urbanSTL

If we had a N-S line built 20 years ago, Jefferson or whatever alignment they chose would be experiencing population growth similar to the Central Corridor. I know people who've gone to Chicago, Philly and San Francisco because "THEIR public transportation system goes EVERYWHERE. In St. Louis, I can't get to (nearly any part of the City) because we don't have enough lines!" Even I have entertained the idea of moving somewhere with a better system than us.

We aren't going to be able to compete with similar-sized cities like Minni, Denver, Portland, or Seattle who are aggressively building theirs out. Portland in particular has already surpassed us. The folks I know who moved up there after high school always point out how much better their system is than St. Louis' and that they can get around without a car or even taking the bus. I would love if everyone HERE could save $300-ish per month by getting rid of their cars and taking MetroLink instead! The FACT is that the only City neighborhoods truly flourishing are the ones with a station. There is no denying that.

^ south hampton, st.Louis hills, holly hills around the park, tower grove heights, Compton heights would disagree, all of those neighborhoods are great and no Metrolink stations.

I got a house in south Hampton last year and there 4-5 houses I looked at during the search and now walking my dog around the neighborhood, noticed young couples are in those houses now. 2 houses on both sides of me are owned by people 30 and under

Those neighborhoods never slipped into decline like the ones currently experiencing growth. They are also overwhelmingly white upper middle class with a lot of expensive, older homes.

Yes I am aware but he said that the only neighborhoods doing good are the ones with a metro link station. He never qualified it by excluding those.

Knowitall wrote:So how many young people would move here if N/S was built? 5000? 10,000? Do we spend $1,000,000,000 to gain 5000 people?

I firmly believe that if a street-level N/S line were to have been built by the late 90s (roughly around the time of the 370 and 364 openings) Saint Louis City would have seen a much smaller population loss during the naughts and would be growing by now. I think we'd be widely seen as at least equal to Pittsburgh, if not surpassing the Three Rivers City. (Which by the way is another city that has made major investments in rapid transit.) Maybe we'd be right on the heels of Minneapolis.

I think you have to look at three distinct areas, South Corridor, North Corridor, and the impact of the line on the retention of downtown's role as the region's clear central business district.
For South City, I don't think there is any question the line would have firmed up the adjacent neighborhoods and would have led both to increased development and thousands of more people. In turn, the health of these neighborhoods would have had some spillover/stabilization effect in other south city neighborhoods such as Bevo and Dutchtown. For North Corridor, I believe there once again would be more population retention as more investments would have been made in the area, but I'm not sure if the "draw" for new people would have been the same as for the South Side, but again I'd say we'd be looking at several thousand more people in North City than present. For downtown, I think the biggest impact would have been in reinforcing the CBD.... the naughts were a horrible time for downtown office employment and I believe that the destruction during that time would have been abated to a significant degree if we had the N/S line. This in turn would have retained more people throughout the city as their jobs would have been there.

So I think the city would be much further along than now.... perhaps surpassing 350,000 people and counting.

edit: adding, a N/S line also would have made the region more attractive to new businesses locating in Saint Louis and in turn more people as well.

Knowitall wrote:^ south hampton, st.Louis hills, holly hills around the park, tower grove heights, Compton heights would disagree, all of those neighborhoods are great and no Metrolink stations.

South Hampton lost 11% of its residents from the 2000-2010 censuses. St. Louis Hills lost 1.77%. Holly Hills was stable, losing only 0.11% of its population. There is no official Tower Grove Heights neighborhood for census purposes, but Tower Grove South lost 9.58% of its population and Tower Grove East lost 22.73% of its population. Compton Heights lost 9.19% of its population.

EDIT: forgot to inlclude my source.

Great neighborhoods? Yes. But by and large also bleeding residents.

-RBB

rbb wrote:

Knowitall wrote:^ south hampton, st.Louis hills, holly hills around the park, tower grove heights, Compton heights would disagree, all of those neighborhoods are great and no Metrolink stations.

South Hampton lost 11% of its residents from the 2000-2010 censuses. St. Louis Hills lost 1.77%. Holly Hills was stable, losing only 0.11% of its population. There is no official Tower Grove Heights neighborhood for census purposes, but Tower Grove South lost 9.58% of its population and Tower Grove East lost 22.73% of its population. Compton Heights lost 9.19% of its population.

EDIT: forgot to inlclude my source.

Great neighborhoods? Yes. But by and large also bleeding residents.

