractors on the east side of the park does not make up for the loss of access to hundreds of jobs.

Pipe Down

In many ways, it seems that the driving force for moving the Central West End station is entirely aesthetic. For example, in 2010, Washington University hosted a design competition to improve the station’s aesthetics and ambiance in conjunction with “renovations” of the adjacent power plant building—a building that incidentally seems to be the source of much consternation.

[Paul Duell], the senior project manager for design and construction for the medical school, had a lingering, unsolved problem. The city’s Central West End Metrolink station, its most active metro stop, lay at his footstep — an ugly site in need of improvement. Although the St. Louis light-rail system has been highly successful, this active stop, which serves both the medical school and the Barnes-Jewish Hospital to form one of the largest nonprofit health-care complexes in the country, greets its approximately 5,000 riders with a daily dose of the medical school’s power plant. Imagine leaving work from patient care, exhausted, and looking up at a slew of pipes carrying steam or waste.

If it Ain’t Broke…

When you look up descriptions of the Central West End station from transit foamers on the internet, “industrial” is one of the words most often used to describe its locale. The pipes and steam and dingy look of some of the buildings near the station hide the fact the area is one of the most walkable neighborhoods in the entire metro area.

Even then, aesthetics are an insufficient reason to relocate the station. Nor should a driver’s perspective of the BJC campus be the primary shaper of the way hospital infrastructure is built and located.

A MetroLink station at Kingshighway would likely serve fewer jobs, fewer residents, and fewer stores, restaurants, and businesses than the existing station at Euclid. Forest Park would be a beneficiary of a relocated stop, but only at the expense of the Central West End neighborhood.

BJC must also recognize that thanks to all the improvements they’ve made along Euclid, that their “back yard” has become their “front yard”. In almost every way, the environment of the BJC campus is better on Euclid than it is on Kingshighway. No new building along Kingshighway is going to change that.

And anyways, if the station were relocated to Kingshighway, how would the monorail ever reach it?

Cross-posted at nextSTL.

Interstate 71 is the highway barrier in Cincinnati. To the east, I-75 and a swath of railroads form a giant wall blocking the growth of downtown in that direction. A bending Ohio River, I-71, and a line of bluffs frame the east side of downtown.

Interstate 70 is the highway barrier in St. Louis. To the south, I-64 and a swath of railroads form a giant wall blocking the growth of downtown in that direction. The superblock composed of the convention center and Edward Jones Dome frames the north side of downtown.

Between I-64 and Washington Ave, a span of about 3,500 feet, there are presently only 5 streets that cross I-70 from downtown St. Louis to the Arch grounds and the riverfront. However, if the current plan from City+Arch+River for the renewal of the Arch grounds gets built, the number of connections between the park and downtown will be reduced by 1 to only 4 streets.

Between I-75 and the Taylor-Southgate Bridge/Broadway, a span of about 3,700 feet, there are 8 connections that cross I-71 between downtown Cincinnati and the neighborhoods, stadia and riverfront to its south. These connections are a vast improvement over the conditions that existed prior to the complete reconstruction of I-71/Fort Washington Way in 2000. Since then, Cincinnati has embarked on the development of a mixed-use project on land between Paul Brown Stadium and Great American Ballpark.

Cincinnati has and continues to take full advantage of the connections it has across its land dividing highway. St. Louis, meanwhile, seems hell bent on removing the few connections it has left with its riverfront.

On one hand, this method of cataloging comments added an extra method of analyzing all the comments submitted. It was especially enlightening to see the multitude of comments classified as “out of scope”, a rather curious category for a process that was seeking comments on the scope of the project.

On the other hand, it was annoying to not be able to read the comments as a whole as originally written.

For that reason, I set about putting the comment pieces back together as best I could. You can download the reorganized document by following the link below.

» Comments for the JNEM Environmental Assessment Recompiled

• CityArchRiver is hosting an event on January 25 to update the community on efforts to modernize and reinvigorate the Arch grounds. Detailed plans for the park over I-70, Museum of Westward Expansion entrance, and new access for the I-70 corridor will be unveiled. (CityArchRiver 2015)
• MoDOT will hold a public meeting on January 30 to discuss a project to widen I-270 between I-44 and Dougherty Ferry as first reported here in 2010. Construction is expected to start this spring and last approximately 2 years. (MoDOT)
• A band of residents along McKnight Road created a committee called Ladue Residents for Sidewalks demanding that sidewalks be added to their city streets. (Ladue-Frontenac Patch via MoBikeFed)
• St. Louis aldermen introduced a bill to require bike parking for developments costing over $1 million. The bill would also reduce car parking requirements in exchange for additional bike parking. (Post-Dispatch)
• Clayton becomes the eighth city in the St. Louis metropolitan area to adopt a Complete Streets policy. (MoBikeFed)
• Missouri officials are trying to figure out whether they can turn I-70 into a toll road without voter approval. (Kansas City Star via Citizens for Modern Transit)
• Amtrak filed a petition with the Surface Transportation Board claiming that Canadian National is the single worst railroad in the United States when it comes to following the law on prioritizing Amtrak trains. Canadian National owns trackage between Joliet and Chicago used by Amtrak Lincoln Service trains traveling between St. Louis and Chicago, a segment that is specifically cited as a major source of delays in Amtrak’s complaint. (Reason & Rail)
• Kansas City hopes to start a bike sharing system this summer. Will St. Louis ever get one of it’s own? (BikeShareKC)

If I had the power to renumber the region’s interstate highways…

Even when the outcome is a foregone conclusion, every major project transporation seeking federal funding needs to perform an environmental impact report. As part of the EIR process, multiple alternatives are studied to address the purpose and need statement; most alternatives are practical, others… not so much. The Forest Park Ave busway is of the latter variety.

