Jefferson, Clay, & STP’s Cul-de-Sac

Update: 02/02/24

Last night’s public hearing saw seventeen people comment against the proposal and just six in favor of it. Written comments submitted to the Council prior to the meeting had a much stronger St. Peter-skew with ~240 emails in favor and ~60 opposed. Council members’ lines of questioning offered little insight into how they will vote on issue, but if I had to venture a guess, I’d say this proposal is going down. The first reading and initial vote will take place at the next Council meeting, Thursday, February 15th.

Update: 1/27/24

At Thursday, February 1st’s City Council meeting, a public hearing will be held on the topic of “Vacating a portion of a public right-of-way known as Jefferson Avenue (from Harrison Avenue to Clay Avenue) between blocks 16 and 21 in the Town of Kirkwood Subdivision in the City of Kirkwood, Missouri.” That’s a fancy way of saying it’s a public hearing on giving away Jefferson Ave to St. Peter in exchange for land along Clay that would be used for on-street parking.

The newly released renderings offer several changes from the previous design. Plans now call for the eastern half of Jefferson to remain open to vehicular traffic as “private drive”. The number of on-street angled parking spaces to be gained by the city has been reduced from 48 down to 42. Because Clay already has 15 curb-side spots along this stretch, the city would only stand to net 27 spots out of the deal. The parish’s plans also call for the construction of a new 36-spot parking lot near the rectory, to bring the total campus parking capacity from 143 to 144, a net of one.

The public hearing documents also stipulate new terms for the city’s use of St. Peter’s parking. While Kirkwood will no longer be required to pay the annual $36k amount for use of the lot, under a new 10-year lease it would be required to contribute 50% of the cost of maintaining the parking lot, including “insurance, snow removal, taxes (as applicable), maintenance, repairs and replacements of the parking lot and surrounding sidewalks, maintenance and capital reserves, lighting, fencing, landscaping, security (as necessary), sealing and striping, signage, and other expenses commonly associated with the ownership, operation and long-term leasing.” St. Peter would reserve the right to annually designate times and days that the parking lot would be closed to the public.

While the public hearing itself does pertain to the parish’s construction plans, St. Peter’s website offers insights into future campus projects, including the construction a parish center at the corner of Clay and Argonne and new classroom space at the corner of Clay and Adams.

Selling off one of our city streets might have a price, but 27 on-street parkings spaces is not it. This is especially true once we consider the substantial financial liability the city would have to take on to enact the deal. The city is in the midst of spending $720k (and growing) on the repaving of the police department/city hall parking lot. Forking over 50% of a similar cost (plus plowing, insurance, striping, sealing, etc) to help maintain a parking lot that the city would not even have direct control over would be fiscal malpractice. As I mentioned in my original story below, the deal would also add substantial road surface area along Clay that the city would also have to pay to maintain, despite the fact that those spots’ most common users would likely be parishioners of St. Peter.

This is a bad deal for Kirkwood; I hope lots of people come out to next week’s meeting and speak against this and I hope the Council votes it down.

Original Story: 10/10/23

Kirkwood is currently in the design stage of a planned overhaul of S. Clay Ave from Adams to Woodbine. That initial relatively minor streets project, however, has since synergized with a long-planned overhaul of the St. Peter’s campus and now looks to realize a full-blown urban renewal project in the heart of Downtown Kirkwood.

We’re still an early stage of the project —the $2 million surface transportation-grant-funded project is not expected to begin construction until the Winter of 2025— but things are moving fast, and if we want to nudge the project in a positive direction, the time to start is now. I think the best way to breakdown the project in these early days is to conduct some SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).

Strengths

The really exciting news is that the preliminary plans featured on the city’s website call for the construction of raised intersections at Clay & Argonne and Clay & Jefferson. These will be similar to the existing raised intersection at Monroe & Taylor, and the one that’s coming to the intersection of Monroe & Fillmore as part of Phase 1a of the Grant’s Trail Extension. When you add these three raised intersections to the raised crosswalks planned for Argonne (in front of the Farmer’s Market), and on Taylor (just South of the railroad tracks), that are also being included in the Grant’s Trail Extension, they will really start to dictate a new, safer, more comfortable, more pedestrian friend vocabulary for Downtown Kirkwood, and the more we add the more effective the existing raised crossings will become. That’s really exciting, especially given that 4 Hands Brewery will soon be adding a lot of traffic to the area.

Weaknesses

This entire story was going to be about these changes and what else we should do until I was tipped off that there was a whole aspect I was missing: The involvement of St. Peter and the inclusion of major alterations to Jefferson.

According to their website, St. Peter parish has petitioned the City of Kirkwood to acquire, permanently close, and build upon the half-block of Jefferson that is flanked by the school to the North and the church to the South. In exchange, the city is set to receive the two-block-long, 24-foot-wide strip of St. Peter’s property that fronts Clay from Adams to Argonne. The city plans to then use this strip for the construction of 48 angled on-street parking spaces.

