South Kirkwood Road’s Turn for a Diet

Last Fall, Kirkwood City Council agreed to reduce the number of lanes on North Kirkwood Road from four lanes down to three from Adams to Bodley. It looks like this fall, the battleground will move further South. Phase 2 of the Kirkwood Road project will look to overhaul the city’s premier thoroughfare from Monroe to the BNSF railroad tracks, just South of Rose Hill. Early reports of the project’s anticipated scope seemed to imply that Phase 2 would be relatively muted compared to its predecessor, but momentum seems to be building towards pushing for more significant change.

The Kirkwood Road Project page on the city’s website lists Phase 2’s anticipated construction date as Winter 2025 (i.e. this coming winter), proceeded by a public open house and preliminary MoDOT approval in Fall 2024. That compacted schedule would make it very difficult to incorporate any sort of public feedback prior to the submission of the preliminary plans and the intention seems to have been to check a box rather than alter any significant aspects of design. Fortunately, advocates have gotten wise to this slight-of-hand and there are now early whisperings that the public house could be moved up as soon as this coming June, thus allowing enough time to incorporate any proposed changes.

Today I want to make sure I’m out ahead of that accelerated timeline and offer some suggestions for how the project can be made better, but first I want to make sure just how important it is that we get this stretch of road right.

What’s at Stake

The stakes for this project couldn’t be higher. Monetarily, smart safety-oriented investments on South Kirkwood could significantly reduce the costs the City incurs from traffic incidents on this stretch of road. According to advocates associated with the group Safer Streets for Kirkwood, over the past five years, the 3/4ths of a mile that encompasses Phase 2 has seen 470 documented crashes and potentially. Their estimates show that more than 100 additional incidents along that stretch have likely gone unreported. The cost estimate of those crashes is approximately $82.8 million ($16.5 per year), with Kirkwood tax payers on the hook for approximately 9% of that total figure directly, at a cost of approximately $1.4 million per year.

Much like North Kirkwood Road, converting the street to a more pedestrian-oriented form also has the potential to spur indirect but equally significant cultural and economic benefits for the town as well. By expanding the footprint of Downtown —the neighborhood that serves Kirkwood’s economic and cultural engine— the city would enjoy both increased revenue over the status quo (a bigger Downtown would be more of a regional draw boosting sales tax revenue) and reduced expenses (as expanding the area from which people could comfortably walk to Downtown would reduce per-capita demand for parking spots, which the city heavily subsidizes, and the significant wear-and-tear cars exact on city streets, thus adding to maintenance costs.

The project also has significant implications for Meacham Park, a neighborhood that has long been physically isolated from the rest of the community. Being able to comfortably walk from Meacham to Nipher, or a City Council Meeting, or KPAC, or the Farmer’s Market, or any one of Downtown Kirkwood’s shops and businesses, is an important feature of integration with the broader community, and this project has the potential to significantly advance that goal as well.

So how do we realize all this potential? What follows are some ways we can make the driving, walking, and transit experiences better for everyone. First a map to help you follow along:

Traffic Improvements

The most obvious change Phase 2 calls for is a lane reduction from the current four down to three, mirroring the improvements included in the project’s first phase. The replacement of two travel lanes with a single center turn lane is proven to reduce accidents with no negative impacts on vehicular travel times. Such a change has the added benefit of yielding one lane’s worth of additional space for additional amenities like bike or bus lanes, street trees, and wider sidewalks. Those improvements further improve the pedestrian, cycling, and transit experiences thus boosting alternatives to driving and yielding further benefits in the process.

The other significant vehicular improvement that the project would benefit from is a reduction in the size of each of those three lanes. In the Fall of 2023, Johns Hopkins University published one of the most comprehensive studies of lane width ever completed, stretching across seven cities and more than 1,000 street sections. That study concluded that reducing lanes from the standard 12ft width (like those found on South Kirkwood Road) down to 9 or 10ft has the potential to significantly improve safety, and that the effects of this sort of narrowing were most profound on roads with speed limits between 30-35mph (Kirkwood Road’s current speed limit is 30).

It might be surprising that narrower lanes seem to be safer than wider ones, but narrower lanes tend to induce more cautious driving and thus broader adherence to the actual speed limit by lowering driver’s sense of their own margin for error. Now, it would probably also be great to reduce the speed limit itself down to 25mph (in fact 2024 City Council candidate Ron Ruzicka penned a Webster-Kirkwood Times letter to editor suggesting a Kirkwood Road speed reduction last March), but reducing the speed limit without changing the design of the road and thus the speed drivers feel comfortable operating would likely do little to change behavior, especially without a significant enforcement initiative. Ideally, we’d do both, but if forced to choose just one, narrowing the lanes is likely the more impactful of the options, especially since speed limit signs are much easier to change outside the scope of the project.

Much like reducing the total number of lanes, the other thing narrower lanes get you is still more room to dedicate to pedestrian safety infrastructure, so let’s take a look at what I think we should do with that additional space.

Pedestrian Improvements

South Kirkwood Road is currently approximately 60ft wide from sidewalk to sidewalk and about 50ft of that width is currently occupied by roadway. Going from four 12ft lanes down to three 10ft ones would leave us with about 18-20ft worth of space to add amenities for other modes of transit like biking, walking, or taking the bus.

Unfortunately for cyclists, South Kirkwood Road’s current orientation probably isn’t suitable for a protected bike lane (It serves as a route for the #49 bus, which needs access to the curb, plus there are lots and lots of curb cuts, meaning cars would constantly be turning through the bike lane to access various parking lot entrances), but there are significant opportunities to improve the walking experience along this stretch of road.

