Submit Your Bicycle/Pedestrian Improvement Project to MODOT! 2:21 PM

MODOT is seeking community consultation on "high priority" pedestrian and cyclist improvements to their transportation system.

Please, do the City of St. Louis a favor and submit a project!

There are some ground rules. Read them and submit your project here.

One requirement is that your proposal directly affect the MODOT system. So, for example, bike lanes on Lindell might sound great, but Lindell is not a state or federal road.

Try to think of ideas along the interstate system, but especially on one of the state-maintained roads within the City of St. Louis. These include:

> Missouri 30 - Gravois Avenue
> Missouri 100 - Chouteau/Manchester Avenues
> Missouri 115 - Natural Bridge Avenue
> Missouri 180 - From Goodfellow west to city limits on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.
> Missouri 267 - A portion of South Broadway in Carondelet/the Patch
> Missouri 366 - Chippewa Street

I submitted a proposal to install a planted median in the center of Gravois from Taft Avenue on the north to Christy Boulevard on the south. This would reduce traffic lanes on Gravois, provide a pedestrian crossing, beautify the area, and connect the Christy greenway and bike lanes to the Bevo neighborhood.

Please submit your own project ideas! St. Louis needs you right now, as the vast majority of submissions are coming from Kansas City and St. Joseph! If you need examples, click here for previously submitted projects (including mine).

St. Louis Open Streets 3:10 PM

St. Louis Open Streets is a new program sponsored by the City of St. Louis that will open up several miles of city roads to pedestrian and cyclist traffic only. That's right...automobiles are prohibited!

The project web site is located here.

Open Streets is an excellent way to encourage walking and cycling in the city, as well as to see the city the way it was meant to be seen--outside of a vehicle and on foot or bike. More importantly, the city's willingness to close major arteries for pedestrians--when not encouraged to do so for parades or other special events--is an important milestone. Perhaps the St. Louis Streets Department will consider other measures to improve our city's road network to make it more amenable to pedestrians. These would include making bloated streets like Olive Street west of downtown go on a "road diet"; opening up streets closed by barriers to make them more trafficked and safer to walk along; reconnecting the street grid where interstates have done damage; et cetera.

The first Open Streets event is scheduled for May 1, 2010, from 8am to 1pm. The route selected is Lindell Boulevard from city limits on the west, eastward to Compton, where the closure jumps to Locust Street, which extends all the way until 4th Street. See below for the route's flyer.

Other Open Streets events are planned for Sunday, June 13; Sunday, September 19; and Saturday, October 9, 2010.

If you notice, certain streets within Forest Park will also be closed off to vehicular traffic.

Personally, I think this is a wonderful idea and a victory for pedestrians in the City of St. Louis. I do want to be careful to point out that permanent street closures without sufficient population density are often a bad thing, making streets appear too quiet, private, or even desolate. That is why I support allowing through-traffic on most of the city's closed-off roads. However, as an event designed to bring people out to have fun and exercise temporarily in the former right-of-way of vehicles, Open Streets is a great statement in support of pedestrians. This event does not, however, serve as a substitute for improving the state of St. Louis's often overly-wide and pedestrian and cyclist-unfriendly roads. Still, for now, bravo!

Skinnytown Sculptures / South Grand Road Diet 11:53 PM

I am in love with the new Morganford--AKA Skinnytown--sculptures that have arisen along the funkified stretch over the past couple weeks. I first learned out these little pieces of whimsy through St. Louis Brick's post entitled "Morganford is the new South Grand", but St. Louis Investment Realty's Matt Kastner has snapped photos of still more sculptures here. From that very blog comes the photo below. Its legginess makes it the perfect tease photo to get you to follow the link to see nine (9!) others (This doesn't even include the giraffe sculpture staring across the street at the Three Monkeys). These appendages strut their stuff outside Vintage Haberdashery, an homage to the legs suspended from their second story window.

In other Tower Grove South news, South Grand is going on a road diet and you, St. Louis, can vote on the resulting slimmer design at an upcoming public meeting. I hear high-tech touch pads will be used for the voting process. Here's a cut-and-paste of the meeting announcement from the Tower Grove South website:

GREAT STREETS INITIATIVE SOUTH GRAND: Public Meeting and Design Charrette Announcement
Good Evening Everyone,
Please accept the attached postcard as an invitation to participate in the Public Meetings and Design Charrette scheduled for Monday, August 10, 2009 – Wednesday, August 12, 2009 from 4:00PM to 7:00PM. Also, please share the postcard flyer with your constituents so that they may have the opportunity to participate in the meetings as well. Should you have any comments or question, please give us a call at (314) 436-3311. We appreciate your immediate attention to this matter, and we look forward to meeting you.
Bridgett S. Willis
Hudson and Associates, LLC
1204 Washington Ave., Ste. 402
St. Louis, MO 63103
Office: 314-436-3311
Fax: 314-436-3503
Cell: 618-560-3225

Maybe a slimmed down South Grand will be able to compete with the charming, wacky Skinnytown along Morganford?

Counterpost to Patterson's Dish-Drainer Bike Racks 3:09 PM

I'll be darned if I didn't just read Steve Patterson's manifesto against "dish-drainer" style bike racks, arguing that they were inefficient since you can't secure the bike frame, only the front wheel, when I walked out my door (I now live next to a grocery store), and saw this:



And a zoomed-in view:

This method, which secures the frame, could fit at least six similar bicycles, if not more. Steve's public apology to the "dish-drainer" bike rack may be forthcoming. Stay tuned for details.

Restaurants, coffee shops, you name it--they should have bike racks! 1:45 PM

...like Dutchtown's Urban Eats, (3301 Meramec, 63118) which is officially at the top of my list of places to try the next time I'm in town.

Here is a picture of their bike rack:



They're also hosts to numerous neighborhood and community events.

One even dealt with bicycles--the "Blessing of the Bicycles" in front of the glorious St. Anthony's church on Meramec. Check their website out for more info.

I've had the pleasure of having tried another bike-friendly establishment: Cafe Ventana (3919 West Pine, 63108), which not only has a row of bike-shaped bike racks, but also a striped "bike lane" in its parking lot.

These two restaurants are leading the pack, St. Louis. You need to catch up.

A quote from our fair Mayor re: biking 11:18 AM

I don’t have the kind of daily schedule that would let me bike to work. But, if the weather stays this nice a while longer, you might find me along the River Des Peres Trail on a Saturday morning soon. I’ll have a helmet on.

From yesterday's MayorSlay.com blog post.

Personally, I'd like to see him rearrange his schedule to include biking to city hall. It's a major boost for cyclists and urbanists when your city's figurehead bucks the personal automobile in transporting him or herself.

The very act screams, "I am the mayor of an urban area. And I am one of you."

Is that thinking too much into it?

Portland, Oregon's mayor-elect rides his bike to City Hall.

Carfree in New Orleans 10:01 PM

It's often said that urbanists with cars are hypocrites.

Make that one less swerving, cussing, cell-phoning hypocrite on the roads of New Orleans. The car broke down into a billowy smoke stack last week. It's time to sell it and move on.

Despite potholes that could double as foxholes, unexpected monsoon rains, and a humid air often described as "clam chowder", my summer in New Orleans will very likely be spent biking and walking.

Which means, I need a bike. ASAP.

I will see you all in St. Louis on May 16th.

No thank you, Enterprise. I'm hopping on the Amtrak!