Now, the motivation for St. Peter to pursue such a move is clear:

• Closing Jefferson has long been on the agenda for the parish for various reasons, the most sympathetic of which is increased pedestrian safety for school children crossing the road
• St. Louis Archdiocese’s All Things New re-shuffle, which reduced the number of area parishes from 178 down to 135 and which could shutter up to a third of the area’s existing catholic elementary schools, has left St. Peter intact and likely to absorb some additional parishioners and students, both of which will require additional building space
• What St. Peter will be giving up for this incredibly valuable public real estate is of little value, potentially even negative value, to the parish: grass that they have to mow and parking spaces they have to maintain
• That strip of grass will now be taken over by the city and the city will spend a bunch of money to convert it to a much higher use in the eyes of the parish: parking spaces that parishioners will be able to use. And instead of St. Peter paying to maintain those parking spaces, the city will now be on the hook for their upkeep

I’m significantly less sure that this is a good deal for Kirkwood. A big part of what makes Downtown Kirkwood a thriving urban space is its intact street grid, which evenly distributes traffic across multiple streets at low speeds rather than routing it all to a single high-speed arterial road. This strong street grid is what makes something like the North Kirkwood Road lane reduction possible: We can reduce the car capacity of Kirkwood Rd and increase its pedestrian-amenities without making it impossible to travel through Kirkwood partially because Taylor and Clay exist. If Kirkwood Road was responsible for handling all of the North-South traffic then we’d have to focus much more on its ability to move a high volume of traffic (presumably through increased lanes and speed) because it’s the only game in town. Now, even if Jefferson closes we’ll still have Argonne and Adams and to a less-direct extent, Washington and Monroe, but the number of East-West games-in-town would be reduced, so what remains would probably have to focus more on moving cars and less on moving people than they otherwise would.

That’s especially true when you consider the resiliency intact street grids offer compared to what’s being proposed. On an intact street grid, if there’s an accident or a water main break, you simply drive one block over and continue your journey. Alternatively, if you think of something like a highway, where there’s only one route between point A and point B, all of a sudden a single crash can bring gridlock. Closing Jefferson won’t make Argonne or Adams into a highway, but it will similarly increase the cost of anything going wrong on either of them.

And more than anything else, what we have to understand is that this move is permanent. Once Kirkwood gives up Jefferson, it’ll never get it back, and we’ll forever be a little more suburbanized than we otherwise would be.

Now, I think all of that is a pretty high price to pay, but it could still absolutely be worth it for the city! Life is about tradeoffs and sometimes you have to bite the bullet. I’m just highly highly skeptical 48 parking spaces is the fair price for an urban city street. Trying to provide enough free parking is, and always will be, a road to ruin for the city. There will never be enough and it will always cost more to maintain than it brings in for the city.

Paid parking could be a real positive, but adding more free parking kicks that can down the road further rather than bringing us closer to grappling with this reality. Kirkwood is popular, land in a popular places is valuable, if you assign that valuable land (in the form of parking spaces) a price of “free,” demand for that parking will continue exceed supply, even if you add 48 more spaces. The price for the land has to be something higher than “free”.

Is it too late to re-negotiate? I legitimately don’t know, but this strikes me as a great deal for St. Peter and a raw deal for the people of Kirkwood.

Threats

While the St. Peter-Jefferson plan has made significant headway, there are some people working to kill the project. The primary leaders of this opposition are those living in homes on the half of Jefferson that would remain after the bisection was completed. One of those homeowners, Liz Robinson, has started a petition to try and rally support for blocking the project. I’m always sort of skeptical of these efforts to block various things because it’s a slippery slope from blocking bad projects to letting everyone block any projects that they in particular don’t like (NIMBYism). And if you read what the petitioner has written on nextdoor and in her letter to St. Peter, there is quite a bit of NIMBY sentiment (the new building will block our sun, Kirkwood’s master plan wants to change a bunch of neighborhoods so yours could be next, etc) mixed in with some pro-urban sentiments too:

Bill and I bought this house after 11 long years of living on the outskirts of Kirkwood. We saved long and hard to purchase our dream house. The house that is closest to most of the restaurants, the one that we can sit on the porch swing and listen to the music coming from Duffy’s, the one that has constant people walking dogs, families on bikes and neighbors headed downtown, the house that we can give our kids some freedom to get gelatos because we can see them from our yard. I cannot imagine not being able to hear that music, not having that sense of community with all the people passing by and being generally cutoff from the very reason that we wanted to move here. We did not buy a house in the many neighborhoods of Kirkwood with a cul-de-sac. This is what we wanted, and St Peter would like to take that from us.

Liz Robinson’s submission to St. Peter’s feedback form

So what’s the right call? Do we cut off our nose (sign the petition and try to dissuade Kirkwood) to spite our face (empower people to block things in the future)? In this particular case I am siding with yes. Signing this petition has no legal power. It, or another petition like it in the future, does not constrain the ability of the city to act. What it does do is voice that we think they’re wrong on the merits and signals that we may hold our elected officials accountable at the ballot box accordingly. If a different, better project comes along in the future, we’ll evaluate it on it’s own merits and try to convince others that it and the electeds who support it are worth backing. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. So I say sign away.

