South County Connector: Misguided Planning for an Archaic Legacy Project

If road builders were your physician, you would cough and get a lung transplant. This is what's about to happen in south central St. Louis County the South County Connector study rolls on. The 1957 concept of an inner-ring Interstate simply won't die. The idea that we must build highways to connect all Interstates, parkways to connect all highways and arterial roads to connect all parkways is more difficult to kill than an army of zombies. We continue to build for 20 years ago and by the time planning and building catches up with reality, we will have overbuilt our infrastructure once again, destroying part of our civic fabric in the process, which once gone, cannot be reclaimed.

The question at hand is how many homes is it worth for a relatively small, defined area of South County to save a few minutes getting to Clayton, or shopping centers in Brentwood and Richmond Heights? St. Louis County lost population from 2000-2010. It's time to rethink projects set in motion 50 years ago. Access to County government is cited as once reason to build more and larger roads. Yet this is becoming less of an issue all the time. One quick example: one can challenge assessed property value in St. Louis County online in approximately five minutes - no need for a $200M roadway project. Times change, trends and needs change, unfortunately road projects seem to lurk long enough to climb the funding ladder and eventually get built, independent of changing factors or community needs.