St. Louis commuters will have to endure a couple of more months of construction as workers repave and revamp Kingshighway in segments, city officials said.
The project has tested drivers’ patience as the city updates the nine-mile thoroughfare top-to-bottom, part of a multiyear effort to make major roads safer using $46 million in pandemic relief funds.
While many drivers dislike the long traffic jams and rough segments of pavement – “I’d rather gargle with razor blades than to drive on Kingshighway right now,” one Facebook user wrote – St. Louis Complete Streets program manager Scott Ogilvie said that the final product will mean fewer risks for drivers and pedestrians.
The windfall from the American Rescue Plan Act means the city can be more ambitious, he said.
“St Louis has historically had kind of an inconsistent approach to arterial street resurfacing, and so these ARPA projects have been kind of a rare opportunity for us to do entire corridors like start to finish,” he said. “I think it's really beneficial to get everybody thinking in that mode.”
According to the Missouri Department of Transportation, around 40,000 vehicles travel on the busiest parts of the road daily.
St. Louis workers have been redoing Kingshighway in several segments. Parts of the project on the city’s north side are already completed, and the southernmost segment of the boulevard just needs paint, Ogilvie said.
The long segment currently under construction in south St. Louis, from approximately Southwest Avenue to south of Chippewa, should be finished around mid-October, he said. Newly installed pavement has to sit for a few weeks before workers can paint lane markers and stripes.
Next year, the city will begin work on the middle part of the project to connect the finished segments, Ogilvie said.
The project adds bump-outs, medians and other traffic-calming measures intended to keep drivers from speeding. Parts of the road will get new marked bike lanes. The city is also redesigning several intersections where people have been more likely to get into car accidents, including where Kingshighway intersects with Delmar and Florissant.
“These things tend to work,” Ogilvie said. “It's not going to mean there are zero crashes … but hopefully there are fewer car crashes, and hopefully they're less severe.”
Three of the eight sections will get so-called road diets, or lane reductions.
Matthew Rutledge, a resident of Tower Grove South who frequently bikes, runs and walks in the area, was disappointed that the busy, congested section of the street near where he lives will not get a bike lane or significant lane reduction.
He said he made it a point to go to planning meetings, where he said several people advocated for fewer lanes adjacent to Tower Grove Park.
“It felt like it fell short of what it seemed like the community was asking for,” Rutledge said. “It still is the typical street design of prioritizing ‘how many cars can we get through? How fast can we get the cars to move over?’ … So I've just been kind of disappointed, and was trying to figure out where the disconnect was between what the community wanted and what the engineering firm was presenting.”
He said that asking pedestrians to travel east to where the future Tower Grove Connector cycle track is being constructed will discourage people from walking or using a bike.
“Asking someone to detour an extra half a mile east and then have to bounce back a half a mile west is adding, you know, 30%, 50%, onto their trip,” he said. “Instead of taking a direct route, you're making it take that much longer.”
Berto Garcia co-owns Garcia Properties, the real estate group that also operates the Golden Hoosier and Bud’s Pizza and Beer near where the street intersects Chippewa.
“Reducing lanes and improving parking is absolutely the way to go in the residential sections of Kingshighway,” he said.
However, the improvements next to the Garcia businesses "amount to paving and striping,” Garcia said. “While I think this will repair the damage utility companies have made to the street over the years, it will not change much in terms of safety.”
Garcia added that without traffic enforcement, the city could spend a billion dollars on Kingshighway and “it will do very little good.”
Ogilvie said the city had to be strategic about where to put the road diets. Some sections of Kingshighway are much busier than others, he said, and taking lanes out of the road could mean drivers would start taking detours through quieter, residential areas.
Ward 2 Alderman Tom Oldenburg, who represents neighborhoods near the southernmost part of the project, is happy Kingshighway is finally being repaved but said the rollout has been somewhat “clumsy.”
“It’s sort of that weird moment where we're in the middle of construction, and it does create, often, a more unsafe environment,” he said. He added that neighbors have complained about the lack of signage, lane markings or cones around construction zones that has made driving confusing and dangerous.
“It's been a long time coming, and I just ask folks to be a little more patient with the city and the traffic department, along with the contractor, as they put the finishing touches on it,” he said. “It will make the Kingshighway corridor more attractive and more valuable.”