Opportunities

Finally, although I’ve given it significant attention in this piece, I think it’s important that we not let the Jefferson/St. Peter issue completely overshadow the opportunities present in the larger Clay project. Clay is a street with a ton of potential. It’s less fast and less traffic-choked than Kirkwood Rd, and it has a more urban in character than Taylor. It’s the only one of the three N-S routes that allows the bypassing of train traffic via the Clay Ave bridge (which is also being replaced via a separate pot of funding), and, perhaps most importantly in terms of potential, it’s incredibly wide, providing plenty of real-estate for improvements. What should those improvements look like? I have two main ideas (and a map outlining them!)

The project’s scope is colored yellow, the two green squares represent the two proposed raised intersections, the red x’s are where I’m proposing we add stop signs, the red circle at Clay & Woodbine represents a roundabout I’m proposing, the green (if you zoom in) represents places I think the City should look into eliminating curb cuts and adding curb bump-outs at intersections, and the blue lines represent existing (Woodbine bike lane) or coming (the Grant’s Trail Extension) cycling infrastructure it might be worth connecting to. Let’s dive into the details.

Intersection Improvements

First, while the project calls for raised crosswalks at Jefferson and Argonne, there is no mention of improvements to any of the Clay intersections South of the bridge.

I have long been an advocate for transforming Madison & Clay into a four-way stop given the presence of a park, significant housing density, and the unique difficulty of timing left-hand turns onto Clay given how the crest of the bridge hides oncoming traffic (I have even gone so far as to start a petition of my own only for the then City Engineer, now Director of Public Works, Chris Kruger to paint over the crosswalk entirely in response. Still though, if you haven’t yet, you should sign my petition).

I also think four-way stops could be warranted at McCullough and W. Clinton as well. The two intersections along this southern stretch that are currently four-ways stops, Monroe and Woodbine both would greatly benefit from standard pedestrian safety interventions like curb bump-outs (like those coming to the intersection of Washington & Taylor as part of the deal for the approval of The James).

At Clay & Woodbine, I think there’s a case to be made that the location could be an excellent one for Kirkwood’s first roundabout. One of the world’s leading urban planners, Jeff Speck, contends that roundabouts are the most urban of the suburban intersection typologies (because it keeps traffic moving it doesn’t quite offer the pedestrian comfort of traffic coming to a full stop). As such, he argues that they should be reserved for places outside of the urban core, which I think Woodbine & Clay qualifies as.

The real reason to affirmatively do it, though, is because 1) it can handle higher volumes of traffic than the current four-way stop design (which could be useful for handling traffic into and out of the Concordia parking lot) and 2) because it would make the logistics of adding a two-way bike lane on Clay easier. Speaking of which…

Protected Bike Lane

I think there’s a really appealing case to be made that Clay should host Kirkwood’s first ever protected bike lane, which is long overdue. A protected bike lane is one where parked cars or some other kind of protective barrier separates and protects cyclists from traffic. Now implementing a protected bike lane on Clay would require a decent amount of work, but I do think it’s feasible if done right.

South Clay currently uses a setup that looks something like this, with a single travel lane in either direction and on-street parking on both sides:

Now there is some demand for on-street parking on Clay, but not enough to fill both the eastern and western sides of the street. And partially because those spots aren’t getting used and partially because the parking lane isn’t really painted, what you end up with is something more akin to two 17′ wide traffic lanes, which allow cars to feel comfortable driving at very high speeds. If we instead eliminated one of those two on-street parking lanes, we’d have sufficient room to add bike lanes and/or increase the widths of the sidewalk.

Now there’s one additional flaw in this plan that must be overcome which is that the western side of the street has a tremendous amount of curb cuts thanks to all the residential driveways that feed on to the street. Because you can’t block driveways with a protective barrier and because cars turning through the bike lane to get to their driveways is dangerous for cyclists, a protected bike lane is probably only possible on the western side of the street, and even there, the city would probably have to streamline the number of curb-cuts (via right-of-way acquisition á la the St. Peter Jefferson deal) to reduce the opportunities for car-cyclist conflict. Instead, drivers looking to enter the large parking lot here would simply utilize a couple of the larger access points rather than a half dozen small ones.

Then, finally, you’d have to decide if you wanted this protected bike lane to be a single northbound lane (and figure out something else for south-bound cyclists), or to try our hand at a two-way cycle track like the one below.

Bi-directional cycle tracks are a bit of an advanced move and are more typically found on one-way streets so perhaps it wouldn’t be a great fit here, but it’s certainly worth looking into and I think would be made easier if done in conjunction with a small roundabout at Woodbine like we talked about earlier.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got! Let me know what you think about Clay, Jefferson, St. Peter, or anything in-between in the comments!