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In regards to the airport. I suspect the comparison was in passenger counts, but I will defer. St. Louis is faring quite well for a medium hub airport, with higher passenger counts than Indy. That isn't your cities fault, you have closer competition than we do. Louisville, Cincy, Dayton, Chicago are all close than other airports to STL and they draw from your far out areas. Indy did build a new airport, and we have a much older one in St. Louis - that is being replaced with and airport that will still be bigger than Indy's. My google search indicates 39 gates in Indy, similar to the new terminal at KCI. The new St. Louis airport will have 62 gates. We can discuss performance when OUR new airport opens (of course, by then the Indy airport will be about 22 years old. Will you like the comparison then?
Regarding sports, I thinking MLB, MLS and Hockey have higher attendance (and revenue) and are in a different league than WNBA (I am not trying to take anything away from the WNBA). Appears as though the 2023 average for the Indianapolis Fever was 4066 per game, the second lowest in the league. I am also seeing the NBA average attendance in Indy was 15,647 per game. If you want to include WNBA then you should also include our XFL, especially with the attendance records we set - the 2023 Battlehawk season averaged 35,104 per game. You do have the Indy 500.
Looking at a google search (this was Newsweek) the highest ranking hospital in Indy was the Indiana University Medical center - as 150th. Barnes was ranked 33rd.
Before we say anything about a place leap frogging others lets first compare things as they are today, and not what we expect them to be in the future, because wile potentially at different rates, things are progressing in many cities.
I am NOT dissing your city, I am just trying to provide some perspective on a few items that I can google and get comparative data collect. It's great to be a booster, but boosting your city doesn't have to mean saying you are better than others. Most of the time, it's an opinion. So, don't get updset if others opinions don't agree with you.
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Originally Posted by STLCityMike
In regards to the airport. I suspect the comparison was in passenger counts, but I will defer. St. Louis is faring quite well for a medium hub airport, with higher passenger counts than Indy. That isn't your cities fault, you have closer competition than we do. Louisville, Cincy, Dayton, Chicago are all close than other airports to STL and they draw from your far out areas.
According to 2022 statistic, St Louis airport had total passengers of 13,665,517 and aircraft operations of 157,517. Indianapolis total passengers count was 8,693,024 and aircraft operations of 193,634. Let's not pretend as if St Louis is the busier airport. If you're only counting movement of people then yes but overall aircraft operation the Indy is busier. Strictly from and economic standpoint IND economic impact is $5.4 billion compared to STL $3.1 billion. As a side note, IND was selected as top of the continent’s quality airports: for the 11th year in the row, the Circle City’s airport has been named the Best Airport in North America by the Airports Council International. Additionally, J.D. Power named IND as the best in customer satisfaction for medium-sized facilities. In the study, IND ranked highest among medium airports for a second consecutive year, with a score of 843. Southwest Florida International Airport, with a score of 839, ranked second, and Ontario International Airport, with a score of 834, ranked third.
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Originally Posted by Regarding sports, I thinking MLB, MLS and Hockey have higher attendance (and revenue) and are in a different league than WNBA (I am not trying to take anything away from the WNBA). Appears as though the 2023 average for the Indianapolis Fever was 4066 per game, the second lowest in the league. I am also seeing the NBA average attendance in Indy was 15,647 per game. If you want to include WNBA then you should also include our XFL, especially with the attendance records we set - the 2023 Battlehawk season averaged 35,104 per game. You do have the Indy 500.[/QUOTE
You are selling Indy short my friend. Sports are more than MLB, MLB and Hockey. It includes motor speedway racing, (National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Nationals NHRA). Spectator events such as the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Final Fours, Olympic trials, the Conference Football Championship and bi-annual basketball tournaments, and the once-in-a-lifetime Super Bowl. Governing bodies, like the Indiana Sports Corporation, the NCAA, the National Federation of State High School Associations, USA Diving, USA Gymnastics and much more. All the above-mentioned groups generate revenue. For example, The Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) alone has an $1.058 billion impact on the city. That alone generated more revenue many times than your 2023 Battle hawk season. According to Sports Business Journal, Indianapolis ranked #11 to St Louis #28 as the top 50 cities in the U.S. for the best opportunity and environment to conduct sports business. Sports after all is big business, would you not agree?
Looking at a google search (this was Newsweek) the highest ranking hospital in Indy was the Indiana University Medical center - as 150th. Barnes was ranked 33rd.
I realize you're not familiar with the region but Avon and Carmel are part of Indy's metro area. With that said, IU has several hospitals. Indiana University Health West (Avon) is 70th. Indiana University Health North (Carmel) is 89th. St Louis has a couple of hospitals that are ranked higher than Indy ... Barnes (36) and Mercy (50).
If my math is right, St. Louis has a GDP that is 24.5 trillion dollars higher than Indy.
