Whose Scale?
By Mitch Berg
The Strib’s editorial this morning clucks about the way Saint Paul’s University Avenue strip – one of the most successful areas in Minnesota, both in terms of big commerce (Midway Center, with its row of big-box retailers) and smaller enterprise (the two miles of Asian businesses that turned the Avenue, over a couple of decades, from a wretched decayed toilet to a generally decent place) is scaled.
They have a plan, you see:
The plan, prepared by Urban Strategies of Toronto after months of discussions with residents, is extraordinary. It depicts clearly the challenges St. Paul faces in remaking one of Americas ugliest urban strips in a way that doesnt chase away immigrant shops or low-income residents but adds vitality, beauty, safety and convenience. The plan lists 90 initiatives, including the infilling of big-box parking lots with sidewalk-oriented businesses — a gradual transition from suburban to urban form. “The result will be stronger businesses, more vibrant neighborhoods and a more beautiful urban place,” the plan proclaims.
One of the options they don’t list, unfortunately, is “changing the type of transit chosen for the strip”.
The Met Council has committed Saint Paul to “light rail” for the Central Corridor – the same big, fast trains used on the Ventura Trolley. This option will require University – Saint Paul’s backbone (forget about I94) to be torn apart for the better part of a decade.
Leave aside the advisability of rail transit in a relatively low-density city like Saint Paul (I’m not dogmatically anti-transit, but the Met Council’s choices in this area give one plenty of room to be agnostic about the issue and still have plenty to rage against) for a moment; the Met Council had several options that would have done a vastly better job of connecting the downtowns and not gutted the middle of Saint Paul:
- Build a Ventura-Trolley-style light rail line along existing rail rights of way along the tangle of tracks already connecting the two downtowns – between Energy Park/Pierce Butler and Como Avenues – connected to the rest of the area by feeder buses. This would combine the (relative) speed of light rail, the flexibility of buses, and not tear the hell out of the Midway, and save a zillion dollars by using existing rights of way.
- Use a lower-impact form of rail – “Streetcars” instead of “light rail”, something more like a bus on rails, only with vastly higher capacity and its own right of way. It’d disrupt the street vastly less, be a huge improvement over University’s teeming bus lines, and (this is big) encourage the sort of smaller-scale, more organic development that the editors purport to want. Streetcars wouldn’t require big, elaborate, expensive, disruptive stations, as does the Ventura Trolley – the sort of things that disrupt neighborhoods, and also shimmy urban planners into trying to change the fundamental character of the areas around the stations – as has happened around the Ventura Trolley.
Of course, I read things like this…:
On that front, Minneapolis has moved well ahead of St. Paul in anticipating light rail along its portion of the avenue. Discussions with the Prospect Park neighborhood and university officials have produced detailed plans and rezoning for the station area around 29th Street SE., which promises to be the most dynamic stop along the line.
Here, in close proximity, will be the quiet, leafy Prospect Park neighborhood on one side, and on the other a new Gophers football stadium, a new bioscience campus, a commuter rail line, the universitys inter-campus bus transitway and space for private enterprise to build bioscience laboratories and perhaps 1,000 new homes. One idea is to make this an area attractive to alumni, who might like to retire near campus on an LRT line. Already, the plan, offered by consultant Daniel Cornejo, includes an urban-scale grocery store as part of the rail station.
In other words, they want the sort of cataclysmic neighborhood-shaping that accompanies the disruption caused by the sort of construction they support.
Sorry, Strib. I like the city I live in just fine. Most of us who live here voluntarily do. Go and shape your own city in your image.
Because you’ve done such a fine job in Minneapolis.
February 12th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Hey, it only took two tries and forty years to turn the Near Northside of Minneapolis into the model community it is now. Why, they’ve even got gunshot detectors! Now THAT’S progress.
February 12th, 2007 at 10:21 am
“Use a lower-impact form of rail – “Streetcars” instead of “light rail””
I agree with this part. I really do like public transit and the light rail in Minneapolis does pretty good for its location (not a lot of density and a couple miles between stops) but for University a slower speed frequent stopping easy on-off streetcar style setup makes a whole lot more sense.
“Near Northside of Minneapolis”
The Near Northside mess is a due to a lot of factors, more than I like of which are based on the actions of decades of mono-party control and what’s looked like a fair bit of corruption from time to time.
However, I do think that the addition of the urban canyons in the form of interstates and major highways have done a lot to contribute to the difficulties of the city. I understand that Saint Paul’s got its issues with these matters as well, but near north is neatly segmented off by both 94 and 394.
The city should have been (and still should) be able to overcome this unnatural boundary but it certainly didn’t help.
