joshkelahan.com

MLK Bridge, St. Louis, MO. Courtesy Wikipedia Commons

I work in St. Louis.  Not downtown, not in the central west end, but somewhere in the middle.  Some people call it mid-town, I call it hell.  Anyway, I hate sitting in traffic, so for me, in the morning my best option is to go through downtown.  As far as I can tell, nothing in STL is open before 9am anyway, so all the downtown roads are clear.  Now there are really only two methods to get into downtown. One is the Eads bridge, the other the MLK.

For the past 4ish years, I’ve been taking the MLK into St. Louis on my way to work.  Sometimes it would be trafficy (technical term) but it was still a lot shorter commute than taking the Poplar.  Last year there was a high profile traffic accident on the MLK where an accident on one side crossed over the center line, and and caused a huge accident on the other side. People died.  It was sad.  Because it was such high profile, a change was going to get made, and it didn’t really matter what they wanted to do, it was gonna happen.  The bridge was to be made safer.

What they decided on, was putting a median on the bridge, no longer would vehicles be able to cross over and cause catastrophic accidents.  But it comes at a cost.  Those concrete medians are so wide, and the bridge itself so narrow, that putting them in meant that one lane would be lost.  So which to lose, one eastbound lane, or one westbound lane?  If we look at this from a safety standpoint, it doesn’t matter which lane we lose.  If we look at it from a traffic perspective, then almost immediately we see a problem.  Because the MLK dumps cars into downtown, if eastbound is backed up, then downtown gets gridlocked.  And if downtown is gridlocked, then no one goes anywhere.  Illinois on the other hand has a lot more space for traffic to sit.  And sit we will.

Everyday almost 30k vehicles cross the MLK (at least in the past). I would wager that 2/3 of those vehicles are semi trucks.  In the past it was 4 lanes merging into two lanes and going over the bridge.  Now those 4 lanes have to merge into one lane.  This sucks.  This means that no matter what, the traffic is going to be bad coming over the MLK.

Instead of rushing this through, they should have stepped back, and done this properly.  In Illinois, the highways were put together to funnel traffic onto the MLK.  The Eads bridge, which also goes downtown, is nearly impossible to get to, because there is only one exit lane, and there is a stop sign at the end of it.  So no matter what you have to stop.  That means that the only other option is the poplar.  Now the poplar has 4 or 5 lanes, which would be plenty if they all just went over the river and kept going, but they don’t.  The right hand lanes have very dangerous exits, where you have to slow down to 10mph.  This slows down everyone on the bridge. GAH!!!!

Ok, so now lets actually step back and look at this.  The infrastructure is already in place to funnel westbound cars to the MLK.  So it makes sense to send cars over the MLK.  The Eads bridge is almost impossible to get to going west.  So what if we change it so that during rush hour, the MLK is only westbound, and the Eads is only eastbound.  That would give us 3 lanes going west (4 if we remove the new median), and 4 going east.

Discuss.