On February 7th, the City of Kirkwood submitted an STP (Surface Transportation Program) grant application to East-West Gateway for the overhaul of Argonne Drive from Taylor in the East to Geyer in the West. Last week, the application itself became publicly available, and after reviewing the plans, I’m pleasantly surprised by what the city staff came up with. Let’s take a quick look at the plans (you can download a full copy of our application here) and then examine a couple of the tweaks I would make to transform it into a true home run.
The Plan
The first thing to notice is the inclusion of a bike lane on the northern side of Argonne, running from Geyer to Clay. Both sides of the street will also get upgraded 5ft-wide sidewalks.
I argued a couple of weeks back that the plan should include a parking-protected bike lane on the northern side of the street. My belief at the time was that the city would prioritize maintaining the existing on-street parking that lines both sides of the street, so using the parking lane to protect the bike lane (a common setup elsewhere, but a relative oddity in St. Louis) was the only way to make both potentially viable, and even then, the plan would’ve required an expensive widening of the road bad. That belief now seems to have been misguided as the new plans call for ditching the curbside parking on the north side of the street in favor of an unprotected 5-foot-wide eastbound bike lane. It’s still worth upgrading the bike lane to a protected one, but that’s a minor tweak, as I’ll discuss a little further down.
On the central stretch of Argonne that runs through Downtown Kirkwood from Clay to Taylor, the interventions are even more transformative. The application calls for three raised mid-block crossings —one at Sugar Shack, one at Reclaim Restore (the old Bug Store), and one on East Argonne at the Farmer’s Market, each featuring curb bump-outs— an expansion of the central median that runs down the length of the street and a hefty new curb bump-out across Argonne from the Farmer’s Market. The intersection of Taylor and Argonne would also be raised, mirroring the raised intersection that will soon be coming to Clay and Argonne as part of a separately funded project.
These interventions will undoubtedly help slow traffic and transform Argonne, Downtown’s primary East-West corridor, from a car-dominated street into a primarily pedestrian-oriented domain. Still, there are a couple easy tweaks I would like to make before declaring the project (again, should it be chosen) a smashing success.
Let’s Make It a Home Run
The first concern I have concerns the design of the two outside mid-block crossings that front Sugar Shack and the Farmer’s Market. Pedestrians tend to walk in the straightest, shortest line between two points, so by including a slight hitch in the crossing, I worry that the pedestrians will forgo the use of the crosswalk itself after they’ve reached the median and continue straight across. Surely the hitch has been included at the two crossings for some reason, perhaps to accommodate more parking spaces, but I hope Kirkwood weighs whatever benefit it confers against its non-zero cost.
Secondly, I really hope we explore upgrading the planned bike lane into a protected bike lane. Separating bikers from cars substantially increases the size of the demographic that would feel comfortable utilizing such a facility. While lots of avid cyclists or even able-bodied adults might feel more than comfortable traversing an unprotected bike lane, a small improvement here would help expand the user base to younger children, older adults, and less experienced road cyclists. Additionally, including some kind of physical barrier between the bike lane and the traffic lane would help prevent cars from illegally parking in the bike lane.
The appeal of upgrading to a protected bike lane is further heightened by the fact that the implementation of such a plan would be relatively straightforward. First, there’s plenty of room. The current plans call for the 30-foot-wide road to be divided into a 5-foot bike lane, a 10-foot westbound traffic lane, and a 15-foot eastbound traffic lane.
As we know from our discussions of Kirkwood Road and Big Bend, established best practice calls for maximum lane widths of 10ft, so narrowing the eastbound lane, even to something I’d still consider too wide, like 12ft, would provide plenty of room to incorporate a barrier.
It seems that the wider eastbound lane is meant to accommodate cyclists via sharrows (the white bike stencils you’ll see painted on the street), but as I discussed in the previous piece on Argonne, sharrows are proven to not only be ineffective, but actively counter-productive, making streets less safe than no intervention at all. Unfortunately, the plan calls for this short stretch of street to include 20 such sharrows at a total cost of $5,200. By nixing this line item, we’d probably have enough money to fully fund the barrier.
