Kirkwood TOD: Cutting the Gordian Knot

Noticeably absent from my series on attainable housing in Kirkwood was Transportation Oriented Development (TOD). Transportation Oriented Development is the idea that it makes the most sense to add housing around places that have access to public transit. That way you can reap the benefits of additional housing without absorbing as much of the costs in the form of car traffic.

I purposefully left it off the list because unfortunately, I don’t really think Kirkwood currently has the public transit infrastructure to make owning a car optional. These things are tied together in a sort of Catch-22:

Kirkwood doesn’t have much public transit because it doesn’t have enough transit users, but part of the reason we don’t have more transit users is that we don’t have the public transit that would make ditching a car and becoming a transit user a viable option.

What I want to do then is lay out the current situation, and then offer some solutions for beginning to unwind this feedback loop.

Transit Desert

The convenience and reliability of transit are often determined by the number of transfers you have to make to get to where you need to go. If you only have to hop on one bus or one MetroLink train, that’s called a “one-seat” trip. Two-leg journeys are “two-seat”, etc. Every time you add a link to this chain, you add more room for things to go wrong: More chances to miss a connection, more time you’re exposed to the elements, more time you have to stop reading your book or scrolling twitter and figure things out.

Depending on where exactly in Kirkwood you live, you have relatively few of these low-stress one-seat rides available to you. You can explore a map of all of our existing bus routes here, but in summary, since Metro re-shuffled our routes in 2019, Kirkwood is serviced by the three bus lines outlined below:

North Kirkwood

North Kirkwood has direct service via the #57 bus via Manchester that runs West out to Wildwood, and East through the Brentwood Promenade and the Brentwood MetroLink station. Unfortunately, Kirkwood’s portion of the Manchester corridor has essentially no housing, so these already limited routes are only helpful to a relatively few residents.

South Kirkwood

The southern portion of Kirkwood is doing a little better on both the transit and land-use fronts, though! South Kirkwood gets direct service from the #56 bus which starts at Meramec CC and runs East down Big Bend to Meachem Park, up to Downtown Webster, Webster U, and Nerinx Hall, and ends at the Shrewbury MetroLink station.

In addition to having some more appealing destinations, the land use patterns of the Big Bend corridor are a little better oriented towards transit as well. We have 24 new townhomes across the street from the Meramec terminus of the #56, and several existing multi-family developments line the South side of Big Bend between there and 44. We don’t quite know where it’s headed yet, but Meramec is in the midst of a campus re-design that might further boost the productivity of the land here. And finally, the Meachem Park stop sees above average traffic, which further increases the productivity of the route.

Unfortunately, the Big Bend corridor is also incredibly un-walkable, with few daily amenities within a comfortable range. Transit will maybe take you to work or school in South Kirkwood, but you’ll probably need a car to run your errands, head to the gym, or go get dinner. Fewer car trips are always better, but there’s a big jump in terms of walkability when transit takes you from driving less to not even needing to own a car at all, and for now the only place where that looks like it might be remotely viable in the medium-term is Downtown Kirkwood.

Downtown Kirkwood

Now Downtown Kirkwood only has one bus route, the #49, that services it directly. That route basically runs North-South, which means Downtown Kirkwood has one-seat rides North to: UMSL, the airport, Northwest Plaza, Bayer/Monsanto Headquarters, Chaminade/MICDS/St. Joe’s, and South to Vianney, Ronnie’s (the movie theatre), and South County mall.

As a result, Downtown Kirkwood, our most walkable neighborhood, is left with 60-minute transit access mostly to other suburbs that lie along the 270-corridor rather than anywhere consistently useful for most residents.

What Would be Useful…

So given that I don’t think our current transit network is very useful, I think it’s helpful to think through the types of routes that I think would be useful.

In a post-COVID world, demand has shifted —at least in proportional terms— away from commuting and towards leisure trips. This is especially true of the suburban office parks that line 270 and to which our existing routes most directly provide access. These auto-oriented office parks seem doomed as the worst of all worlds: Not as convenient as work-from-home, fewer amenities than working in a central business district, and no longer significantly cheaper than either of the alternatives.

So while heading to the Bayer/Monsanto headquarters might no longer be necessary, heading to Downtown St. Louis for the occasional work meeting, sporting events, festivals, and concerts, or heading to Downtown Webster to check out their seemingly infinite supply of STL 100 restaurants still seems useful. These are trips that 1) people are still making because there’s no reasonable remote substitute, 2) that match the economic profile of Kirkwood’s increasingly affluent residents (wealthy with money to spend on expensive leisure activities), and 3) have the added advantage of being events that people often drink at (and thus are events attendees might consider public transit for even if they do have access to a car of their own).

These potential trips mean that Downtown Kirkwood requires access to East-West transit rather than the North-South routes it currently has. Lucky for us, the region’s premier investment in transit, MetroLink, has this exact orientation. We simply need to figure out a way to connect more directly to it.