The drawings above and below come from a 1984 draft environmental impact study for what would become the St. Louis MetroLink system. The busway alternative ran from the airport to downtown via I-170 and Forest Park Pkwy with stations spread out along the way. While plans for the busway west of Kingshighway seem practical, published plans for the busway along Forest Park Ave are surprisingly bizarre.

At both Kingshighway and Grand, the busway would take over the normal travel lanes. Through lanes for vehicles would be built underneath the entrance and exit ramps to Kingshighway and Grand. Meanwhile, busway stations would be built in the narrow gap between the car lanes and bus lanes.

In addition to utilizing the Forest Park Ave underpasses at Kingshighway and Grand, overpasses were to be built at Taylor and Vandeventer to maintain high operational speeds for buses and would have essentially turned Forest Park Ave into an expressway.

The intersection of Forest Park and Euclid is one of the busiest pedestrian crossings of any major intersection in St. Louis outside of downtown. With the high density of residential and commercial to the north and the hospital and MetroLink station to the south, there is a constant stream of pedestrians crossing Forest Park Ave.

But at seven lanes wide, Forest Park Ave is not the easiest street to cross. Fortunately, a few locations offer respite for pedestrians crossing the street: overpasses for Kingshighway and Grand Ave offer very wide medians while pedestrian refuge islands are available at Taylor and Euclid… except on the west side of Euclid.

For several years, now, portions of the sidewalk on the west side of Euclid north of Forest Park Ave have been closed for new construction projects: first it was the Park East Tower, then it was the Nine North condominium and garage project, now it is a new building for BJC. These construction projects have kept the number of pedestrians crossing Forest Park on the west side of Euclid to a minimum. But with the sidewalk and the new BJC building poised to open in the coming weeks and months, the number of pedestrians crossing Forest Park without the added safety of a pedestrian refuge will soon increase dramatically.

Given the volume of pedestrians crossing Forest Park at Euclid, it would be great to see the City of St. Louis or BJC mirror the east side of the intersection and add a pedestrian refuge on the west side of the intersection. A little added safety could go a long way.

As for pedestrians wishing to cross Kingshighway…

Perhaps the most exciting part of 2011 for me occurred just before the year even began when Alex Ihnen invited me to write for nextSTL.com giving me. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to write for a much larger audience than I have here on my own blog and I’m excited to see the ways the community is growing outside of the blog and forum.

Near the end of the year, I teamed up with a few others to help start the Transit Riders Union of St. Louis. While things have started off slowly, we hope to become more active in the months to come. If you’d like to help in any way, please feel free to contact us.

Now enough blabbering. Onward with the top 7 posts of 2011:

1. Chicago-St. Louis High-Speed Rail Project Continues to Move Forward
While republican governors in Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin killed off their high-speed rail projects, Illinois has continued to forge ahead.

2. Wash U Students Have No Place to Wait
At the intersection of Skinker and Forest Park, students walking between the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood and the Danforth Campus often wait in the street due to a lack of sidewalk space.

3. Less Congestion, More Sprawl, a Lot More Time in the Car in St. Louis
One of the great ironies underlying the annual Urban Mobility report is that as traffic congestion in St. Louis decreases, the average commute time increases.

4. Realigning MetroLink to Better Serve St. Louis
Wherein I imagine where MetroLink should have run when originally built to better serve the city’s spine, the central corridor. Look for more ideas like this in the months to come.

5. Metro Responds
Following my post highlighting the surprising lack of local bus lines serving downtown St. Louis, Metro responded with an explanation of why things are the way they are. Hopefully future plans for BRT can help improve the situation.

6. What May Have Been: Stadium MetroLink Station and
7. What May Have Been: Delmar Loop MetroLink Station
A small series looking at early MetroLink station plans. More to come later this month.

Honorable Mention
Missing: Local Bus Service in Downtown St. Louis
The post that led to #5 above.

Dishonorable Mention (Tie)
“As a Matter of Policy, We Don’t Build Dedicated Bike Lanes.”
The St. Louis Regional Bike Plan is a thing of beauty and all the agencies and organizations involved with its planning should be commended with the exception of one stick in the mud, St. Louis County. “Salute” ** ***!

Kirkwood May Demolish Two Building for Additional Parking
Car Dealership, Parking Lot To Anchor Transit-Oriented Development At Sunnen MetroLink Station
At least St. Louis County can start adding bike lanes with a simple change of opinion. Opinions won’t help Kirkwood or Maplewood: Kirkwood destroying historic downtown buildings to put up a parking lot, Maplewood destroying transit adjacent apartments to build a car dealership. With Sunnen already the worst performing MetroLink station in the system, perhaps Metro should just close the station altogether. Uhhg!

The Third Street Expressway was completed in late 1955 and connected the Ozark Expressway on the south to the Mark Twain Expressway on the north. Though not easily visible in the picture above, the expressway had six intersections with the downtown grid from Walnut St to Locust St, 2 more than exist today.

Less than 10 years later, the brand new road passing between downtown and the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial was dug up and a trench put in it’s place where I-70 (soon I-44) now runs.