urbanSTL

Does anyone have any idea where I could find a list of road diets implemented in StL (both city and county) since about 2015 and dates of road closure for the work + when it officially opened?

(I'm a WUSTL researcher. We have a bunch of driving data - think Progressive insurance car chip level data. I think it could be cool to look at driver behavior before and after these diets were implemented.)

Off the top of my head, these are the ones I can think of:
Natural Bridge (plus the gazillion roundabouts)
Hampton
Grand
North and South Rd in U City between Olive Blvd and Delmar

I'd also love suggestions if anyone just remembers "this happened near me" and I can start combing old news articles or something to try and piece the history together.

jwisch wrote: ↑

Mar 09, 2022

Does anyone have any idea where I could find a list of road diets implemented in StL (both city and county) since about 2015 and dates of road closure for the work + when it officially opened?

(I'm a WUSTL researcher. We have a bunch of driving data - think Progressive insurance car chip level data. I think it could be cool to look at driver behavior before and after these diets were implemented.)

Off the top of my head, these are the ones I can think of:
Natural Bridge (plus the gazillion roundabouts)
Hampton
Grand
North and South Rd in U City between Olive Blvd and Delmar

I'd also love suggestions if anyone just remembers "this happened near me" and I can start combing old news articles or something to try and piece the history together.

Not sure if this is too small of a section to be of interest to you but 3 blocks of Convention Plaza between 9th & Tucker were restriped last year from 2 lanes each way to 1 each way with parallel parking on the south side and 45 degree parking on the north. 

In 2017 southbound Wabash/ Ellendale Avenues lost a lane and a median was added/improved dividing north and south traffic between Landsdowne and Slay Park in conjunction with extending the River Des Peres Greenway (https://www.stlouiscitytalk.com/posts/2 ... ed-in-2017).

On the temporary side of things there are also what were effectively "temporary road diets" downtown caused by the street closures and jersey barriers installed to combat street racing/drifting/etc.

edit to add: Morgan Ford from Holly Hills to the city limit in late 2015 according to https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local ... /210771723

Wasn't Gravois south of Chippewa reduced since 2015? And maybe Chippewa East of Gravois?

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Miss Shell wrote: ↑

Mar 09, 2022

Wasn't Gravois south of Chippewa reduced since 2015? And maybe Chippewa East of Gravois?

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Gravois was reduced from 3 in each direction to 2 with turn lane in 2015-2016 time frame, I want to say from grand to 44

I just wanted to follow up on the questions I asked > a year ago about sites of implemented road diets in the city/county. Thanks to everyone that helped brainstorm locations. After combing through your responses/MoDOT/submitting an open records request to StL County, and then looking at places where our research participants had actually driven both before and after the road diets had been implemented....there were 3 with a reasonable amount of data: Maryland Ave in Clayton, Pershing Ave in U City and Natural Bridge Road (most of our recruited research participants live in the county rather than St. Louis City. I had especially wanted to look at effects on Hampton but we just didn't have enough instances where people participating in our study had driven there)

I'm going to give a super quick overview of our findings as I think they may be of interest to this group (and I do so appreciate everyone's contributions of ideas)....
I'm an Alzheimer Disease researcher. It is well-established that the plaques that gunk up your brain (amyloid) start to form 15 - 20 years prior to "clinically meaningful" symptoms of Alzheimer Disease (memory issues, etc.). We know from other driving studies that people with amyloid plaques but no obvious memory problems actually drive more slowly than the general population. What we learned from this study (which was super cool) is that road diets actually bring the speed of the general population (or at least, the group of healthy older adults enrolled in our study) down to the speed that the people with amyloid plaques. Before a road diet was implemented, people without amyloid plaques were driving like 4 - 9 mph faster on the three roads mentioned than people with amyloid plaques. After the road diet was implemented, there was no change in the speed of the people with amyloid plaques, however, the healthy controls' driving speeds were slowed so that there was no longer a meaningful difference between the groups. Our takeaway from this is that road diets serve to reduce speed variance. Here's a link to the article - it should be free to view for the next ~50 days but I'm happy to directly send it to anyone that's interested. https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1hexa4tTwCukYo

Wow, congratulations on getting it published!

^^Very cool indeed! Speculating wildly here, but I'd guess that a lack of variance is a good thing, as it will cut down on merging and passing, which are two of the biggest sources of accidents.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I'm . . . too close to your subject, sadly. As are a great many of us, I expect. Glad to see treatments improving.

(And glad to see roads getting the diet treatment and people slowing down a bit and driving more reasonably.)

I'm on Pershing in U City pretty regularly; it's crazy how many people actually drive in the bike lane as if it were a regular vehicle lane.

framer wrote: ↑

Sep 02, 2023

I'm on Pershing in U City pretty regularly; it's crazy how many people actually drive in the bike lane as if it were a regular vehicle lane.

Oh for sure. It's all just paint - the driving space feels just as wide as it did before the road diet. The changes to Maryland Ave and Natural Bridge make you actually feel like there is less space to maneuver a car than there used to be, which is what slows people down. The only thing slowing drivers down on Pershing is the potholes. 

Are you telling me that paint isn't real infrastructure?

All my fancy phd learnin suggests that it is not

I'm shocked

By jwisch!

NextSTL - Road Diets and Older Adults

https://nextstl.com/2023/09/road-diets- ... er-adults/