Argonne Deserves a Bike Lane

At tonight’s meeting, Kirkwood City Council will approve a grant application to overhaul Downtown Kirkwood’s most iconic street. If East-West Gateway approves the city’s STP grant application, the federal government would foot $2,089,600 —80%— of the $2,612,000 of the total estimated cost to redesign and repave Argonne between Geyer and Taylor, with the City covering the remaining 20% of the costs.

Included in the project’s proposed scope is a raised intersection at Argonne and Taylor, mid-block crosswalks with pedestrian cross beacons on either side of Kirkwood Road, wider five-foot sidewalks down the full length of the street, and a new covered bike rack/bike repair facility at the Farmer’s Market, the future trailhead for the Grant’s Trail extension to Downtown Kirkwood. These improvements all sound great to me, but the city’s failure to include a bike lane within the plans, as is recommended by its own Pedestrian and Bicycle Plan, keeps it from being a true home run for the city.

Kirkwood’s Bike Infrastructure is Lacking

Over the past decade, the City of Kirkwood has emerged as a true regional leader in pedestrian infrastructure. Thanks to the council’s adoption of Vision Zero, the hard work of walkability advocates like the group Safer Streets for Kirkwood, and significant financial commitments on the part of the city, Kirkwood has amassed an impressive array of significant pedestrian upgrades:

• In 2018, West Woodbine was redesigned to include bike lanes, mid-block crosswalks, and lane width reductions as part of a Complete Streets pilot program
• Raised intersections were constructed at Monroe & Taylor and the Geyer/Peeke/Dougherty Ferry three-way intersection
• In 2023, the Council approved plans to initiate a road diet along North Kirkwood Road from Adams to Bodley. Those plans also call for a mid-block crossing in front of The James
• The city’s Director of Public Services has indicated that South Kirkwood Road could also be subject to a road diet mirroring the one planned for North Kirkwood Road
• More raised intersections at both Argonne and Jefferson were included in the plans for the upcoming Clay resurfacing project
• And, of course, the Grant’s Trail Extension to Downtown Kirkwood represents a massive investment in the city’s commitment to facilitating alternate modes of transportation

The city has been less successful, however, in its pursuit of bicycle and transit infrastructure. I’ve written about ways we could improve our transit infrastructure in the past, but today I want to focus on the cycling piece and look at the opportunity Argonne presents for taking a big step forward to building out bike network.

A Bike Boulevard in Waiting

The Argonne project is nearly the perfect candidate for bike infrastructure. It provides a direct connection between the Grant’s Trail extension at the one end and an important destination in the Community Center/Kirkwood Park at the other. It is also wide enough to host a bike lane without needing to eliminate on street parking or traffic lanes. This is obviously true on the two blocks that flank Kirkwood Road where Argonne’s substantial center median offers plenty of underutilized space, but it is also true further West. Here’s a mock-up I made using the street’s existing dimensions:

As you can see, by simply shrinking the care lanes down to 10ft (which, evidence suggests, improves street safety for all users), we create enough room to upgrade both sidewalks to 5ft as planned, maintain the existing on-street parking, and still have enough room left over for Kirkwood’s first-ever protected bike lane, separated from the rest of traffic via the parking lane.

Protecting a bike lane with a parking lane may seem a little strange if you’ve never seen it before, but it is becoming an increasingly common approach because 1) there’s not much better protection for bikers than a wall of steel parked cars and 2) cyclists don’t have to deal with cars driving through the bike lane in front of them either to park at the curb or to get from the curb to the traffic lane. A two foot buffer between the parking lane and the bike lane (as shown above) also prevents cyclists from getting “doored” by unaware passengers exiting the vehicle.

Now, a big part of the reason why we don’t have more protected bike lanes in Kirkwood is that they are largely incompatible with driveways. You can’t erect a barrier that effectively separates and protects cyclists from traffic but which also has a gap every thirty or so feet to accommodate cars pulling through the bike lane to get into and out of driveways. Luckily, West Argonne is one of the few streets that doesn’t actually have driveways every thirty feet.. Instead, it has a rare occurrence in Kirkwood: an alley. Thanks to that alley, the northern side of Argonne features just seven curb cuts on the three blocks between Geyer and Clay. At least two of those curb cuts (depicted by the red X’s in the image below are redundant since the houses they service already have alley access at the rear of the property.

Now, the South side of Argonne has a lot more curb cuts since those houses don’t have alley access, so you probably wouldn’t want to do a eastbound protected bike lane over there even if you had the room available (it would be tight). Instead, I think the long-term vision would probably involve routing eastbound traffic North on Geyer, East on Jefferson (taking advantage of the fact that homes on the South side of Jefferson share the same alley as the homes on the North side of Argonne and thus also have relatively few driveways), and then South on Harrison before tying back into Argonne itself:

What We’ll Probably Do Instead

Instead of taking advantage of the unique format of this portion of Kirkwood however, I’m worried we’ll go with the one-size-fits-all approach and slap some sharrows on the street and call it a day.

Sharrows (a mashup of the words “share” and “arrow), like the one on South Geyer pictured above, are meant to 1) alert drivers that they are to share the road with cyclists and 2) direct cyclists towards more established bike routes (Like the Grant’s Trail or a protected bike lane).

The only problem is that when you look at the data, these sharrows turn out to be not only not effective but actually actively harmful. A study from the University of Colorado Denver (go Lynx!), for example, found that sharrows in Chicago actually reduced safety as compared to streets with no cycling infrastructure markings whatsoever. Unfortunately, Kirkwood seems to absolutely loves them. Here’s a video I took on the recently repaved North Geyer last time I was home:

By my count I drive by nine separate sharrows in nineteen seconds. And that was just by the time I had started filming, they started showing up like that all the way back at Essex. That means there must be something like 32 separate sharrows on 0.7 mile-long stretch of road. A full day’s work just to make our roads less safe.

Why are these things so popular despite being counterproductive? I’ll hypothesize it’s at least partially because they allow politicians to point to them whenever they get asked what they’re doing to encourage bicycling in the city without being forced to commit any real resources to making it so.

Argonne presents a golden opportunity to take a different approach, to make Kirkwood’s streets safer, to connect the heart of the city to its flagship park, to amplify the impact of our substantial investment in Grant’s Trail, and for our Councilors and city staff to cement a lasting legacy. I hope they take it.

If you can write to the city clerk (aschelb@kirkwoodmo.org) or write the council members directly, or better yet, if you can show up to tonight’s meeting and encourage the Council to pursue a protected bike lane on Argonne in person during the public comment section (don’t forget to fill out a card), Kirkwood will be better for it.