Grant’s Trail Extension:
A Silver Bullet

Please Note:

I should have linked to this Webster Kirkwood Times article on the rail spur that much of this proposal is based off of. It is interesting and informative, and great local journalism. But I did not because, like an idiot, I did not read it until after I finished writing this post. It offers great background on the rail line itself, its history and the process that led to the transformation of most of its length to Grant’s Trail. I highly suggest you read it before reading what I have written about what to do with the remaining portion of that line below.

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New York has the High Line, Atlanta: the BeltLine, and Indy: the Cultural Trail. Each of these projects have increased multi-modal transportation options and spurred development. I have often heard the idea, connecting Grant’s Trail to Downtown Kirkwood, tacked on to the end of studies and plans as a sort of non-serious, exciting addendum. But the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that there’s nothing tangental, or secondary about the concept at all. In fact, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that this is the single most important project Kirkwood can undertake. 0.7 miles worth of path to spur development, increase housing, reduce traffic, decrease carbon footprint, add an asset to Kirkwood’s fitness facilities and contribute to Downtown Kirkwood’s foot traffic. People love shitting on silver bullets but every now and then, they turn out just to be pretty big, pretty good ideas. I hope this can be one of those.

Route

I was skeptical of the importance of connecting Grant’s Trail to DTK mostly because I couldn’t picture it. I pictured some bike lanes running from downtown to the southeast and, while I always support a bike lane, there are several better candidates (along Adams to the existing Lockwood bike lane, PLEASE) than some block by block zig-zag towards a highway. …But then I heard that there was an abandoned railroad spur (the same former rail line that the existing Grant’s Trail is composed of almost entirely) and ohhh baby that thing could not be better positioned if it tried.

Part of the key to making any successful trail is having it end/begin at a notable landmark. For Kirkwood, the most logical candidate is the Performing Arts Center that is nearing completion. Not only are its size and modern architecture striking, but so to is its location. Positioned right where downtown Kirkwood begins and the railroad right-of-way ends, a terminus at the performing arts center would require little action to connect the trail to downtown proper. The foundation of the action that would be required are already present: A bike lane leading to the Kirkwood Farmer’s Market, North along Taylor, begins just past Monroe while plenty of low traffic routes could direct other bike and foot traffic towards Kirkwood Plaza. The raised intersection (at E. Monroe and Taylor) currently in the design phase, along with the sidewalk infill on S. Fillmore, would further strengthen the pedestrian connection between Grant’s Trail and the rest of Kirkwood.

Cost

The most expensive aspect of connecting Grant’s Trail to Downtown Kirkwood, transversing I-44, has already been paid for and completed. This Mile 8 of the trail is already fully furnished with parking, drinking fountains and bathroom facilities. The two largest items on the budget remaining are a railroad crossing (just past where the current trailhead exists) and the construction of facilities at the new trail head across the street from the Performing Arts Center. While building a bathroom and a pedestrian sized rail guard is probably not cheap, such a project would likely qualify for numerous grants/financial collaboration at the county, regional, state and federal levels. St. Louis County has recently launched a campaign to create a bike and pedestrian action plan. Resources will eventually be allotted by the county and a plan with such practical and positive implications seems like a prime candidate to receive some of them. At a regional level while the well-funded Great River’s Greenway does not currently have an extension of Grant’s Trail to Downtown Kirkwood in their list of planned future greenways, such a project, an off-street recreational path extending a greenway they currently manage, would seem to fit very neatly into their mission. State level funding for bicycle infrastructure in a left leaning enclave of a staunchly conservative state is going to be hard to come by. That’s goes double for a state that has struggled to fund the likes of the Rock Island Trail, a trail that services primarily bread and butter Republican districts, but hey, here’s to hoping!

Four Benefits & Impacts

1. Housing

Increased housing on the underdeveloped land adjacent to the proposed path is the single biggest potential impact of an extended Grant’s Trail. As I mentioned in my Kirkwood Housing Post, Kirkwood currently hold 4,440 fewer residents than it did in 1970. Densely developing the land on either side of the trail with apartments and condos could go a long long way towards erasing that gap. If the political will (and the infrastructure improvement that would be required) was there, I believe a development campaign could erase the gap entirely.

