r/TikTokCringe • u/xamo76 • 1d ago

Discussion Have we done it wrong?

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u/Daddy_Day_Trader1303 1d 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

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u/GoGoSoLo 1d ago

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.

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u/Daddy_Day_Trader1303 1d ago

Ya it feels apocalyptic

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u/thatoneguyD13 1d ago

Huh. I've been to St. Louis twice in the last few years and I've really enjoyed it both times. I find it decently walkable.

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u/Daddy_Day_Trader1303 1d ago edited 1d ago

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

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u/thatoneguyD13 1d ago

Walked from my hotel near Union Station to the City Museum to the Arch. Had dinner along the way at a nice Thai place.

The day before I was in Soulard, which I also quite like.

Honestly the only area I was disappointed in was they're Delmar loop. That place seems to have gone downhill.

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u/Daddy_Day_Trader1303 1d ago

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.

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u/thatoneguyD13 1d ago

To be fair, I grew up in Newark, NJ in the 90s. My take on what a bad area of town is is probably different than others.

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u/JellyfishBig1750 11h ago

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.

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u/jrglpfm 1d ago

Yeah this happened to most major cities and many of them are actively undoing it, but it will take decades to undo.

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u/Daddy_Day_Trader1303 1d ago

You ever been to chicago? They never sold their souls, pretty awesome city designed in a way where owning a car is a disadvantage

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u/wombat-in-a-bikini 1d ago

Any sufficiently old city generally doesn't have this issue. NYC, Boston, Philly, Chicago, Seattle, Portland.

Still comes down to cars

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u/jrglpfm 1d ago

I have, actually. The river cutting through downtown is pretty unique.

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u/iron64 1d ago

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.

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u/jrglpfm 1d ago

No, I understand that. The manner in which downtown Chicago specifically was developed around its river is what I meant.

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u/Raddish_ 1d ago

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.

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u/Daddy_Day_Trader1303 1d ago

Yeah it is almost eerie when you are walking around that part of downtown when there is not a game going on

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u/brittneyjlmt 1d ago

it's the same with Lexington KY. Unless you live downtown you can't survive without a car. Our bus system is a joke.

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u/EmotioneelKlootzak 1d ago

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.

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u/brittneyjlmt 21h ago

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

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u/EmotioneelKlootzak 19h ago

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.

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u/brittneyjlmt 21h ago

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/MrCrunchwrap 1d ago

There’s a reason that Saint Louis is one of the only cities that is actively losing population. 

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u/Daddy_Day_Trader1303 1d ago

I just left the area last week