And the protective barrier itself could be comprised of almost anything at all. The current council is very aesthetic-minded, so perhaps decorative planters would be the move, but even something like the short concrete sections that front parking spots or vertical plastic flex-posts placed in a two-foot wide painted buffer would do the trick. The only potential complication is ensuring that there is enough room in the buffer zone for residents to be able to place their trash bins on collection day, but that shouldn’t be much of an issue.
In short, though, this is a great project, and the city took a more forward-looking approach than I anticipated. Kudos to all involved! Now, let’s cross our t’s and dot our i’s and take this thing from triumph to homerun. Our next opportunity to influence this project and ensure that Kirkwood secures grant funding will come when East-West Gateway opens the public comment portion of its process. I’ll give you an update when the time comes.
The “hitch” in the mid-block crossings is there for safety reasons, to slow down pedestrians and encourage them to look both ways before crossing the next lane. It’s a common practice, look up “pedestrian chicane”.
Thanks, Jim. I have to say, a Google Images search of “pedestrian chicane” shows approximately zero examples of chicanes for pedestrians, just ones for bikes and cars. Which makes sense since pedestrians are traveling at a max of like 5mph. If that’s the actual reason, I think it does much more harm (incentivizing people not to use the crosswalk at all) than good.
Fascinating. Thanks for posting this. I think the bike lane idea is a useful addition to that stretch of road—it leaves to Kirkwood Park—but I wonder if the protected bike lane idea runs into the. Ari ours federal highway rules—I know this was an issue when Holmes between Kirkwood and Oakland was redone some years ago—we could have side walks on bot sides but no protected bike lane because of width restrictions.
second, thi doesn’t address one of the irksome things that makes Argonne miserable—the endless number of folks who wait for a parking space to open in front of Billy G’s/Four Hands at one end and the farmer’s market on the other. We need to figure out a way to get
folks to stop that tiresome practice. You might advocate getting rid of parking on that stretch, but I don’t think that’s realistic. Maybe better enforcement, meteors (!) or public shaming of perpetrators. I lucky enough to live a mile from that street, and I usually walk unless I’m getting something heavy from OK Hatchery. I know that’s not an option for most shoppers. But we need to mfigure out a way to get folks to stop waiting for the closest space. Same for that short parking stretch next to Dewey’s Pizza on Jefferson. Traffic there backs into the intersection with Kirkwood Road just because people are waiting for someone to leave a space.
Thanks, Mike! Hadn’t considered federal guidelines being the barrier, I’ll have to look into that. Completely with you on the scarce-parking-causing-backups issue. I’ve argued on several occasions that the only real way to solve this is to meter the parking and set the price so that there are always one or two parking spots available on every block. Fewer than that and you raise the price, more than one or two spots available and you lower it. An especially viable solution given the parking sensors Kirkwood has installed throughout Downtown: https://kirkwoodgadfly.com/how-to-solve-the-parking-problem-and-cut-taxes/
I cross Argonne at least twice per week walking from my condo to the Y and back. Argonne street downtown is the easiest street to cross mid-block now because of the median. It’s like crossing two narrow one-way streets with a pause in the middle. Walking North, I only have to look west to get to the median, not both ways. Then pause and look East to cross the other lane. It’s actually easier and less disruptive to all to cross mid-block rather than at the Clay or Taylor intersections. I was kind of hoping they would extend the grass medians at Clay and at Taylor into the corner crosswalks slightly so I could stop halfway across there also, like at Kirkwood Rd and Argonne. Since it doesn’t extend, all traffic both ways and all pedestrians have to negotiate eye contact and walk all the way across. I think the mid-block crosswalks are good if for no other reason they permit/encourage folks to cross mid-block safely even if they don’t follow the jogged lines religiously.
It’s a great point about extending the median to the intersection crosswalks, I’m definitely adding this to my list of tweaks in my next update. Thanks for the local knowledge, Gary! It’s the little things you only notice from living it every day!