St. Louis’ Grand Experiment is the Norm in Chicago

The norm in the St. Louis region is for roads to have lots of lanes and no on-street parking.  On-street parking slows motorists and the traffic engineers will have none of that, it is all about speed for them.  But multiple lanes of speeding cars are bad for cyclists and pedestrians alike.

While the South Grand retail district (Arsenal to Utah) has always had on-street parking it has also had our lanes for through traffic.  Currently an experiment is being tested — reducing a six block section to three lanes (two plus center turn).  Have to see if these new radical ideas will work you know.

Anyone that has ever driven a car or ridden a bicycle in Chicago knows the configuration will work wonders.  Chicago has 120% more population density per square mile than St. Louis (12,649 vs 5,725).  They have lots of people, cars and bike.  Yet many of their major streets have the same basic configuration — two parking lanes, two travel lanes and a center turn lane.

Above is a view of this configuration on North Halsted.  On the right is Home Depot.  As you can see the travel lane is wide enough to accommodate motorists and cyclists.    New construction is built up to the sidewalk, in part, because streets have on-street parking.

In spaces you have a hole in the urban fabric (left above) with a parking lot here and there.  But they don’t toss out their urban principals and declare the area an auto-centric zone.

The above is a good distance from downtown Chicago.  The newish building on the right, with retail at grade and residential above, can relate to the street because it only has two lanes of traffic and because of the on-street parking.  But go out further into the inner ring suburbs and the pattern continues.

This section of Roosevelt is well outside the City of Chicago and many miles from downtown yet the street pattern is the same with only two travel lanes and on-street parking to support street oriented buildings.  Without the on-street parking you’d get standard sprawl — buildings isolated in their own parking lots.

Further out in the suburbs the two travel lanes become four but the on-street parking remains.  This ensures buildings will be built up to the street.

There is no need to test the 2 travel + turn lane configuration on South Grand.  It works and works well.

I believe if our streets were more like Chicago’s (fewer lanes, on-street parking, urban in-fill) we’d be in a position to re-urbanize & re-populate our city.  We need to extend this throughout the entire city as well as the first ring of suburbs.  Hampton, Kingshighway, Natural Bridge, Market — every street in town.  After a couple of decades we’ll see the change taking root.  If we can’t do it on six blocks of Grand I’m afraid we’ll never get to where I think we should be.

– Steve Patterson