Getting Over the Line: A Road Diet Update

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 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 on each side of the roadway.  Plans also detail an 8-foot space on the east side of Kirkwood Road to accommodate arriving and departing bus passengers and, possibly, future streetscaping.  We learned through the demonstration project  that the downtown stop lights are not well synchronized.  This is being addressed!  In addition, a crosswalk added between the James apartment building and the Alpine Shop will be synchronized with the rest of the traffic lights. 

Liz Gibbons newsletter excerpt, 9/13/2023

Update: 07/24/2023

Tomorrow (Tuesday, 7/25/2023) the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center will host the Public Open House for the N. Kirkwood Road improvements. Those improvements include:

• A lane diet that will reconfigure Kirkwood Road from its current format of two travel lanes in either direction down to one travel lane in either direction, a center left-hand turn lane, and an on-street parking lane on the eastern side of the street (The James/Alpine Shop side) between Adams and Bodley
• A mid-block crosswalk with pedestrian signal
• Sidewalk bump-outs at bus stops
• General “improvements at multiple crosswalks”

It will be interesting to see how significant those crosswalk improvements will be (it’s hard to tell via the blueprints, if you go to the Open House, please report back what they’re proposing in the comments below!) but in general, I think these changes constitute a massive step in the right direction for walkability in Kirkwood, and I’m really glad we seem to have gotten the marginal details right:

• The recent revision of the plan to include a center turn lane in lieu of a second parking lane (a suggestion I made in the original story below) is industry-wide best practice and I’m now incredibly optimistic that this project will actually reduce traffic as compared to the status quo, not increase it
• The curb bump outs at the bus stops are a big upgrade to transit reliability in Kirkwood (busses won’t get stuck trying to merge back into traffic after onboarding/off-boarding, reducing the chances of an accident and increasing performance speeds). . This will also over an excellent opportunity to place bus stops and perhaps even introducing platform boarding in the future

A lot of people have worked really hard to bring this to fruition (including a tremendous number of Webster-Kirkwood Times mailbag letters), so if you can, show up tomorrow, voice your support, check out the drawings, and help see this thing through; Kirkwood will be better because of it!

Earlier this month, we got word that Kirkwood City Council was considering a road diet on North Kirkwood Road that would see the route cut down to one traffic lane in either direction. Now, the published work session minutes from that meeting show that the council voted to allow staff to proceed with studying the concept by a 5-2 vote. The two opposing votes were members Mark Zimmer and Liz Gibbons. Once the plans are completed, a public hearing and final vote will follow.

Now, this is all obviously good news, but it also means we have more work ahead before we see this thing through. Most of that work will come in the form of offering comments in support of the project at the public hearing (and I’ll make sure to keep you informed when that time comes), but for now I think the best thing to do is to address some of the concerns that have been raised and see if we can build our pro-road diet coalition further still.

Addressing the Concerns:

We’re going to get to reader questions and concerns in the second half, but first, I want to address some of the doubts expressed by Council Member Gibbons in her email newsletter:

1. Traffic Will Grow

At this point, I am not convinced that reducing Kirkwood Road to two lanes between Adams and Bodley will be safer. First, unlike the 100 and 200 blocks of North Kirkwood Road, there are a number of businesses in this section that have large numbers of vehicles entering from and exiting to Kirkwood Road. Left turns in and out of these businesses concern me greatly, especially when you consider the high volume of traffic. No turning lane is included in the plan.

Now the first part of this strikes me as a little circular: North Kirkwood is auto-oriented due to our policies, so therefore we shouldn’t change our policies to make it less auto-oriented. The new plans for the Kirkwood Apartments and The James both start to roll back this dynamic in the neighborhood and make it more people oriented, with more businesses lining the sidewalks and fewer curb cuts along Kirkwood Road curb cuts. And as part of this plan, Kirkwood is going to look into reducing those curb cuts further still by seeing if they can convince Global Foods and Walgreens to share an entrance. As I’ve written about before, in the coming years, I expect more of the lots in the neighborhood to undergo similar transitions. Pretty soon, we could make it so this part of Downtown Kirkwood isn’t solely reliant on cars, but only if we try.

As the neighborhood becomes more people oriented and less car oriented, it makes sense to adjust our streets to make them more people oriented too since these things are complimentary. No one’s favorite part of Kirkwood is the stretch from Washington to Bodley, but lots of people’s favorite part of Kirkwood are the 100 and 200 blocks of North Kirkwood Rd. There’s a reason for that! We should take some of the lessons learned from the parts of Kirkwood that people really do love and apply them elsewhere, including here.

