Update 04/17/2020
Since this article was first published the roads in Kirkwood Park have been closed to vehicular traffic which is a huge win! The fight goes on in trying to get beg buttons turned off as well as in getting some streets in Downtown Kirkwood opened to foot traffic. It appears that Trailnet has taken up the open-streets banner and are looking for your input on which local governments and streets most need their advocacy. You can help guide them in Kirkwood’s direction here.
Previous Story 03/22/2020
I’m tired of coronavirus content; I can only imagine other people are tired of it too. And yet, with a couple of my favorite hobbies, sports and politics, having ground largely to a halt, there isn’t really much else to talk about. What else there is to talk about feels largely irrelevant and out of touch given the stakes of the current moment. I’ve similarly been wrestling with the relevance of this website during such a time. The justification I’ve settled on is simply this: people deserve to get to think about things other than this virus. That it is important for all of our mental health that we get to do so. So maybe these posts can help pass the time, to distract you from the six inches in front of your face for a couple minutes. But before we disregard those six inches, let’s address them and what they have to do with walkability, head on. (Please note: I reserve the right to address what Kirkwood can do on the economic front of this virus at a later date. Content machine go: brrrrr!)
The Problem
Today, Monday March 23, as I am sure many of you are aware, is the first day of St. Louis City and County’s stay at home order. People are allowed to leave their house for essential errands and for outdoor physical activity (with exercise and mental health being the primary considerations of the latter exception). If tons of people are stuck at home both without access to local gyms or much else to do in general, it serves to reason that our sidewalks will see much higher levels of use in the coming weeks than they typically would. Which is great! I’d typically be psyched about more pedestrians. The problem is sidewalks are typically four feet wide while current CDC guidelines call for us to maintain six feet of space between people to avoid contraction. On top of these spacing issues, walking in Kirkwood is made even more dangerous by our installation of “beg buttons” at crosswalks. Beg buttons are the buttons that must be pushed before the cross signal is given. Unless people are wearing gloves, which is likely very few, upwards of a hundred people probably touch many of these buttons daily. Despite being textbook examples of “high touch surfaces” there is a zero percent chance they are ever disinfected. Mix in the previously mentioned much higher volumes of foot traffic and all of a sudden pedestrian activities start to sound sketch.
Solutions
Beg Buttons
Let’s start with beg buttons because the solution to the problem they pose is super easy: just turn them off! All you do is go into the programming for traffic lights and switch the walk signal from activating when pushed to activating as part of the regular cycle just as most lights switch from green to yellow to red and back again irregardless of whether cars or there or not. This is best practice for walkability even when global pandemics aren’t raging; it’s double-best practice now. It such an easy thing to do, especially for high volume crosswalks downtown and those connecting pedestrians to Kirkwood Park.
Downtown
Numerous major cities have taken steps to close many of their streets to vehicular traffic so that pedestrians have more room to spread out. In addition to disabling their beg buttons, Calgary closed some roads as well. And while New York has way too many pedestrians to ever have beg buttons, they too have a goal of having at least one closed street within four blocks of any residence. The most obvious place to implement such a program in Kirkwood would be on Argonne and Kirkwood Road itself in the heart of downtown. Not only is this the most densely populated area of Kirkwood, but it is also the part of Kirkwood where residents are most likely to live in apartment and condo complexes and thus lack private outdoor spaces (read: yards) of their own. By closing these two particular streets, we also lose access to very little as all access to residential parking (i.e. Plaza Station parking garages) is maintained via side streets. Because of Kirkwood’s lack of residential alleys, other streets would be much more difficult to close to traffic. Because trips to grocery stores and pharmacies still must be accommodated, residents still need to be able to drive cars to and from their houses. One of the only residential streets with alley access (and thus a much more limited need for local vehicular traffic on the street itself) is the western stretch of Argonne. West Argonne also just so happens to connect Downtown Kirkwood to Kirkwood Park fairly directly. Which brings us to…
The Park
In a since deleted (more likely I just can’t find it) facebook post a woman complained that the path around Walker Lake had already begun to grow too overcrowded to be safe. That woman went on to call for walks around the lake to be limited to a single direction (alternating by day) so that the close proximity caused passing by one another could be avoided. While I guess that could be considered, I think the more plausible solution is to simply increase the capacity of the parks paths. The most accessible method of achieving this higher capacity is likely one that I have suggested before in a post about Kirkwood Park: to simply close the streets that run through the park to vehicular traffic. These three streets, Rifle Range Dr, Amphitheater Dr and West Monroe, spottily used even during normal business/traffic hours, are likely even more sparingly used by cars now.
Legacy
Maybe this works well while the stay-at-home order is in effect and happens to be a bright spot during a dark couple of months. Perhaps, if it is enough of a bright spot we decide to keep the street closures for a few Sundays a month or maybe the Kirkwood Park street closures become permanent. Or maybe it works well for a month or two and we never see or hear from the idea again. But if there was ever a time to give it a shot, a time where we didn’t have a whole lot to lose or a whole lot for people to complain about, this would be it. So let’s let ‘er rip