Curious label on 1962 St. Louis Map

[glamatomic]

Originally Posted by pianist1972

There's also 755, which was never built, but why there are those huge exits and right of ways westbound 64 exit to Market,

Interesting... I never knew that. Now that I'm picturing that exit though, it would make sense that it was meant to have been a larger project. What route was 755 meant to have taken?

[billiken]

Originally Posted by Chicago76

Thank God it didn't happen. St. Louis ranks #2 among all large metros (1 million+) in terms of overbuilt freeways in the entire country behind KC. For comparison we have over 14.4 vehicle miles traveled daily per urban area resident in STL. Cincinnati has 10.5 miles. We have one lane mile of freeway for every 894 residents. Cincinnati has one for every 1316 residents.

All of those freeways are the single biggest reason why the city and north county have been has disinvested as they have. The city has turned the corner, but north county won't. Other areas are going to join North County in the next 20-25 years. We'll have a nicer city. We'll have nice, stable areas on a corridor west of the city running out to Chesterfield. We'll have nice fringe suburban areas in Jeffco, St. Charles county and some of St. Louis County. Everything else is going to pay. South County. North County. Parts of the county that have done okay like Overland and Maryland Heights. It may sound crazy, but Ballwin is headed for a tumble in the next 20 years. Too many new houses are being built west of St. Charles for younger people looking for a turnkey suburban house and too many other younger families and singles are looking for something more central and urban. As the population continues to age in Ballwin, they're going to be dumping houses in their retirement years and there won't be enough buyers without a major price adjustment.

I agree with this--while I do enjoy the benefits of overbuilt highways (our very light traffic makes my work situation traveling all over the Metro fairly painless, and it also makes it easy to see all those friends who move to Wildwood, O'Fallon, etc.), it's bad financially for our government to maintain all of it.

I am also involved in a lot of Mom's groups--I remain just flat out shocked by how popular the move out to Wentzville seems to be. But there are many people commuting to big N. County work campuses that say, my commute from Wentzville to N. County is about the same vs. Ballwin/Manchester to N. County, so lets go get that new, cheaper house! There's also plenty of O'Fallon based companies driving this growth, too.

[Chicago76]

Originally Posted by glamatomic

I beg to differ; at least from my personal perspective. The amount of miles of interstate is a blessing- although I admittedly lament how they did divide/ruin some neighborhoods.

If you've ever lived in a city with not enough freeways for the size of the area and population, you'll know what a nightmare that is!

St. Louis traffic congestion is relatively limited compared to other cities throughout the world. How many miles traveled doesn't bother me as much as much as how long it takes to get there!

You're entitled to your opinion, but the facts don't really bear this out. Miles of interstate do more harm than good, because they encourage people to live further away, which in turn increases driving mileage, which in turn encourages suburban business relocation, which in turn creates more driving in other directions. Basically, it turns into a self fulfilling prophecy where if you build more, it becomes as time consuming as if you didn't build the extra miles in the first place.

I've lived in areas with massive congestion issues, but those cities are generally completely different animals compared to a place the size of STL, so I'll make my case using hard data. Take the urban areas that are close to STL in population: Vegas, Denver, Minneapolis, Tampa. Nix Baltimore because they've got really strange commuter patterns back and forth between there, DC and everything in the middle of MD. If we had the average freeway lane mile to population ratio of those 4 cities, we'd need to rip out about 40% of our freeway lanes. Clearly that's crazy, because we've built suburbs and developed in areas because those lane miles exist. You can't undo that much of the freeway building craze without crippling the transportation system. We'd be lucky to be able to remove 2% of the lanes without creating all sorts of problems. Here's the interesting thing: the average car commute times of those 4 regions overall is the exact same to slightly less (by a fraction of a minute) than ours in St Louis.

If you don't build it in the first place, then you don't sprawl as much and your employment centers stay more focused. Rather than building new suburbs and watching the old infrastructure crumble, people improve and retrofit the legacy neighborhoods. Suburbanization still occurs, but things stay more compact. The infrastructure burden is lower, so the service quality/condition is better relative to the tax dollars spent. Congestion is a bit greater, but you're also traveling shorter distances. Currently, you might average 30 mph on a combination of local streets and freeways going 15 miles during rush hour. That's a 30 minute trip, which is pretty close to reality for a lot of commuters. In an alternate universe where all of those roads weren't built, you might average 24 mph with more congestion, but you're only travelling 12 miles. It's still a 30 minute trip. The difference in this scenario is that you'd have more walkable nodes developing in older suburbs, more places where transit would be practical, less decay in the worst neighborhoods in the region, etc.

I'm not advocating for tearing up tons of freeways, because you can't really undo things once they've been built. But we've definitely hit a point where we need to lay off building more, and any freeway that was contemplated decades ago that never got built is the best freeway we have IMO.

[Chicago76]

Originally Posted by billiken

I agree with this--while I do enjoy the benefits of overbuilt highways (our very light traffic makes my work situation traveling all over the Metro fairly painless, and it also makes it easy to see all those friends who move to Wildwood, O'Fallon, etc.), it's bad financially for our government to maintain all of it.

I am also involved in a lot of Mom's groups--I remain just flat out shocked by how popular the move out to Wentzville seems to be. But there are many people commuting to big N. County work campuses that say, my commute from Wentzville to N. County is about the same vs. Ballwin/Manchester to N. County, so lets go get that new, cheaper house! There's also plenty of O'Fallon based companies driving this growth, too.

All of this. Had we never overbuilt in the first place, the sprawling campuses in North County and along the 40 corridor wouldn’t exist and neither would the development all the way out to Wentzville. It would probably go no further than a mile or two west of the old part of St Charles. What we’d have instead is people retrofitting areas like Ferguson, Florissant, Affton to meet their needs. We’d have tear downs of 50s built, 1100 square feet 2-3 bed 1 bath versions of the 50s American Dream, replacing them with a mix of townhouses, multi unit condos amd rentals and larger single families on quarter acre lots. People could still get their slice of suburbia if that’s what they want, but they’d also have a legit town center kind of like an Edwardsville a mile or two away. Rather than jumping on a highway to head to MasterCard, they’d commute downtown, to Clayton, or to 1-2 other versions of Clayton that may have existed along Lindbergh.

You would sit in traffic more going around the metro, but you would spend no more time in your car than you do today because the distances would be shorter. We didn’t need to go the full Canada/Australia/UK route, because by American standards freeways there are much more scarce than places like Chicago here, but the ST Louis urban footprint easily could have done well with 2/3rds or even 1/3 of what we have. The region would look very different, but it would have been no more time consuming, easier (with some transit options), and fiscally better.