urbanSTL

Having lived in a city full of speed bumps and humps (in Pakistan) they were generally a negative experience. And I don't even speed.
And how would these affect a future street car track network (I can dream), bicycle movements, snow plows, storm water runoff etc etc?

I do think people who drive like maniacs deserve to have their momentum broken but in general if you have to resort to a speed bump to calm traffic, your street design may be faulty. either too wide or lacking interest like trees, buildings, street life etc.

Lets see how well these are implemented.

Speed humps can and do work in major cities. I may have already stated this, but here in DC they are used extensively (especially in the residential areas East of the Capitol) and people have 0 issues. There are some wider, raised sidewalk style bumps as well near parks and they are fantastic for pedestrians and even dog walkers to use.

Any St. Louis politician who declares that they would be a negative is simply grasping at straws because they don't like change.

Maybe look at it as a way for STL to appeal to our future youths?

Not really against speed bumps per se. I think they are a poor substitute for good street design.

^ I think they can be part of good street design. The city desperately needs a holistic streets plan - or some of the criticism of this being haphazard with unintended consequences is probably true.

imran wrote:I do think people who drive like maniacs deserve to have their momentum broken but in general if you have to resort to a speed bump to calm traffic, your street design may be faulty. either too wide or lacking interest like trees, buildings, street life etc.

In my neighborhood—North Kingshighway Hills (next to the old Tropicana)—people fly down Hereford 45+ mph. And that's a tight, narrow street with trees. Unfortunately, I fear I fatal accident one day. I don't think it's design in this case, it's plain old jackholes.

When I lived in Atlanta, the speed bumps (in North Druid Hills) were wide and shallow with broad, large white arrows painted on them. These worked really well, slowed you down without jolting the car.

(hmmm, just noticed I must like living in neighborhoods with 'North...Hills' in the name.)

I guess another part of the equation is that we need to stop annoying drivers with all the stupid closed streets. Maybe some of them speed out of frustration
#healthegrid

Surely speed bumps would've been the better alternative to just closing off the whole street if that's legitimately what their purpose was? I work by SLU and there's a whole bunch of streets that are annoyingly blocked off in the area, meaning I have to go out of my way to navigate sometimes. I get that some of those streets are residential and residents likely don't want the through-traffic, but geez. They could have at least made them look better than the big-ol Stalinist concrete blocks that they chose for a lot of them.

While we're on the subject of traffic flow: is there any reason the city insists on still having timed traffic lights in a lot of areas rather than sensor-based ones? Seems like a lot of lights have timings for no real reason.

I'm sure it's very expensive, but I feel like it'd be one of those long-term investments that would eventually pay itself off.

Good street design is often the factor that makes or breaks the street. The problem with St. Louis streets is that they are almost always too wide. Narrowing them with bigger sidewalks, bumpouts, stop signs, sensors and enforcement are nice, but are all band-aid solutions. For all the negatives that closed streets bring, at least they can be nice reprieves from automobile traffic for people, especially children.

I think a more permanent albeit novel solution would just be to privatize the center of the street. Free street parking would be eliminated, naturally. Give owners of property on the block a cut of the profits and maybe at least one out of ten times there'll be blocks where at least 50% of residents will agree to the idea. The center of the street could even just be privately owned, fenced off parking, and for a lot of streets even with each residence owning a space I bet there will still be more than enough parking spots. Obviously, this'll be a bare minimum short-term result but the hope is to eventually build more residences in the medians, which this approach makes possible. I live near Laclede and West Pine in CWE and these residential streets are monstrously wide (many sections of them already have grassy medians), and could benefit from such a solution: https://anunearthlyglow.com/median-buil ... clede-ave/. Many (I would say the majority of St. Louis non-arterial) streets could adopt this solution.

The only downside (aside from the obvious logistical implementation and social inertia ones) would be that emergency vehicle and truck design would need to evolve for them to move through the new streets. But a lot of these non-arterial streets are closed off and inaccessible to such vehicles anyway.