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You're not going to win with the talented people in the Midwest if you just try to make it feel like Silicon Valley Jr. -- you have to be different, with a whol

You're not going to win with the talented people in the Midwest if you just try to make it feel like Silicon Valley Jr. -- you have to be different, with a whole different ethos that's a bit more about the style of life here. This is true in public policy, too. I live in St. Louis, where we're constantly chasing the tails of bigger cities and their neat, new bike-share-startup-trolley-incubator-green-space whatevers. And it'll never work. For St. Louis to ever have any hope of being cool, it needs to focus on the things that make St. Louis cool and give up on trying to be Chicago.

nrr 11y ago
Indeed, lest our baseball team become the butt of a gambling joke in the Back to the Future franchise. (; That said, absolutely this. However, I'll add one more thing: The projects that we see getting built seem like they're more tourist-oriented than geared toward improving the standard of living for the city's denizens. Ultimately, I think the policy thing, especially surrounding the damnable tourist-oriented Loop Trolley, is going to be one of those "lots of dollars squandered while we try to re-learn how to make our city a sustainable (and safe) place to live, work, and play and not just visit" ordeals. That's really quite unfortunate, but the reasons are cultural: We Americans just don't like being told that we're wrong or that something is a bad idea. "Oh yeah? Well, I'll show you." And then ridership doesn't meet projections, and those politicians wind up losing the Mandate of Heaven^W^W^Wnext election, and then we get the same thing all over again. It's funny. Not too far off is Madison county, and as far as a semi-rural county goes, I think they actually got the whole infrastructure development thing (more) right (than most urban Midwestern areas). Trails to rails, gradual "nicening" of facilities (i.e., implicit bus stops at intersections to explicit signage to full-out bus shelters), lots of green space between communities, more encouragement to build tighter towns and cities that don't sprawl all over the place, etc. I found using MCT for the six years that I lived up that way to be on par with, normalized for density, biking Berlin and riding the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe's buses and trains when I last visited there. That's pretty hard to pull off, and it was readily apparent that those were facilities meant to be used by the folks who lived there, not as a vehicle for tourism.

nrr 11y ago

Indeed, lest our baseball team become the butt of a gambling joke in the Back to the Future franchise. (; That said, absolutely this. However, I'll add one more thing: The projects that we see getting built seem like they're more tourist-oriented than geared toward improving the standard of living for the city's denizens. Ultimately, I think the policy thing, especially surrounding the damnable tourist-oriented Loop Trolley, is going to be one of those "lots of dollars squandered while we try to re-learn how to make our city a sustainable (and safe) place to live, work, and play and not just visit" ordeals. That's really quite unfortunate, but the reasons are cultural: We Americans just don't like being told that we're wrong or that something is a bad idea. "Oh yeah? Well, I'll show you." And then ridership doesn't meet projections, and those politicians wind up losing the Mandate of Heaven^W^W^Wnext election, and then we get the same thing all over again. It's funny. Not too far off is Madison county, and as far as a semi-rural county goes, I think they actually got the whole infrastructure development thing (more) right (than most urban Midwestern areas). Trails to rails, gradual "nicening" of facilities (i.e., implicit bus stops at intersections to explicit signage to full-out bus shelters), lots of green space between communities, more encouragement to build tighter towns and cities that don't sprawl all over the place, etc. I found using MCT for the six years that I lived up that way to be on par with, normalized for density, biking Berlin and riding the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe's buses and trains when I last visited there. That's pretty hard to pull off, and it was readily apparent that those were facilities meant to be used by the folks who lived there, not as a vehicle for tourism.