St. Louis also has a metro population that is 30 percent higher. St Louis population is closer to that of Baltimore yet Baltimore's GDP is roughly $35.4 billion higher.
Indy Airport is a FedEx cargo hub, driving the aircraft movement, and likely driving the economic impact up. STL also has more commercial destinations than Indy, and more active gates. I am not dissing Indy at all. In fact, I was trying to add factual data to a discussion that was had between two other posters as some support for what one person MIGHT have meant. For passengers (not cargo, which is what residents would most likely use), STL is busier as I see it.
Anyone who has been to both airports will attest that STL is much busier. Period, not debatable.
Yet Indy is the more financially sound of the two airports. Period. Not debatable. The point is busier does equate to being better. Not a diss just a fact.
Yet Indy is the more financially sound of the two airports. Period. Not debatable. The point is busier does equate to being better. Not a diss just a fact.
LOL.
Indianapolis Airport (IATA: IND, ICAO: KIND), also known as Indianapolis International Airport, is a medium sized airport in United States. It is an international airport and serves the area of Midwest, United States. Indianapolis Airport has non-stop passenger flights scheduled to 46 destinations in 2 countries.
St. Louis Airport (IATA: STL, ICAO: KSTL), also known as Lambert-Saint Louis International Airport, is a large airport in United States. It is an international airport and serves the area of Midwest, United States. St. Louis Airport has non-stop passenger flights scheduled to 74 destinations in 6 countries.
Indianapolis Airport (IATA: IND, ICAO: KIND), also known as Indianapolis International Airport, is a medium sized airport in United States. It is an international airport and serves the area of Midwest, United States. Indianapolis Airport has non-stop passenger flights scheduled to 46 destinations in 2 countries.
St. Louis Airport (IATA: STL, ICAO: KSTL), also known as Lambert-Saint Louis International Airport, is a large airport in United States. It is an international airport and serves the area of Midwest, United States. St. Louis Airport has non-stop passenger flights scheduled to 74 destinations in 6 countries.
Answering this question is a no-brainier. I've lived in three of these cities and in my opinion, here are the rankings:
1. St. Louis. Easily first.
2. Kansas City. A respectable second.
3. Indianapolis. A more distant third.
4. Omaha. A great city in its own right, but out of its league here.
I am not slamming Omaha. I lived there and can tell you it is a very modern, progressive, liveable, up and coming city. Nearly everyone I know who visits from the coasts is always surprised by its size and feel. However, that said, I think it is a bit unfair to put it up against the bigger boys. I would have put it in a different category, say, with Wichita, Tulsa and Des Moines. It could easily come out on top in that contest.
Of the other cities, St. Louis has a larger, more urbanized population, a richer history as a major American city and is more dynamic in many ways. That doesn't take away from what the other cities have to offer, it is just the way they stack up. By the way, I love Kansas City and would be very happy living there. K.C. folks have plenty to be proud about. However, As a larger metro area, St. Louis just has more to offer.
By the way, I feel the true measure of a city's size is its MSA. Many of America's major cities are hemmed in by their suburbs and the bulk of their populations live in the metro area, not the city proper. If you took each city's population in the city limits as the measure, then a smaller city like Omaha would rank as much bigger than it really is. Omaha proper has more people than STL, KC, and other much larger urban areas. As it is, the STL MSA is one of the top 20 in America. It is the 21st biggest media market, and was 18th just a few years ago, until a couple of other metros in the faster growing sunbelt leap-frogged it.
I'm surprised that this more-than-decade-old thread didn't cross my radar screen until now.
I would agree that Omaha — "Kansas City's little brother" (the two cities shared an NBA franchise for a few seasons in the mid-1970s, and both had TV stations owned by Meredith Corporation) — doesn't really belong in this category; if you wanted a fourth city to include in this comparison, Columbus, Ohio, would have been my first choice. West of KC, you don't run into a city of this size until you hit Denver to the west or Oklahoma City to the southwest, and — despite Denver calling itself "the Queen City of the Plains" and OKC having a suburb called Midwest City, neither of those cities are in the Midwest.
I would pretty much agree with MidwestMark's ranking of the four, but as a native Kansas Citian, I will, of course, quibble at the margins.
Despite its larger size and longer history, I would say that StL and KC are closer to each other now in several respects than they were a decade ago. (Of course we should be using metro populations as the comparison; St. Louis' city fathers unknowingly shot themselves in the foot regarding its future with the 1876 "Great Divorce" from St. Louis County.*) I've spent some time in St. Louis (my mother lived there, in a lovely neighborhood of substantial brick homes that straddled the St. Louis-University City border just north of the Washington University campus, for a few years in the mid-1980s), and while it has some attributes and attractions (the Arch, the Missouri Botanical Garden, its children's museum...) that are unique in the state and world-class (especially the first two I mentioned), KC just about matches it (I'd rank the Nelson-Atkins a notch above the St. Louis Museum of Art, for instance; it is great, however, that residents of both cities can see the art in their respective museums for free, something not common in the museums to their east. Then there's the National World War I Museum and Memorial and the Harry S Truman Library and Museum in next-door Independence. Oh, and I forgot the Country Club Plaza, the nation's first planned shopping center).
