Frisco Trail: The Great Collaboration

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, that’d be even better).

I think that prioritizing the bus route is likely a bigger value-add for residents of Kirkwood here. This part of Kirkwood is dense and looks like it’s going to be getting even denser, subjecting our streets to greater levels of traffic stress as it does. Reducing car use in this portion of town will need to become a priority sooner or later and busses can simply take more people more places faster than a mixed-use path can.

Second, this route aligns remarkably well with the blue line of the MetroLink. The oft-maligned MetroLink is a fairly high-quality product, allowing St. Louis to significantly out-perform the rail transit of any of our peer cities. Missing out on directly connecting Kirkwood to this asset via transit by using the space for a recreational path would carry a significant opportunity cost both for our town and the entire MetroLink system.

Finally, the stretch of Lockwood East of Berry Rd is already home to the #56 bus route, which originates at Meramec Community College. That means that any transit upgrades here would benefit users of both routes.

One more note: In the story below I have a rendering of my preferred street design. That mock-up shows the Lockwood center median serving as a bus loading platform. That’s nice in theory —center loading platforms are considered best practice if you have enough room and money to build dedicate lanes— but we do not have enough room or money for all that, and that means that the fact that our busses have doors on the right side, not the left is limiting here. Instead, we should make the right-hand lane in each direction a bus/bike lane and use the space gained to add sidewalks to the stretches of Lockwood where they are missing.

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Original Story: 10/05/2021

After years of discussion, Kirkwood is in the process of figuring out the details of how exactly to connect Grant’s Trail to downtown. While there is significant work left to be done to ensure that project fulfills its potential (I’m most especially interested in ensuring that the extension is routed through the southeastern section of Kirkwood that is currently zoned for light industrial so that we can use it as a catalyst to re-zone it for residential use), I think it’s important to look ahead at what might be next too. And in my mind what comes next is pretty clear: Kirkwood needs to create the Frisco Trail.

The Idea

What’s the Frisco Trail you ask? Well, for starters, I made it up. But beyond that, the idea is that Kirkwood and Webster should find a way to create multi-modal connections between their downtowns so that people can easily move in between the two without needing to drive. I’ve presented the idea of creating a shuttle bus route between the two in the past, but if anything, that vision was too small (or at the very least probably needs to be operated by Metro rather than as a standalone entity). So why expand the vision to more than just a bus route? Well, first of all, Great-Rivers Greenway and Kirkwood walkability advocates have both proven they have the institutional capacity to make really big things happen. Second, upon further inspection, the route basically writes (and names) itself. So here’s the idea…

Why It Works

To understand why it’s such a no-brainer, it’s important to keep Great Rivers Greenway’s mission in mind. Their goal is not to create a bunch of individual recreational paths, but rather an interconnected network. So then you look at where they currently have trails (the River Des Peres and Gravois Greenways, aka Grant’s Trail, specifically) and then you draw lines between those Greenways and you essentially have the living embodiment of their vision. Now, sometimes it’s hard to actually realize these connections —you can’t just made a 10 foot wide path through people’s backyards after all— but this isn’t one of those times.

Whether by incredible long-term planning from Great Rivers or happenstance, Lockwood, the road that most directly connects the two existing, immensely popular Greenways has a 20-foot wide grassy median running through the middle of it. Route the path along that median, block off most of its cut-throughs, and you’re basically in business.

The lone exception to the space already existing to create the path is the western-most tenth of a mile where Lockwood turns into Adams for the final run into Downtown Kirkwood. Here you’d likely just eliminate the on-street parking lanes, shift the driving lanes over, and put a separated trail in the roughly 20 feet of room you’ve gained.

So the route is easy, but the question is, is it useful?

More Than a Rollerblade Path

The path I’m proposing would be 2.7 miles long and according to Google Maps would take 56 minutes to walk and 16 minutes to bike. It currently takes 7 minutes to drive but if we start eliminating lanes of traffic, that’s going to rise a little bit. While a 16 minute bike-ride is absolutely workable from a connection stand-point (you could ride your bike 16 minutes to and from work every day quite easily), 56 minutes is simply too long of a walk for many people to think of it as a useful transit option.

In order to transform it into one, you would need regular bus service and in order to get people to ride the more efficient buses, you would have to give them a dedicated bus lane (one personal cars aren’t allowed to drive in ). This triggers a sort of feedback loop: because buses don’t face traffic in a dedicated bus lane, they get more efficient and more people ride them and because cars have fewer lanes to drive in, driving yourself becomes slightly less efficient and more people choose the bus. Now this only works if the bus drops you off close enough to where you live that you can reasonably walk to the stop (park and ride is basically a myth). So in order to have enough people live close enough to the bus stop that they can walk, and in order to have enough bus riders to warrant a dedicated bus lane, you need density around those stops. Which brings us back to housing.

And on the housing front, things are also aligned. That’s because the two endpoints of the proposed path, western Downtown Webster and northern downtown Kirkwood, are both staring down historic levels of infill. In Webster, the city council will host a public hearing tonight on plans to add approximately 700 units of new housing right at our proposed eastern terminus. In Kirkwood, the city has already approved 152 new units just one block North of our proposed western terminus.

This housing is incredibly important in ensuring Kirkwood and Webster do not become elitist enclaves à la Ladue and I full heartedly endorse it. (In fact, I think much more is needed, especially on the Kirkwood side of things where the large parking lots in the northern portion of Downtown lend themselves to adding more infill projects like The James). But it also is true that adding these residents will increase traffic. We have to do everything we can to ensure that as much of that traffic as possible is via bike and public transportation rather than personal vehicles. Lucky for us, that feedback loop exists: more housing means more demand for cycling infrastructure and public transit, more viable public transit and cycling infrastructure means more capacity for housing.

Grant’s Trail First

But first thing is first: Kirkwood needs to connect Grant’s Trail to Downtown. Once we settle on an exact route (again, hopefully one that runs through those industrial properties that would probably be just as well off in Fenton as they would be in Kirkwood), we should shift our focus on connecting the River Des Peres Greenway to northern downtown. Connecting the two paths via a Downtown Kirkwood path is more difficult (the land is more developed), but the thing is Downtown Kirkwood is already fairly walkable and maybe you don’t need an explicit path but rather just a good network of sidewalks and bike lanes. After all, the goal is to get people to and from Downtown Kirkwood efficiently, not to just help them pass through it as they train for their marathon.

How To Get It Done

Of course once you start talking public transit and dedicated bus lanes, you’re talking a serious, truly transformative project and truly transformative transit projects in St. Louis mean that you’re going to have to get Metro and likely St. Louis County Council involved. And they should be, because this thing has potential.

The project would also require the participation of Kirkwood, Glendale, and Webster as it runs through all three. So there are lots of moving parts to say the least, but here it would be incredibly helpful for a strong St. Louis County to step in, cut though some of the bureaucracy, and make sure this gets done.