February 12th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Why even a rail system at all? Why not electric busses? San Francisco utilizes busses that are a diesel hybrid with an arm that can just hook up to overhead lines. It seems it would be a lot cheaper to run a few lines than tear up streets for tracks. They don’t look pretty, but they are effective.
That’s the heart of the issue though, isn’t it. These “improvements” aren’t about what’s effective, or what’s good for commerce or convenience. They are about AESTHETICS. Mitch sites from the report “The result will be stronger businesses, more vibrant neighborhoods and a more beautiful urban place.” More beautiful maybe, but how do we no that a few little shops will be stronger businesses than those that already exist? How do we know the neighborhood will be more “vibrant”. More trendy, sure, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to vibrance.
Form should follow function, not the other way around. Play Sim City on your home computer and quit playing it with my life.
February 12th, 2007 at 10:56 am
While I do think a train running down university would be “cool,” the cost/benefits in the short term are pretty depressing, and the metro region really needs to create a “transportation” plan that will really benefit the whole region.
However, nordeaster asked, “How do we know the neighborhood will be more “vibrant”.” I think if you look at the line in MPLS, there has been a lot of new investment in those neighborhoods, specifically housing. Trendiness & beauty may not be the results, but vibrancy, if the form of more human activity, will most likely follow.
February 12th, 2007 at 11:30 am
A train down University will be very effective. All they have to do is ban cars on the Avenue.
February 12th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Vehicles on rails are more predictable for pedestrians, bicycles, cars, etc. You know where they will be and you know where they won’t be.
If properly installed and maintained, they are also more efficient – rails on track are much more efficient than tires on road and you don’t have the wear and tear.
And, of course, there is the aesthetic.
All that said though, I’d personally be fine with electric buses. As a bicyclist, there are even some advantages to not having tracks all over. It would be nice to not have to suck in the crap that the current buses belch though.
Funny thing about the cold weather – it makes the exhaust coming out of all the vehicles much stronger smelling and tasting. My theory is its just the absence of other scents to the air but whatever it is, bicycling in the winter makes one quite aware of vehicle exhausts.
February 12th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
“My theory is its just the absence of other scents to the air but whatever it is, bicycling in the winter makes one quite aware of vehicle exhausts.”
Before I go bicycling in the winter, I like to smoke half a pack of Luckies and stuff dry ice in my shorts.
Because that’s how tough I am.
February 12th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Before I go bicycling in the winter, I like to smoke half a pack of Luckies and stuff dry ice in my shorts.
Because that’s how tough I am.
(using a Curly-of-the-Three-Stooges voice): Oooh! Tough guy!
February 12th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Big cities have Metros. Pissant cow-towns have busses. Minneapolis has a train. St. Paul has busses and is dying of envy. So we must have a train, too, at all costs.
There’s not enough ridership to justify a train on University Avenue. So the City is building 5,000 more apartments along that stretch. Middle-class people don’t ride the train, they prefer to drive. So the apartments are designated for seniors and low-income, people who don’t drive. Running the train down the middle of the street eliminates two lanes so University becomes pretty much impassible to vehicles, shifting East-West traffic to Minnehaha or Summit. St. Paul just announced a city-wide inspection and licensing crackdown on all rental housing, which will make it so expensive as to drive many smaller landlords out of business, forcing renters to move to the new City apartments on University Avenue, all of which combines to create ridership for the train.
But ridership to where? Low income and retired people don’t ride the train to work – they don’t work. They don’t buy Latte Grandes from trendy shops – they can’t afford them. Poor people will ride the train the same as they ride the bus – to Rainbow and back; to the probation and welfare offices and back. Adding more poor people to University will be good for the White Castle and the KFC, but only if the City lets them stay instead of tearing them down in favor of “nicer” places. The space intended for trendy shops will end up being filled with pawn shops, check cashing outlets, and government subsidized functions – library, police, Urban League, outreach programs, free clinics, etc.
In the olden days, we shoved all our poorest citizens into one zone – those were called Projects which deteriorated into Slums. But luckily, history doesn’t repeat itself in St. Paul.
February 12th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
There is actually a big contention in Saint Paul that the Met Council basically brushed over a streetcar-based plan that would have been less disruptive to University.
We’ll be discussing this on the NARN, by the way, on March 3 during the 1PM hour.
As re Iraq – perhaps. I have to figure out what I want to do with that.
February 12th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Donk – the fix was in long ago. I attended a Citizen Input meeting at the Hmong Cultural Center in Frogtown about 3 years ago. The City Planners already had powerpoints showing what existing buildings would be razed, where the new apartments would be built, what the streets in the trendy new shopping center would look like, how the train lines would run . . . the request for citizen input was strictly pro forma so they could say they got some.
