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Minneapolis and Saint Paul are connected by a street car line, Cleveland has a "streetcar" suburb (Shaker Heights) and they have an actual heavy rail line going from their airport to city center and off to the suburb of East Cleveland. not to mention that suburb East Cleveland has similar density and a similar housing stock to our main cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul).
You get to the Twin Cities suburbs and its very low density suburbia for miles and miles.
I suggest looking up the differences between light rail and streetcar. Anyway, downtown Minneapolis and MSP International are also connected via rail (light rail) so, I'm not sure what your point is. Also, why would you throw East Cleveland, a dying suburb of ~17,000, into the conversation? So, East Cleveland has a similar density on paper. So does the inner-ring suburb of Columbia Heights. Neither of these suburbs have the land area nor population comparable to either Minneapolis or St. Paul.
I'll try to put together some comparison numbers. Also to correct myself earlier, Kansas City was 80sq mi in 1950, not 50. Still I don't think it takes away from the point of how much suburbia it had to annex to cover those core losses.
Is that what accounts for MetroLink's wiggly routing once it goes west in downtown?
Also, if it takes about 2,000 feet for I-44 to go up from below-grade and capped to above-grade to a bride crossing, then it seems like I-64 should be able to go below grade and capped from around where Busch Stadium is going on west. Have there been any proposals to do such?
When the MetroLink first opened in the 90s, the vast majority of it opened using pre-existing right of ways. It was something like 14 of the 17 miles were using existing track.
As for the highways, if the feds were pitching in I'm sure there would be some serious proposals. St. Louis doesn't have the funds for this though, and this point I feel like the ever elusive north/south MetroLink line is more likely.
In terms of strategy, sewing Busch Stadium and downtown back towards that southern sliver of downtown would be great, but you have 64 as a double decked highway going from the Poplar until about the Enterprise Center. I'd also love to have Soulard become contiguous again all the way back up to downtown, but then of course the same thing would have to be done with 44 and 55.
As for capping 64 west of Busch (or even the Enterprise Center) then the same thing would have to be done with all the active rail lines in order to sew the city back together. St. Louis honestly vivisected itself with the highways and active rail lines.
That makes it even odder that the central corridor and the immediate south city neighborhoods most hit by the highways and such are the ones doing well. The city still flows naturally into north city, but some of those neighborhoods are in the worst shape, even though they're bordering the prospering central corridor. One would assume at some point there's got to be spillover.
When the MetroLink first opened in the 90s, the vast majority of it opened using pre-existing right of ways. It was something like 14 of the 17 miles were using existing track.
As for the highways, if the feds were pitching in I'm sure there would be some serious proposals. St. Louis doesn't have the funds for this though, and this point I feel like the ever elusive north/south MetroLink line is more likely.
In terms of strategy, sewing Busch Stadium and downtown back towards that southern sliver of downtown would be great, but you have 64 as a double decked highway going from the Poplar until about the Enterprise Center. I'd also love to have Soulard become contiguous again all the way back up to downtown, but then of course the same thing would have to be done with 44 and 55.
As for capping 64 west of Busch (or even the Enterprise Center) then the same thing would have to be done with all the active rail lines in order to sew the city back together. St. Louis honestly vivisected itself with the highways and active rail lines.
That makes it even odder that the central corridor and the immediate south city neighborhoods most hit by the highways and such are the ones doing well. The city still flows naturally into north city, but some of those neighborhoods are in the worst shape, even though they're bordering the prospering central corridor. One would assume at some point there's got to be spillover.
I see--so the pre-existing right-of-ways had those many turns and so that's what the city had to work with in MetroLink. Though that also makes me wonder why the existing right-of-way had that series of turns.
I'm for more freeway caps. It seems like St. Louis got hit hard with the cut off of the waterfront and the freeway further growing the gap between the central corridor and the south side of the city that the rail lines already did--and then on the north, St. Louis had its series of mid-century urban renewal projects that didn't turn out so well.
1. St. Louis
2. Cleveland
3. Minneapolis
4. Detroit
5. Cincinnati
The rest are fairly suburban.
Cleveland is definitely not number 2. And you forgot Milwaukee. Detroit would be number 1 outside of Chicago if it didn't have most of its building tore down. Some pockets are still very urban
If you were to take every Midwestern major city's historical density/"bones by dividing its peak population by the square miles of the city (an inaccurate exercise of course, given annexations, etc. which under exaggerate the true size), it may give you an idea of where certain cities reached at certain points. I think there is merit in what btownboss mentions about urban character regarding what is still present and not knocked down, as well as modern functionality which I do believe is relevant. But, I believe a lot of the 'je ne sais quoi' factor (given we are talking about urban character-which is more subjective than just overall urbanity) can be accounted for by finding these numbers for the cities at hand. First, we will put in Chicago's present-day density as a "baseline" of sorts. If someone else wants to get into other factors like "weighted density" or actually look up the square mileage of the cities at those times... have at it.
