Update: 9/13/2023 The diet is happening and the plan is to follow all the established best urbanist practice save for the fact that the lanes should be 10-ft wide rather than 12, but we fight on! Here's Council Member Gibbons with the update: At the work session last week, the Council reviewed new plans for… Continue reading Getting Over the Line: A Road Diet Update
Update 09/13/2023: At the work session last week, the Council reviewed new plans for narrowing Kirkwood Road from Adams to Bodley. Based on lessons learned from the demonstration project, the new plans call for 12-foot, single lanes going north and south and a 14-foot, center, turning lane. There will be no parallel parking on either side of Kirkwood Road.  The proposal includes 6-foot sidewalks… Continue reading Kirkwood Rd Needs a Diet
Noticeably absent from my series on attainable housing in Kirkwood was Transportation Oriented Development (TOD). Transportation Oriented Development is the idea that it makes the most sense to add housing around places that have access to public transit. That way you can reap the benefits of additional housing without absorbing as much of the costs… Continue reading Kirkwood TOD: Cutting the Gordian Knot
Kirkwood has finally settled on a route to extend Grant's Trail to the city's downtown core. To sum it up, I think the city has done a really nice job with the whole process. The route is the right amount of direct, enjoyable, flat, and practical (by which I mean: I think the city and… Continue reading Grant’s Trail and Our Industrial Wasteland
A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed some of the insights that could be gleaned from the failed Proposition 1 vote. This week, I want to offer some ideas to fill the funding hole Prop 1 left. As I said then, Kirkwood still has potholes to fill, bike lanes to stripe, and trails to construct.… Continue reading Leverage The Lots, Balance the Books
Tomorrow Kirkwood will hold an election that has not garnered much interest. But you should vote if you can. Because tomorrow you have a chance to vote to make Kirkwood better. I speak, of course of Prop 1. Prop 1 would institute a one-cent sales tax in a city-wide transportation development district (TDD) for 40… Continue reading Yes on Prop 1: A Brief Overview
Update: 10/02/2022 Okay, after a year of consideration, a couple of updates on this. I still think the Adams/Lockwood corridor is ripe for exploitation, but it probably makes more sense if conceived of as primarily a transit route rather than a multi-use path (although these uses are complimentary, and if we could pursue both simultaneously,… Continue reading Frisco Trail: The Great Collaboration
"Kirkwood is a train town" is a phrase often uttered. It is said in the same way that some places are called hockey towns or factory towns. And yet I would imagine that those things are much more regularly thought about, more central to life there, than trains have been to Kirkwood in a very… Continue reading The Case for Commuter Rail
People love streets. If a candidate could somehow ensure that they'd fix all the streets in Kirkwood, they could run on any platform they desired, build a fourteen story tall McDonalds on every corner say, and win the election going away. I, however, do not very much care about streets at all. At least with… Continue reading Bike Lanes & Street Re-Paves
Last Thursday I published a story highlighting some of the items on that night's City Council agenda. One of the items I left out of that story is likely to be the most exciting. It wasn't an oversight, I just hadn't gathered all the info yet. But now I have so let's dig in to… Continue reading West Essex.