With the current demand for housing in Kirkwood, there’s not any real reason to have any property set aside exclusively for light industrial use. Light Industrial zoning is actually pretty broad and allows almost every use under the sun as either a permitted or special use including hotels, bakeries, and halfway houses ( a personal favorite is use #26, man-made lakes). Literally the only thing I can think of that is not permitted is any sort of residential use.

As a further testament to this point, because people along this trail would theoretically be less reliant on cars, some rules can be tweaked to achieve the desired density in the Trail District. One means of achieving this density would be to completely eliminate the minimum parking requirements for any developments along the proposed Grant’s Trail extension. This does not mean that there would be no parking but rather that developers could choose the market-optimal amount of parking. Another way of achieving dense development along this stretch would be to relax the height limitations on buildings in this area.

2. Transportation

Grant’s Trail connects to Affton Ice Rink and Baseball fields, Cor Jesu High School, a BMX park, Grant’s Farm and numerous places of employment. Alternatively, and possibly more significantly for Kirkwood, are the possibilities for transportation of those who live near the trail outside the Kirkwood area, especially residents of Crestwood and Oakland, traveling in the opposite direction towards Kirkwood. Potential destinations include the new Performing Arts Center, the farmer’s market on a Saturday morning or the Route 66 Cars & Guitars Festival, Bar Louie Mimosas or hey, the first inaugural Sunday in the Streets event!

More important than transportation via the trail itself, however, is the investment in biking infrastructure that an extension would likely spur. Kirkwood is a bike lane and protected bike lane desert that has failed to tap into the bike lanes that end right at our doorstep. The more places you can safely access via bike, the more likely people are to bike. This relationship is not linear, but rather has a synergistic affect. All it takes is an initial plunge.

3. Health & Recreation

Perhaps more importantly to any of these connections, however, would be the extension’s connection to Grant’s Trail itself. More than 750,000 people use Grant’s Trail every year. The vast majority of those people use the trail with no destination in mind but rather just to get some exercise. Rollerbladers, walkers, unicyclists, scooterers and joggers just cruising to cruise. A healthier population of Kirkwood is good.

4. Environmental Impact

This is redundant but no matter how many times you say it, people still forget that the world is burning. SO if people can live closer to the places they want to go (see 1) and can get to at least a few of those places without using cars (see 3), then it stands to reason that emissions will be reduced. Support for housing density (in addition to eating less beef and flying less) is one of the few things individuals can do that can have any sort of real impact. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Existing Plans for Grant’s Trail Extension

Kirkwood has been throwing around different possibilities for connections between Grant’s Trail and Downtown without actually doing anything for a few years now. The two plans depicted below (from urbanSTL forum contributor Gary Kreie) utilize various amounts of the abandoned spur with the 2005 version extending almost it full length before crossing the active tracks and the more recent 2015 version using only approximately one third of its length before turning into a road-based network.

While any sort of extension would be good and welcome news, I tend to classify these proposals as less ambitious. On the one hand on-street bike lanes could be replicated throughout Kirkwood. Perhaps this initial investment in infrastructure would contribute momentum to Kirkwood-wide programming in a way that the track-based proposal could not (there are only so many abandoned railroad corridors after all). On the other hand though, to even approach the level of mass-appeal to all ages and abilities a completely separated path would have, protected bike lanes would be necessary. Unfortunately the construction of these protected lanes is expensive and Kirkwood has so far demonstrated no willingness to make such an investment. More likely we would be left with a network based exclusively on paint, paint that may do more harm than good.

Street-based extensions like the ones above also have one more drawback: They miss an opportunity to contribute to systematic land-use reform in Kirkwood. Winding through single-family home lined streets might be great for those 12 houses, but a new densely populated district out of light-industrial whole cloth has the power to be transformative.