Now there’s a plan in Saint Louis to stir tourism with the stick of nostalgia by building a line through the Loop, a popular area of clubs and shops just north of Washington U. The line would end, fittingly, at the Missouri History Museum. More than $20 million in federal funds is available to build this trolley, though there’s been so little movement Washington has threatened to take the money back.
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The point being made in the Post article I just read is not that Saint Louis needs to step lively and get in on a good thing. It’s that these new trolleys might not be such a good thing. Arguments cut both way. The mayor of Cincinnati has said he wants to pull the plug on that city’s project. Ridership of Tampa’s trolleys has dropped about 35 percent in the past four years.
McKee had a big hand in important projects in other cities, including Portland’s light rail system. Chicago was different. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill had brought him here in 1983 to head the design team for the 1992 World’s Fair that Chicagoans of a certain age might remember was supposed to gain our city global glory. McKee watched that grandiose project go up in flames, and given the blundering arrogance of its champions he didn’t think that was necessarily the wrong outcome.
The trouble with buses is that meeting the need would require so many of them (each with its own expensive driver) that they’d flood the streets. “You would need State Streets running all through downtown,” said McKee.
That left light rail. The working group set up what McKee calls a “fatal flaw analysis”—a search for anything that would make the system not work. “We had a whole list of questions,” McKee said. “Things like getting over the rivers, operating in mixed traffic, questions of which street is it feasible on given the access requirements of adjacent properties.
“So you had sitting in one room in a problem-solving mode people from the CTA, Public Works, Planning, the RTA, Metra even, two or three other technical groups. . . . We orchestrated virtually weekly work sessions with all these agencies. We had a very clearly defined work program. Where the answers could be discovered through internal resources they would be. For example, the bridge people could render opinions about which bridge had to be replaced when, and whether it had the bearing capacity for these kinds of loads.
“Where we could not easily find it within the city, then we got outside experts. In individuals, not firms. We got people who had a great deal of experience about that specific thing.”
McKee went on, “There began to be a realization that a solution was possible. I think as this confidence level began to occur, turf issues began to erode away.” Individual conclusions became everyone’s conclusions “because they emerged through an open process. It was apparent it wasn’t anybody selling anybody anything.”
The light rail system that the working group came up with would run north and south along Canal Street and Columbus Drive and east and west along Monroe and the right-of-way behind the buildings that line the north side of the river. It would go as far north as Chicago Avenue and as far east as Navy Pier. A line down to McCormick Place also would be built, later or probably sooner.
The critics began attending circulator board meetings and other forums, emphatically pressing their point of view to the press. There must be, they said, less expensive, more efficient ways to shuttle commuters and tourists across the Loop.
