Residents who have long advocated for a more walkable and bikeable St. Louis are decrying the city’s decision to remove a handful of bumpouts at intersections in the heart of downtown.
Bumpouts are traffic-calming infrastructure that extend into the street, intended both to slow cars down at intersections as well as provide partial protection to pedestrians as they cross. A City Hall spokesman said that four total had been removed and one other is under consideration to be removed, all from the same area of downtown near Broadway and Market.
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Mayor Cara Spencer, herself an avid cyclist, says that the specific bumpouts that were removed were causing “massive choke points” when downtown played host to multiple events at the same time in recent weeks. “There were people reporting three hours or more to get out of downtown,” she said. At a press conference yesterday, Spencer cited specifically the fact that the drop-off circle at the nearby Hilton was “nearly impossible to navigate.”
Spencer did not cite a specific downtown event, but last weekend did see the Cardinals, Blues and Battlehawks all playing home games on the same day. Prior to that, traffic following the Zach Bryan concert at The Dome at America’s Center backed up to such an extent that it made KMOV’s news broadcast. Jon Kipper reported that concertgoers were late to the show due to delays coming in and then were backed up for hours trying to leave.
Julie Vomund with the Coalition to Protect Cyclists and Pedestrians says that she’s not exactly thrilled with the reasons behind the bumpouts’ removal. “We want to make downtown a more enjoyable experience, a place where people can hang out and live their lives,” she says. “If we’re trying to send them away as fast as possible, that pretty much ruins that.”
Vomund is currently endeavoring to walk every single block in the city. She started in January 2024, hit the halfway mark just last week and was covering some ground in Walnut Park East the morning before she talked to SLM. Her project overlapped with the city beginning to use ARPA money on the installation of traffic-calming infrastructure, a priority of Mayor Tishaura Jones’ administration. Vomund says that she’s seen real improvements—in particular new medians in the center of major roads like Kingshighway mean it is less and less common for her to have to detour many blocks out of her way to find a traffic light so she can cross.
This overall improvement, she adds, makes it disheartening when a relatively new piece of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure just disappears.
A City Hall spokesman says that the total cost for the installation and removal of the downtown bumpouts in question was $30,000.
Spencer noted that the design for these specific traffic-calming measures predate her time in office. “But I own this,” she said. She added that she’s challenging downtown businesses and her Streets Department to make sure that both sides have a “coordinated approach” that “makes sense.”
The City of St. Louis isn’t the only municipality to grapple with traffic-calming infrastructure that instead makes drivers irate. Last year, the Missouri Department of Transportation ripped out bumpouts on Clarkson Road in Chesterfield after an outcry from residents.