A New Route

I’m proposing we achieve that connection with a new bus route from Downtown Kirkwood to the Sunnen MetroLink station (although, if it makes more sense to run the route to the Shrewsbury stop at the end of the line, I’d buy that too):

(existing bus routes are depicted in black, the two existing MetroLink lines are in blue and red, and my proposed bus route is depicted in yellow)

The primary advantage of adding this route would be that it would get you from Downtown Kirkwood to the MetroLink in about 20 minutes. From there it’s a 7-minute MetroLink ride to Clayton, a 10-minute ride to Wash U, a 15-minute ride to the Central West End, and a little over 20-minute ride to Downtown.

But while these 40-minute two-seat trips to Downtown are the headliners, it’s the interim one-seat rides that this route would facilitate that make me think it might be viable. Trips from Downtown Kirkwood to Downtown Webster and Maplewood go from ones that require a car (or at least a long bike ride) to ones that you could accomplish by some combination of walking a couple blocks and hopping on the bus.

Now, Metro isn’t exactly awash in money, so they’re not just going to do us a favor and make it happen. Otherwise they would’ve done so already. If we’re going to convince them to meet this identified need, it’s going to take a concerted effort from Kirkwood, and our partners in Webster, Glendale, Maplewood, and St. Louis County to make sure it’s in Metro’s best interest as well.

Doing Our Part

“Doing our part” falls into two main buckets: the transit infrastructure itself and then the revisions to the zoning code that would make that transit more effective. Implementing the infrastructure changes would help make the route more appealing to riders by improving the quality of service (thus attracting even more riders), while the land use changes would allow more people to take advantage of those improved services by living close to them. Perhaps even more importantly, instituting these changes would help signal to Metro that we are willing to do what it takes to make the route successful (i.e. not a huge money sink).

Transit Infrastructure

First, contingent on Metro rolling out the new route, Kirkwood should offer to re-engineer the streets the bus would run on.

The lowest hanging fruit of these changes is for Kirkwood to use the existing parking lot just West of the train station to construct a bus turnaround at the end of the line. As Kirkwood sets out to spend millions of dollars rehabbing the train station, it makes sense to get our money’s worth by making the facility useful for more than just on/off-boarding a handful of passengers two times a day. This is the easiest of lifts: eliminate ten or so parking spots and maybe add a bus shelter.

Next, in order to keep buses from getting bogged down in rush hour Downtown Kirkwood traffic, we should offer to convert the curbside-parking lanes of Kirkwood Road and Adams to dedicated bus/bike lanes. This would simultaneously improve the service frequency the bus can offer (ride the bus and you don’t have to wait in traffic!) and improve bicycling facilities in Kirkwood.

Then, preferably, Webster and Glendale would follow suit with their stretches of Lockwood, Big Bend, Laclede, and Hanley. The width of Lockwood’s right-of-way and the fact that the #56 bus (the one that starts at Meramec) is also routed down Lockwood East of Berry Rd, makes this especially a no-brainer (this proposal falls along the same route as my Frisco Trail plan, which outlines these advantages in further detail, but I think this is an improved version of that idea). With these improvements in place, our lowly bus route would quickly become one of the highest-quality routes in the region.

Aligning Land Use Policy with Our Transit Goals

Another reason I think this route works well is that we have some fairly dense housing coming in all around the route, adding tons of potential new passengers. Between The James’s 174 units and the Kirkwood Apartments’ 60 units, we’re looking at an additional 500 residents within what is already the densest part of Kirkwood.

Introduce TOD: Transit Oriented Development

Once the infrastructure is in place, leveraging our land use policies to improve the route’s chances of success should be a priority. Mainly, contingent on receiving this new route, we should reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements in our B-5 downtown general business zoning district. That way, if a developer thinks they can market their units to transit users and thus can get away with less parking, they won’t be forced by the city to add it anyway. We don’t have to eliminate parking minimums throughout the entire city to see big improvements here, we just have to reduce them in the places where it makes the most sense, for us, that’s around our three bus routes.

Add More Riders

Then, obviously, more housing would mean more riders so we should add housing here too. The two land-use changes I proposed last month work hand in glove with this goal. ADUs should be allowed in our suddenly transit-rich downtown core, and smaller minimum lot size requirements mean that more homes could be built in the eastern portion of Kirkwood that this route runs most directly through.

When combined with the transit infrastructure proposed earlier, these changes make the new bus route a winning proposition for both Kirkwood (which would add an amenity for residents and Metro (in the form of ridership).

The first step, however, is to take care of the part of the equation that we control. Thursday, the Kirkwood Apartments go before City Council. Get those approved, and in a couple of years, we’ll have a constituency that can help advocate for these changes themselves.

Thanks for reading, a lot more coming your way soon!