I do think that the turn lane question has merit. Everything I’ve read about street diets offers the simple heuristic that streets with an even number of lanes should always be reduced to the closest odd number of lanes, with the extra lane used as a center turn lane. That advice would take the existing 4-lane wide Kirkwood Road and knock it down to three lanes: one traffic lane in either direction and a center turn lane running down the middle, rather than the two traffic lanes and two parking lanes that are being proposed. Now, I’m willing to accept the parking lane version if the 48 parking spots are what gets this done because it’s better than the status quo, but if the lack of a turn lane is what’s holding people back from voting yes, I’d absolutely support the turn-lane iteration too.

Parking lanes are typically 7 feet wide, a center turn lane is typically 10 feet wide, so ditching two of the former for one of the latter would leave you with an extra 4 feet you could use to plant street trees, widen the sidewalks, or potentially add a bike lane (although good design typically requires they be at least 5 feet wide).

The thing is, I’m not sure that Gibbons would support the project if those parking lanes were replaced by a turn lane instead. She states that the project doesn’t include a turn lane, but not whether she would find a project that did but which required other concessions (less parking) any more acceptable. I wish both Gibbons and Zimmer would let us know what their priorities were, what their redlines were, and we could go from there and see if we could find a solution that worked for all parties.

2. Worse for Public Transit?

Gibbons email continued…

In addition, there are two Metro bus stops on the east side and one on the west side unloading and loading passengers on Kirkwood Rd.  There will be no area for the bus to turn in.  The plan also includes 48 parallel parking spaces and a crosswalk with a Pedestrian Hybrid Beacon like the one near Garden Lane and Kirkwood Road to stop traffic for pedestrians seeking to cross at Global Foods.

I’ll quickly note that in the second half of the paragraph Gibbons offers what is probably the single best argument for the lane reduction: Residents of The James crossing the street to get to Global Foods, one of Kirkwood’s most underrated gems and Downtown Kirkwood’s only grocer. Making the trip to the grocery store walkable is one of the most legitimately difficult to making a neighborhood car-optional, and for residents of the James’s 152 units, that’s what this would achieve.

Returning to concerns, Gibbons mentions that the Metro busses will temporarily block traffic when they stop to on-load and off-load passengers. Under the current arrangement, that traffic can simply merge left and go around the bus in the second travel lane, but in Gibbons’s telling of what’s to come, parked cars will line the curb leaving busses to stop in the middle of the lone traffic lane while traffic piles up behind them.

The traffic experts disagree though, stating in response to the concern that “Traffic interruptions due to bus stops are relatively short and their impacts dissipate quickly once the bus leaves.” Now that kind of just leaves us with he-said she-said, but if I were to guess whether the people who professionally estimate traffic effects or someone who doesn’t do that professionally had the better estimate of traffic effects, I think I’d take my chances with the former.

Now, there’s an old line that traffic consultants are paid to tell you whatever it is that you want to hear. I’ll grant that traffic consultants likely do have a conflict of interest in cases when developers hire them to show their project won’t add much traffic, but when they’ve been hired by a municipality to figure out what option is best for its citizens, it’s a lot harder to figure some kind of nefarious motivation the consultant would have to lie. In a case like that, the consultants’ whole reputation, their livelihoods, rely on them giving good advice. Otherwise someone else would come along, do a better job, and put them out of business. So on this question, I’m just taking the consultants word over Gibbons’.

But I also don’t think just considering the negative impacts that bus service might have on people who don’t take the bus is the right approach. A good cost-benefit analysis also requires us to consider the benefits the project might have on people who do take the bus. And on that question, the project looks likely to be an unmitigated success.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Metro supports the change because it would allow busses to on and off-load more efficiently. Busses would no longer have to pull over to the curb at stops and then attempt to re-merge into traffic after completing the stop which saves them time on the route (and decreases collisions). That, in turn, unlocks the virtuous cycle where busses operate with increased frequency and reliability which then in turn increases ridership, which then increases fare revenue which then can be reinvested in service quality which attracts even more riders and so on. For more on the virtuous cycle, check out this piece on the possibility Transit Oriented Development in Kirkwood.

2.5 Three Options for Bus Boarding

There is one wrinkle in the planning authorization granted by City Council that will greatly affect its impact on transit. Kirkwood’s planning staff was given the green light to explore a variation that would replace the parking lane at existing bus stops with some sort of bus loading area. Whether that variation is implemented and what it looks will determine whether the project is a small net positive for transit in Kirkwood, a big net positive to transit, or whether it snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and sets transit in Kirkwood back.

The issue is, I’m not quite sure exactly what the city has in mind when it says loading area. If it’s just removing parking from the 20 feet of the curb that comprise the bus stop, that’s a small but important improvement. Allowing pen access to the bus from the curb means people with strollers or wheelchairs aren’t forced to squeeze between the bumpers of two parked cars.

If loading area instead means that the bus would have to pull over to the curb as it did before the road diet, but then re-merge into the lone travel lane, then that’s a really bad idea. It takes away all the advantages of the road diet for transit and then goes a step further and makes it even worse than existing conditions by making busses wait for an opening.