Chicago (2018)-11,943
---
Chicago (1950-3,620,962: 15,909 PSQM)
Saint Louis (1950-856,796: 13,819 PSQM)
Detroit (1950-1,849,568: 13,306 PSQM)
Cleveland (1950-914,808: 11,774 PSQM)-I know for a fact that Cleveland's boundaries have expanded some since
Minneapolis (1950-521,718: 9,505 PSQM)-I would not have expected just how competitive/comparable in size Minneapolis and St. Paul are over time. Minneapolis is bigger, but certainly not vastly so.
Milwaukee (1960-741,324: 7,712 PSQM)-Milwaukee hasn't lost all that much off it's peak-
Cincinnati (1950-503,998: 6,470 PSQM-I have a strong feeling Cincy annexed a decent a significant amount of land*)
Columbus is at it's present peak. It now has 922K with 3,625 PSQM. Sprawling or not, Columbus looks like it will pass the 1M threshold within city limits sometime in the next decade? Good to see that for the midwest.
Indianapolis is also at its present peak. It will also likely pass 1M as some point, though after Columbus by a while.
Kansas City is only 3% smaller than it was when it peaked in population in 1970.
If you were to take every Midwestern major city's historical density/"bones by dividing its peak population by the square miles of the city (an inaccurate exercise of course, given annexations, etc. which under exaggerate the true size), it may give you an idea of where certain cities reached at certain points. I think there is merit in what btownboss mentions about urban character regarding what is still present and not knocked down, as well as modern functionality which I do believe is relevant. But, I believe a lot of the 'je ne sais quoi' factor (given we are talking about urban character-which is more subjective than just overall urbanity) can be accounted for by finding these numbers for the cities at hand. First, we will put in Chicago's present-day density as a "baseline" of sorts. If someone else wants to get into other factors like "weighted density" or actually look up the square mileage of the cities at those times... have at it.
Chicago (2018)-11,943
---
Chicago (1950-3,620,962: 15,909 PSQM)
Saint Louis (1950-856,796: 13,819 PSQM)
Detroit (1950-1,849,568: 13,306 PSQM)
Cleveland (1950-914,808: 11,774 PSQM)-I know for a fact that Cleveland's boundaries have expanded some since
Minneapolis (1950-521,718: 9,505 PSQM)-I would not have expected just how competitive/comparable in size Minneapolis and St. Paul are over time. Minneapolis is bigger, but certainly not vastly so.
Milwaukee (1960-741,324: 7,712 PSQM)-Milwaukee hasn't lost all that much off it's peak-
Cincinnati (1950-503,998: 6,470 PSQM-I have a strong feeling Cincy annexed a decent a significant amount of land*)
Columbus is at it's present peak. It now has 922K with 3,625 PSQM. Sprawling or not, Columbus looks like it will pass the 1M threshold within city limits sometime in the next decade? Good to see that for the midwest.
Indianapolis is also at its present peak. It will also likely pass 1M as some point, though after Columbus by a while. Kansas City is only 3% smaller than it was when it peaked in population in 1970.
Worth noting in light of that stat is that Kansas City's annexation spree had pretty much come to an end by 1970. The annexations that took place after that were small parcels, including all of the city's territory in Cass County, around Belton.
When the MetroLink first opened in the 90s, the vast majority of it opened using pre-existing right of ways. It was something like 14 of the 17 miles were using existing track.
As for the highways, if the feds were pitching in I'm sure there would be some serious proposals. St. Louis doesn't have the funds for this though, and this point I feel like the ever elusive north/south MetroLink line is more likely.
In terms of strategy, sewing Busch Stadium and downtown back towards that southern sliver of downtown would be great, but you have 64 as a double decked highway going from the Poplar until about the Enterprise Center. I'd also love to have Soulard become contiguous again all the way back up to downtown, but then of course the same thing would have to be done with 44 and 55.
As for capping 64 west of Busch (or even the Enterprise Center) then the same thing would have to be done with all the active rail lines in order to sew the city back together. St. Louis honestly vivisected itself with the highways and active rail lines.
That makes it even odder that the central corridor and the immediate south city neighborhoods most hit by the highways and such are the ones doing well. The city still flows naturally into north city, but some of those neighborhoods are in the worst shape, even though they're bordering the prospering central corridor. One would assume at some point there's got to be spillover.
This is just another reason why I despise urban freeways ... at least, how they were built in America slicing up neighborhoods -- and killing many -- while destroying thousands upon millions of historic structures; esp in our classic older cities like St. Louis. The much fewer urban freeways in Europe seem more to skirt historic, walking neighborhoods and are often capped in denser areas.
It'd be interesting if Detroit could cap its freeways. They were built for the most part below-grade. With the removal of some of the ramps especially away from the major interchanges, capping them would kind of create these odd "rings" of linear parks surrounding larger parcels of Detroit which could be kind of pretty and these weird interchange nodes above ground seen in parts.
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