-RBB

South Hampton lost the grand total of 890 people, when you look a little deeper you will see its 2 people replacing 2 people and a kid. its not like 800 people left and now there is 300 more vacant houses. even with no metrolink station, young people are still moving into the neighborhood. Those pop. declines have nothing to do with having or not having a metrolink station, its pretty obvious its schools.

onecity wrote:Isn't most of the TGS/TGE population decline the result of four families et al being converted to single family homes? Haven't spent a lot of time in Southampton, but when I have I get an "older" vibe there, so maybe it's just kids aging out of their folks' homes? The schools issue is an issue, but in the past haven't some of the SH and similarly located neighborhoods been super Catholic, to the extent that even if SLPS had the best public schools in the entire universe with guaranteed admission to Harvard, they'd still go Catholic?

whole south city was catholic school only for a while, i mean 10 years ago you had St.marys highschool on Grand and .5 mile down delor you had another, St.Johns.
Having lived in South Hampton since last summer, I see a pretty good mix of 50 and over and 30 and under.

Metro recently reported a .7% increase in weekday Metrolink ridership over the last 9 months to 53,022. Metrobus increased 4% to 95,702.

Didn't realize this until recently reading Railway Age, but Metrolink is the only interstate light rail system in the country.

wabash wrote:Metro recently reported a .7% increase in weekday Metrolink ridership over the last 9 months to 53,022. Metrobus increased 4% to 95,702.

Didn't realize this until recently reading Railway Age, but Metrolink is the only interstate light rail system in the country.

What about DC Metro? It goes through Maryland, DC and Virginia. I think Philly's light rail stretches to suburbs in New Jersey too.

DC Metro, SEPTA Regional Rail and PATCO are all technically heavy rail.

Way to shine in your moment in the spotlight!

Casey Nolen KSDK ‏@CaseyNolen

“@AnneAllredNBC: Metro link had lots of sick calls today- say won't be able to run extra trains for @FairSaintLouis @ksdknews”

Agreed. This whole incident goes to show how mismanaged Metro is; they still haven't figured out how to execute on the bare minimum requirements of an efficient transit system.

The media coverage of of the Fair, especially people riding MetroLink, has not included any people complaining about too few trains. Perhaps we should wait until this is over to rush to conclusions about it being mismanaged.

All Metro buses are running as planned.

Mass sick days should be unacceptable, If the workers who called off sick did it for labor reasons, this is one reason why people continue to distrust and even hold contempt for unions, especial public unions .

Agree on the sick days being unacceptable and I hope metro can deal with that internally. However, after taking the train from downtown to the Forest park stop and back for the fair last night I think they did a pretty good job. The line leaving was long but moved relatively quickly. They had a lot of staff/volunteers on hand to help with the line. The start of the line was not immediately clear which caused some confusion. My only major complaint, and this is as much about the people riding as it is metro, was some line jumping. A fair number of folks thought their time was more important than others. Security tried to keep an eye on it - some more than others - but it was a bit of a losing battle. Given the length of the line when we joined, I expected to be there much later.

dweebe wrote:

quincunx wrote:Way to shine in your moment in the spotlight!

Casey Nolen KSDK ‏@CaseyNolen

“@AnneAllredNBC: Metro link had lots of sick calls today- say won't be able to run extra trains for @FairSaintLouis @ksdknews”

Didn't the exact same thing happen on the day of the Cardinal home opener?

That was a labor action, IIRC. I have no idea what the reason behind the sick days this weekend was.

I think we should refrain from condemning hard working people before we actually know some facts.

The 2014 Metro Annual Report was recently released (see pages 148-150 for itemized ridership data).

Metrolink ridership grew 2.4% (an improvement over the .3% growth in fiscal year 2013).
Metrobus ridership grew 2.4% (an improvement over the 1% growth in fiscal year 2013).

Average weekday Metrolink ridership grew 1.9% to 54,111.
Average weekday Metrobus ridership grew 3.7% to 95,911.

Ridership on St. Clair Phase II (Emerson Park to Shiloh-Scott) grew 1.2%. (a decrease from the 3.6% growth in fiscal year 2013)
Ridership on Cross County grew 4.9% (an improvement over the .6% growth in the fiscal year 2013)
Ridership on the Original Red Line (5th & Missouri to Lambert-Main) grew by 2.2%. (an improvement over the -.4% decrease in fiscal 2013)

Interestingly, total passenger miles traveled was down 4.8% in 2014, after a huge 22.1% jump in 2013. The combined data basically means that more riders are taking shorter trips. It's not clear why, but the passenger miles traveled data generally appears much more volatile than the total riders data.

All-in-all its good to see ridership continue to grow across the board. Of course, that should be expected when there is economic expansion and job growth occurring. The 4.9% Cross County ridership growth is particularly encouraging.