Return of the City

Not to beat a dead horse but this article from today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch provides an inkling of why a strategically sited light rail line is better than the bus. Maybe the bus is more cost-effective by certain measures – it’s clearly cheaper to get a new bus route up and running. However, the redevelopment brought about by the new rail line will multiply through the economy for years. The end result will be a more livable city with attractive urban hubs built around the new stations. This is how we begin to roll back suburban sprawl. And, although the evidence from the Post-Dispatch article is anecdotal, many of the people who give up their cars to use light rail would probably keep driving if the only option were the bus.

U. City Underground

Look, I know some of you are saying, why is this guy getting so excited about this piddley little trolley line in a tired, old rust belt city? Well, my answer is that by digging this tunnel, St. Louis is beginning the process of digging itself out of the deep hole it dug for itself. Once the fourth largest American city (see US Census data for 1900 and 1910), St. Louis does not even appear in the current rankings for the top 50 American cities! I think that by linking the area’s two business centers, the new MetroLink line will do a lot of good for the economy and psyche of St. Louis. Will it lead to a great urban Renaissance? Perhaps not but surely it will provide a boost of a couple of rungs up the ladder. Some interesting transit-oriented development is likely to follow. The tunnel I’m referring to is in University City on the new Shrewsbury line (see my post of 3:29 PM on 08/20/06). A nice article about the tunnel appears in today’s Post-Dispatch.

Chaos of Delight

Today is the last day of the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. If you’ve missed it, don’t despair since the exhibit is moving on to Boston, Chicago, Toronto and London. Perhaps the rural counties of Kansas should be included on the tour for maximum effect. I’ll provide only one tidbit from the show, an exceprt from a letter Darwin wrote expressing his joy and excitement upon first seeing the Brazilian rainforest, “ ... if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect, one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight ...”

Better Late Than Never

At long last, the St. Louis MetroLink Shrewsbury Line is about to open. Until now, this light rail system has had one line, which runs from Lambert-St. Louis International Airport to downtown St. Louis and across the Mississippi River to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. The portion of the line from the airport to East St. Louis opened in 1993. Part of the extension to Scott Air Force Base opened in 2001 and the final segment was completed in 2003. The new Shrewsbury Line will serve St. Louis’ West End, Washington University, University City, Clayton, Richmond Heights, Brentwood and Maplewood. The terminal at Shrewsbury will have a large park-and-ride facility adjacent to Interstate 44. The new line will link the metropolitan region’s largest business centers – Clayton and downtown St. Louis. Click on the link at the bottom of this post to see a PDF file (from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) detailing how trains will run on the reconfigured system. Note that there will be no direct trains between Clayton and the airport; a change at the Forest Park Station will be required:
MetroLink-Shrewsbury (.pdf file)

Come Here Little Shmoo

Light summer reading pick: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker. I’ve learned a lot from this book. Pinker debunks much of the common wisdom about language, like the idea that primitive peoples have primitive language. The languages of Stone Age peoples are as rich and grammatically complex as those of any more “advanced” civilizations. And rather than a Tower of Babel, all languages have so much in common (there is “a single mental design underlying them all”) that a visitor from another planet would view all human speech as a single language with various dialects. Pinker is also good at putting the “language mavens” in their place. A language “sage” like William Safire “misjudges the linguistic sophistication of the common speaker and as a result misses the target in many of his commentaries.”

Language, according to Pinker, is an adaptive trait that arose through natural selection. Pinker explains the genius of Charles Darwin’s concept in a novel and accessible way, e.g., “Darwin noted that his theory made strong predictions and could easily be falsified. All it would take is the discovery of a trait that showed signs of design but that appeared somewhere other than at the end of a lineage of replicators that could have used it to help in their replication. One example would be the existence of a trait designed only for the beauty of nature, such as a beautiful but cumbersome peacock tail evolving in moles, whose potential mates are too blind to be attracted to it. Another would be a complex organ that can exist in no useful intermediate form, such as a part-wing that could not have been useful for anything until it was one hundred percent of its current size and shape. A third would be an organism that was not produced by an entity that can replicate, such as some insect that spontaneously grew out of rocks, like a crystal. A fourth would be a trait designed to benefit an organism other than the one that caused the trait to appear, such as horses evolving saddles. In the comic strip Li’l Abner, the cartoonist Al Capp featured selfless organisms called shmoos that laid chocolate cakes instead of eggs and that cheerfully barbequed themselves so that people could enjoy their delicious meat. The discovery of a real-life shmoo would instantly refute Darwin.”