ST. LOUIS — Tuesday night the City of St. Louis held the first of two public meetings about the Grand Boulevard corridor project aimed at making the street safer.
The city is going to be doing about $10 million of improvements on Grand. It's one of the longest corridors in the city and they're hoping a combination of things will make it safer.
“Grand for the fourth year in the row, was the most dangerous corridor, street for St. Louis,” Trailnet CEO Cinday Mense said.
Grand Boulevard has three intersections on the list of the top 10 crash locations in the City of St. Louis:
- Grand and Forest Park Parkway
- Grand and Gravois Avenue
- North Grand and Dr. Martin Luther King Junior Drive
Scott Ogilvie with Planning and Urban Design Agency said making safety improvements is essential from Holly Hills Avenue all the way down to Hall Street.
“A big theme throughout the whole plan is traffic calming. You do that through different features in the roadway, in some cases it will be something called ‘road diets’ where we're going from four lanes to three lanes, which is a safer cross section,” Ogilvie said.
That's exactly what they'll be doing at Grand and MLK.
“You'll see there is also a whole variety of improved pavement markings. And we also have to remember that just north of that section is the Brickline Greenway project. And so when that is constructed, this should have really dramatic traffic calming effects,” Ogilvie said.
Mense said right now on Grand there are a lot of issues: speeding, running red lights and stop signs, to name a few.
“When a roadway becomes wide and straight, it reads like a highway. So people just stop paying attention and they start driving more more quickly,” Mense said.
In addition to road diets, they'll also be putting in bike lanes between the sidewalks and parked cars and improving crosswalks with things like bumpouts so pedestrians spend less time in the middle of the street.
But Mense said there's even more that can be done.
“Optimizing the signal so that people aren't turning right into pedestrians or cyclists. And so some of that timing and that fine tuning will be important, as well as some signage. We aren’t seeing the necessary signage yet in this project,” Mense said.
Construction is supposed to start in 2025.
The next meeting is this Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m. at St. Mary's High School. If you can't make it, you can submit comments online here.