I read their report to the Council and didn’t recognize it as the same meeting I had attended. We citizens ranked as our Number 1 priority “more cops in the Sherburne Alley to run off the drug dealers and whores.” Demand for light-rail came in dead last, at about 2%, which I strongly suspect came from a woman who worked in the Mn/DOT Light Rail Grant Adminstration Office (actually a friend of my wife’s and a sweetheart besides). So of course, the report to the Council said there was “significant” support for light rail. And the Council adopted the plan saying they were bowing to public demand for light rail, giving the citizens what they want!
It’s all a crock. The Met Council is chock-full of New Urbanists who sincerely believe there should be nothing built outside the 694-494 ring; instead, everything should be in-filled with high-density apartments until we look like Manhatten and reach transportation gridlock, at which time people will give up their vehicles out of sheer frustration and will voluntarily embrace The Train. Read any of the Met Council’s vision statements or attend any of their presentations – it’s clear as a bell and they don’t hide it. Why bother, when they can depend on the media to spin it for them.
The real problem is these grand ideas play well with the same folks who see pictures of people boating on the river in San Antonio and say “Hey, we have a river, why don’t we develop ours?” forgetting that we’re in MINNESOTA so the riverbank is uninhabitable 300 days out of the year. The same people who devised the Nicollet Mall as an open-air shopping attraction, forgetting that this is MINNESOTA where Dayton’s invented the mall because outdoor shopping is impossible 300 days a year.
In other words, romantic dreamers.
Liberals.
Idiots.
.
February 12th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Donkeyman1-
A good first step would be for the antiwar folks to admit that:
A UN charter that only authorizes war when against a nation when it sends an army over its border was effective in 1948, but not effective in 2003.
That economic sanctions are not necessarily a useful response to belligerency.
That Iraq was broken long before 2003 by Arab despotism and cold war politics
That the current Iraq War is an attempt to fix problems, not create them; not to enrich Bush’s corporate buddies; and especially not an illegal action under the laws of the sovereign United States.
February 12th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
the Met Council is appointed by a conservative, TPaw..-
“I don’t think that term means what you think it means…”
February 13th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Tell ya what, D-man. Let’s meet at the corner of University and Snelling some fine day. We’ll ride the 16 downtown and back a few times, doing a little unscientific research.
Let’s find out: who rides that bus, and to where? Why are there so many shopping carts jammed in the bus stops? Why are so many young women towing toddlers downtown during the work day? Why can’t members of a certain racial minority afford to buy belts to hold their pants up?
Having those facts in hand, along with our knowledge that St. Paul plans to build another 5,000 low-income units along that stretch, let’s speculate on who will ride the train that replaces the bus. Not the express commuter bus, mind you – the local bus that serves local residents – who do we think will ride that train?
Just so you know, I’ve had the misfortune of having to do quite a bit of that research myself, personally, of necessity. Your comments sound as if you also speak from a position of knowledge, but I’m wondering – have you obtained that knowledge as I did? Or are you a guy who just “knows stuff” like a certain local columnist I won’t name, and therefore you don’t need to verify any actual facts before making condescending remarks?
Even granting that you actually know what you’re talking about, do me a favor; don’t just insult me, tell me where my central argument goes awry. If there isn’t enough ridership to justify a train, so we build 5,000 more low-income apartments along the route and shut down driving lanes to intensify train ridership, what makes you think those new low-income neighborhood residents will patronize trendy shops and chic boutiques instead of White Castle and KFC?
What makes you think cramming thousands of low-income people in one corridor will create a haven of prosperity instead of a slum?
What makes you think I’m wrong?
.
February 13th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Different tangent on a similar topic – I attended a meeting this morning in which a Developer is getting almost $1 million of City money to build a rush project in time for the RNC convention in ’08. It’s planned for downtown St Paul, across the street from the open space that presently is used for a Farmer’s Market (at least, it’s used that way during nice weather).
They’re going to construct a 5-story building with underground parking (good idea); condos on floors 2-5 (dumb, there’s a glut right now, but maybe okay in the long run); and best of all – the main floor will be an Indoor Farmer’s Market.
That’s right – indoor! Available year-round! Right in downtown St. Paul!
Where local farmers can sell fresh, local produce, the good stuff harvested right here in MINNESOTA during FEBRUARY, not trucked in from some warehouse far away. Which, of course, you can’t get at, say, Cub, for a lot cheaper and with more convenient locations and free parking.
A year-round Farmer’s Market in Minnesota, for crying out loud. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what is wrong with these people?