It also struck me that St. Louis' nightlife and entertainment districts (Central West End, Grand Center, Delmar Loop) were a little quieter than Kansas City's (Westport, Power & Light District, Crossroads Arts District).
The relationship among the three peers somewhat resembles that among Pennsylvania's two large cities and (pick your city in Ohio here, but if we're going to stick to I-70, it should be Columbus). The two in the same state are (somewhat) friendly rivals — "somewhat" because I remember reading St. Louis Globe-Democrat (there, that dates me) editorials fretting over KC's rise in some area or other (e.g., our now-replaced airport, which seemed ahead of its time when it opened in 1973) and Kansas City Star articles gloating over the city's having overtaken St. Louis as Missouri's most populous. But each at least acknowledges the other's presence in Missouri; in Pennsylvania, it sometimes seems as though Philadelphia and Pittsburgh act as though the city at the other end of the state doesn't exist.
As for the third city: What's that? It's a place you pass through headed (west, east) on I-70 from the Midwest to the East Coast. (In the case of Indy, I have two friends who sort of bracket the range of opinoins about the city; one is a journalist whose career began at The Indianapolis Star and remembers it fondly and the other was a fellow I knew who referred to his hometown as "Indianoplace." Kansas Citians may feel a twinge of anger at Indy for having swiped the NCAA, founded in KC in 1906 and based there until Indy lured it eastward.)
A few more things:
Kansas Citians, or at least those expats I have met in the Northeast, are passionate in their love for their hometown, even though none of them (including me) is likely ever to live there again. And that passion runs deeper and is expressed more openly than any fondness I've seen for any other hometown. A friend of mine who grew up in the Philadelphia area agrees — and adds that the only people he has met who are as fanatical about their hometown are Philadelphians.
I refer to St. Louis as "the last great city of the East" and Kansas City as "the first great city of the West." And in terms of their personality, appearance and character, I think this should be easy to pick up on a visit to either.
Just about everyone I've met who has visited both has told me they liked Kansas City better. Now, they may be saying that just to humor me, but somehow, I doubt it, for I'm not unwilling to ding my hometown where it deserves it. Two areas where it deserves it are sprawl and transportation. KC, I would say, is probably a better poster child for sprawl than (more densely populated) Los Angeles is, and it has more freeway lane-miles per capita than any other city (=metro) in the US. And that brings us to transportation. While both St. Louis and Kansas City rank at (KC) or near (StL) the bottom when it comes to the level of traffic congestion among 2-million-plus metros in North America, St. Louis has better public transportation by far. St. Louis MetroLink is one of those rare cases where a city had an underused railroad ROW along which it could run a transit line but that ROW actually served places people wanted to go. And it included a tunnel under the downtown that gave it a downtown subway. Thus St. Louis was able to build high-quality rapid transit on the cheap. Meanwhile, despite being free to ride, KC's mass transit routes (the Main Street streetcar and one BRT line notable exceptions) run infrequently and don't cover the area as well as St. Louis' do. Car-free living is therefore a little easier to achieve in St. Louis than in Kansas City, one of the loveliest cities in the country but a drive-everywhere place.
*Pre-annexation Kansas City, MO, and today's City of St. Louis had just about the same amount of land within their borders: 61 square miles in KC's case, 66 in St. Louis'. Were KC to remain the 61-square-mile city it was when it began its nearly 40-year annexation spree in 1946, we would be talking of a city that had lost about half its peak population (which would have been 456,622, the figure it had on the centennial of its incorporation in 1950) just as St. Louis had declined since then. I would guess that that Kansas City would have a population somewhere around 250,000 and still would have been Missouri's second-most populous. As it is, about half of the land in Kansas City north of the Missouri River remains in corn and soybeans today.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 12-30-2023 at 06:03 AM..
Let me also say something about Omaha (where my mother was born), also backing MidwestMark up:
I say all the time that my hometown of Kansas City punches above its weight. Perhaps one reason the OP included Omaha in this quartet is because Nebraska's metropolis punches way above its weight. As MidwestMark said, were Omaha put in a bucket with the other Midwest cities in its weight class (Wichita, Des Moines, Dayton — Tulsa, like OKC, is not actually in the Midwest but is in Omaha's weight class as OKC is in KC's), it would rank at the top, with Des Moines second, Dayton third and Wichita fourth. (Tulsa would come in tied with Des Moines.)
Yet Indy is the more financially sound of the two airports. Period. Not debatable. The point is busier does equate to being better. Not a diss just a fact.
Because residents who use the airport to travel really care about cargo over non stop destinations.
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