6-Foot Sidewalks

The most obvious of these is to widen the sidewalk from the current 4ft width to 6ft, which is better able to accommodate more foot traffic in general, but especially things like strollers, people in wheelchairs, or just two people trying to keep their dogs from absolutely freaking out. So that’s 4ft of our 18-20ft of additional space accounted for.

Re-Imagine the Buffer Zone

It would also be nice to create some sort of buffer between the pedestrians and traffic rather than having cars going 30mph six inches away from pedestrians walking at 3mph. Usually this role is played by street trees, which offer shade and shelter from rain in addition to protection from traffic (people reasonably fear driving into a tree much more than they fear snagging the occasional curb), but this stretch of road currently holds almost no trees, so I think it likely that there are some buried utilities that might make trees infeasible here. Still it would be worth looking into some potential workarounds to this problem. I also think this project provides an excellent opportunity to bury the existing overhead power lines from Woodbine to the train tracks. Burying power lines is expensive (the typical cost is $1 million per mile, which would mean a cost of about ~$350k for this 0.35 mile long stretch), but I’m hopeful that the fact that we’ll already be opening up the ground will significantly reduce that cost, especially given that Kirkwood’s ownership of its own water mains and electric utility should mean that closer coordination is possible. Everyone loves buried power lines from an aesthetic perspective, but they are also significantly more resilient to overhead lines (which are vulnerable to wind, ice, trees, and cars) and thus incur significantly reduced maintenance costs over the long run.

Improve Crosswalks

This stretch of Kirkwood has really poor alignment of roads with lots of three-way intersections that don’t get enough traffic to justify the cost of full signalization. That’s annoying for cars, but it’s straight-up dangerous for pedestrians. South of Monroe, pedestrians do not have another opportunity to legally cross Kirkwood Road for nearly another third of a mile until they reach Woodbine. After Woodbine, their next opportunity comes in another 1/4th of a mile at Rose Hill. Rose Hill and Woodbine are two very obvious candidates for a raised crosswalk like the one constructed at Taylor & Monroe and those planned along Clay, but there’s also clearly a demand for mid-block crossing in between. I remember constantly darting across South Kirkwood Road to get to McDonald’s on Friday half-days in My St. Peter’s years, so adding a crossing near the golden arches or Jimmy John’s holds a special place in my heart, but I think an even more obvious location is in front of Nipher.

Reduce Curb Cuts

Perhaps more controversially, I think Kirkwood should also do its best to find instances where it can re-align existing curb cuts in order to turn un-signalized three-way intersections to signalized four ways ones. One candidate is East Clinton Place. If Kirkwood offered signalized access to Woodbine Center if they simply moved their driveway 60ft to the North so that it could be incorporated into a four-way intersection with full pedestrian crossings, I think everyone would be made better off.

Transit Improvements

The final piece of the Kirkwood Road puzzle is to reorient how the street interacts with the #49 Metro Bus that runs its full length. Metro was supportive of the North Kirkwood Road lane diet because they said the bus would save time by not needing to pull over to the curb and then pull back into traffic (which can take up to a minute), so any sort of road diet would be a win for transit riders in and of itself. But by better designing the bus stops along the route, we can further amplify that win.

Focus on the Right Stops

The #49 currently has four North and South stops within the project’s scope, located roughly in front of Andy’s/Jimmy Johns, at Clinton Place, at Woodbine, and at Rose Hill/Nipher. The Clinton Place stop is probably overkill (it’s a mere ~700 feet from the stops to its North and South whereas best practice on spacing is closer to 1,320 feet; every stop you add to a bus route means that the bus moves slower and thus becomes a less desirable transportation option), so I think Kirkwood should probably leave that stop as-is rather than subsidize Metro’s poor planning with our own limited resources, especially since there’s so much room for improvement at the other three stops.

Make the Bus Stops Better

Perhaps the most substantial way we can make these stops better is to extend the curb into the street at the locations of bus stops. These are what transit nerds know as “bus bulbs,” and they allow for the much faster on and off-boarding of passengers, especially mobility impaired people who might have trouble navigating the step down from the curb and then the step up to the bus. Depending on the configuration of the bus, these can either be raised or curb-height, but in either case, by bringing the bus more directly to its passengers, the bus can get on its way faster thus improving its appeal to riders (and presumably attracting more).

Bus bulbs also offer a perfect location for other improvements like shelters, benches, and signs that display routes and when the next bus is coming. The bus stop in front of Andy’s, for example is the best of the bunch, but even it lacks protection form the rain and sun or any sort of wayfinding, both of which would be pretty easy fixes give the ample space available.

The other stops along this route have essentially no infrastructure at all (despite plenty of space) and the significant financial returns the City could expect from such an investment. The #49 brings the city workers, shoppers, diners, and accomplishes all of it while reducing traffic and demand for parking. Making the bus more appealing makes the city better off.

Legacies to be Built

I hope the citizens of Kirkwood can exert enough pressure to allow this project to meet its fullest potential, but the bottom line is that the Council should be self-motivated to get this right. When Phase 1 went before the Council for approval, I submitted the following public comment: “You can be the Council that expands and builds up the most beloved part of our town, that expands what is considered DTK, and expands the space where our citizens gather and become a community. That would be quite the legacy.” Well, we now have a new Council, and I urge them to use this opportunity to start to build a legacy of their own.