The best possible meaning of a bus loading area would actually be the construction of a bus loading platform looking something like this:

This sort of platform would remove parking and replace it with an extended sidewalk at the bus stop bring riders right up to a new curb. A key thing to notice about the picture above is that the loading platform is raised higher than the sidewalk. This allows for much easier on-boarding and off-boarding, especially for the elderly or those with bags (perhaps Global Foods Grocery Bags!) This quicker loading allows busses to resume their routes more quickly, which brings us back to that virtuous cycle we just talked about. Now this might seem insignificant, but if you do it all across the network, these things really start to add up, so while we’re here, we might as well do it.

Even more importantly, building a relatively inexpensive bus loading platform (really it’s just a couple of extra inches of concrete), means that people get on and off the bus faster, which means buses are stopping traffic for a much shorter period of time. That means that not only do transit users win, but car users do too, and badah bing badah boom, we’ve made everyone’s life easier because we took a little bit of time to do things right.

To state it even clearer, getting the transit portion of the project right means that fewer people will use cars in the first place so any extra traffic that results from the lane diet will at least partially be offset by higher rates of transit use.

3. Traffic Will be Worse

Secondly, as traffic backs up I am concerned that drivers will look for relief by going to Clay and Taylor, or even Harrison, Fillmore and Woodlawn to avoid the congestion on Kirkwood Road, adding to traffic volumes on those roads and creating heightened risks in these residential neighborhoods.

I believe all of this will cause long delays, frustrate drivers, and increase the potential for accidents.

     I very much support a walkable and bikeable Kirkwood, with safe streets for everyone. It is one of the reasons I ran for office. But I am concerned that this proposal, in the name of making things safer, will make them worse.

There’s a lot in here so I’m going to try and address them one at a time. First, because Clay, Taylor, Fillmore, and Woodlawn all have several stop signs, I don’t think there’s any world in which they offer a faster route through Kirkwood than signalized Kirkwood Road. The traffic consultants again agree, saying they expect relatively few people to take these alternate routes.

Now, if there’s concern that drivers will speed or run stop signs to make up for lost time (out of frustration, as Gibbons puts it), then those things are still illegal! They should be ticketed until they stop! Just because driving slower is frustrating to you doesn’t mean you get a pass to break the law.

Even if you ignore the fact that those roads have stop signs, and I’m wrong and traffic somehow really does get substantially heavier and faster on side streets, and we don’t enforce our rules at all, I still think the project would be a net positive. If we look at the block of Taylor running from Washington to Bodley (the backside of The James’s block), for example, there are, by my count, 18 homes. The Kirkwood Road side of that same block will have 152 homes.

If we assume that Taylor is about to get as dangerous as Kirkwood road (an assumption that is highly unlikely and requires substantial numbers of people breaking the law with no repercussions!) then there are still 134 reasons to take that deal! But I think the most likely outcome is that Taylor gets a little bit busier and Kirkwood Road gets a LOT safer, which shifts the balance even more in favor of making the change. This is as close to a real life Trolley Problem as I’ve ever seen except, for the people on Taylor, instead of death, the most likely outcome is just like five more cars driving down their street a day and them not even noticing.

Okay, now to the reader / commenter questions…

4. Why Aren’t We Planning Better?

A reader asked me (I think in bad faith, but nonetheless) how I would rate Kirkwood’s wholistic planning given that we had approved a bunch of apartments in an area that I was now describing as “dangerous for pedestrians and in urgent need of solutions.”

While I think we’re going to get the changes done well before we move anyone into The James or Kirkwood Apartments, I do think the idea of making our land use and transportation planning decisions together has real merit. One of the best ways I can think of to better integrate these processes would be to add a transportation planner to Kirkwood’s planning department.

Kirkwood’s current three-person planning department has the following organizational structure:

1. Planner I, Christie Voelker, heads single-family residential development
2. Planner II, Amy Lowry, heads commercial development and
3. Director of Planning & Development Services, Jonathan Rachie, heads long-range planning and economic development

I’m sure transportation planning gets done under this regime, but it’s probably not as efficient as it could be. Having a planner specifically charged with applying for competitive STP grants, developing a cohesive and effective transportation policy, and adjusting that policy in lockstep with developments and re-zonings would be a significant step forward, both in terms of accountability and in terms of building state capacity.

Now, Kirkwood has a pretty big budget so we couple probably move the numbers around and make it work, but in order to avoid being too hand-wavy about the whole thing, here’s how I’d pay for adding another planner:

1. Hiring a transportation planner in charge of grant writing would allow us to reduce our budget for consulting firms like Horner & Shifrin that currently write our proposals, hopefully with better success (our STP grant proposal for the Grant’s Trail Extension didn’t get score high enough to be selected)
2. We should implement paid-parking and earmark some of those funds to the transportation planner’s salary

(As a rule, paid parking revenue should be used to improve other modes of transit so that you’re not simply taxing people who visit downtown and the businesses they support but instead simply encouraging people to shift modes of transportation. Hiring a transportation planner would seem to fit well within that framework.)

