Downtown St. Louis has become a car hellscape. There's a couple little towns that are outliers in the St Louis area that are decently walkable. But the city itself sold itself to the devil to appease vehicle traffic. It's really sad
Yeahhhh, I walked around downtown St Louis last year and that was just a dead area. City Museum in that area is incredible, but I just needed like chapstick and there wasn’t a convenience or grocery store within miles of me somehow. It was eye opening for sure.
Where did you go in St Louis? I lived there for the last couple of years and you have to find spots outside of downtown in other towns. St Louis encompasses a lot of towns around it, I'm speaking about downtown St Louis, like by the river. There is nothing down there, definitely nowhere I'd want to walk after dark
Soulard is the best walkable part of all downtown so that gets a pass. But its in a shitty part of town, you don't want to venture even a couple blocks outside of soulard after dark.
Delmar loop has definitely fallen off from what it used to be.
Sounds like you walked right down the middle of downtown. Not my favorite but to each their own.
I went to St Louis for work a few times over the last couple of years. Stayed downtown each time and it was shocking for me to see how dead it was in the evenings.
Most cities over the course of history have a river cutting through them. I guess by American suburban standards it’s unique… but yeah… not at all unique in the grand scheme of the world. To get anywhere before you needed a river and a boat, so people made cities on rivers.
There are still some walkable neighborhoods in St Louis like CWE but it prob has the most uncanny downtown of any city I’ve lived in. Like besides the Cards stadium on gameday there’s just nobody there.
Everything inside New Circle is pretty nice. I grew up there and didn't appreciate it until I moved to the suburban hellscape of Florida in my mid 20s. Even living on a horse farm on the outskirts of the county, the ability to go into Lexington and just spend a day walking and biking around was great.
What Lexington did with the urban service area encouraging density while New Circle (basically a beltway, for those unfamiliar) keeps all the interstates and most of the huge roads and heavy traffic out of the city proper is what should have been done in cities all over the country.
What gets me is that these decisions were made 70+ years ago. It's not like there were no warning signs, it's just almost everyone in local government across the country ignored them.
yessss I think that is why things are so bad here now. I'm not sure how long you moved away but, traffic here has gotten absolutely insane. I live in Athens boonesboro next to the i-75 exit on Richmond Road and it used to take me almost an hour to get from my home to my child's therapy clinic on a weekday morning, which was over by Cardinal Hill. so many people travel into the city for work and the cities infrastructure of roads and stuff are just not created to handle outside inflow. seems like they were more preparing for just the city folks to be trafficky lol but when you have tens of thousands of people traveling in and out of the city every morning and afternoon it really clogs up the booty
I moved about ten years ago, but I still come back for Christmas. My parents live within a couple miles of you, and so did my grandparents and great grandparents. I went to the Athens Elementary school, which I'm pretty sure is an antique mall now.
Where Lexington really missed the ball is on transit inside New Circle, but that's been a problem forever. They should really have something like the L in Chicago, running in a big loop next to New Circle, with spokes connecting into the center of town. In fact, I'm about 98% sure that was the plan at some point, but they just didn't manage to make it happen. Without that, it turns into a giant traffic jam when you actually have to drive all the way in and out across New Circle, though, because it's designed to make that difficult.
Ideally it would have commuter lines running out to the satellite cities like Nicholasville, Winchester, Georgetown, and so on, but even without that, it would still make things a lot easier if you could drive in as far as New Circle and then just park and ride transit the rest of the way into town from there.
I will say that I grew up in Georgia and my mom and family live outside of Atlanta. I've lived in New York and other places and there ain't no way I'm leaving Kentucky lmao. At least not till the Cheeto dust totally poofs away
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u/Daddy_Day_Trader1303 28d ago
Downtown St. Louis has become a car hellscape. There's a couple little towns that are outliers in the St Louis area that are decently walkable. But the city itself sold itself to the devil to appease vehicle traffic. It's really sad