Is that enough to pay for a full-time planner? Probably not in the short run. But in the long run, when you factor in the additional grant money that a full-time transportation planner could be expected to bring in, I think the return on investment would be well worth it.

5. Why Not South Kirkwood Road?

Tons and tons of people wanted to know why the proposed changes are focused exclusively on North Kirkwood Road rather than also reducing the number of lanes on South Kirkwood. And the case for South Kirkwood is a strong one, given that the built environment is already pedestrian oriented there.

Before we built Kirkwood Plaza in 2004, the two blocks South of the tracks looked like the portion of Kirkwood Road North of Washington: big box stores fronted by large surface parking lots. But now the situation on the ground has changed. We built the Kirkwood Station apartment complex and Downtown Kirkwood now undeniably stretches all the way South to at least Monroe. That two block extension of Dowtown (from Argonne to Monroe), now feature just two curb cuts (one to an alley, another to what amounts to a single-vehicle driveway for Junction Orthodontics) and no surface parking lots. They’re now bonafide urban spaces and it’s time to adjust our transportation policy to bring Kirkwood Road in alignment with that new reality.

And some of this South Kirkwood lane diet has already been enacted. The current arrangement already features a parking lane on the western side of the street between Madison to just past Monroe, terminating in front of Grapevine Wines.

That creates a situation that I think arguably makes the traffic worse than it would be if Kirkwood Road was just one lane in either direction all the way through. If you think about what traffic actually is, it’s cars slowing down. Those cars slow down for reasons. Most often they slow down to exit from a highway, or to turn, or to merge lanes. The current situation, where travel lanes are constantly turning into parking lanes forcing traffic to merge as their lanes terminate, creates a situation where cars have to slow down a lot, to get over, to let other cars in, or to avoid accidents from other cars doing those things.

It seems wise, then, to extend that parking lane (or, ideally, a bus-bike lane) past City Hall and the train station, and to match it on the eastern side of street fronting both Station Plaza and the large, much maligned mixed-use building just to its South. Then, if you were getting really ambitious, you could extend the lane all the way to the Kirkwood Cinema lofts, the southern most pedestrian-oriented (read: built to the sidewalk) building in Downtown Kirkwood.

I think this would be a really effective way to tackle a lot of different problems.

First, the Kirkwood Station building that is not fronted by the Plaza (the building at the left of the picture below) has, for a variety of reasons, struggled to draw the foot traffic that I think both the city and the developer envisioned when they embarked on the project, leading to a revolving door of commercial tenets. A road diet on South Kirkwood would make this a much more enjoyable space to linger in by slowing traffic and pushing it further from the sidewalk. This would also be the perfect time to add street trees to the stretch (in place of the potted bushes that currently dot the sidewalk), further humanizing the space.

Taming South Kirkwood Road could also be the key to saving the Grant’s Trail Extension project. That project has stalled after the grant proposal we submitted to East-West Gateway (EWG) scored too low to be granted funding. Now I’ve looked pretty closely at the EWG rubric it’s legitimately very hard to find the points needed given how costly the land acquisition piece of the project is (EWG’s rubric favors low cost projects so that they can spread the available money around more broadly).

But one way we might be able to find these points is by shifting the project’s scope from Kirkwood’s side streets (Taylor, Monroe, Fillmore, etc.) to Kirkwood Road itself. That’s because EWG’s rubric highly favors projects that attempt to calm the region’s fastest and busiest streets rather than projects that improve streets that are already relatively calm and safe. In fact, 8 points are automatically lost if your project only involves low-traffic, slow streets as our initial proposal did. I’m not sure Kirkwood Road would be categorized as quite fast enough or busy enough to qualify for the 8 points, but it’s certainly closer to the thresholds than Taylor, et al and thus worth looking into.

As a final note on extending the road diet to at least Monroe, I think that the intersection of Monroe and Kirkwood would serve as a particularly compelling bookend to Downtown. As one of the few Kirkwood intersections with development on all four of its corners, and just one block West of the city’s significant investments in walkability at the intersection of Taylor & Monroe fronting KPAC, we could expect a substantial return on investment by similarly investing here (another raised crosswalk would be sick) and start building some walkability network-effects.

That’s it for now, but I’ll let you know when it’s time to once again answer the call and speak in favor of a project Kirkwood truly deserves. I’ll have a lot more here soon, but until then, Happy Holidays, and as always, thanks for reading.

P.S. Enjoy this picture of the custom sweatshirts my brother (Kirkwood Gadfly’s official Social Chair) got me for Christmas!