If you’re a St. Louis city resident and your street is a horror show of careering cars, revving engines, ignored stop signs, and—heaven forfend—crashes, this is generally what you do: You tell your alderperson and cross your fingers. Some alders won’t address it. Those who do will commonly reach for the most accessible tool in their toolkit: speed humps. Alders have the authority to install them, and in the 2023-2024 session, the board passed at least 24 bills to do so in scores of locations. They do it because they can, regardless of whether a speed hump is the best solution.
Not a superb system for calming residential streets, says 9th Ward Alderman Michael Browning. “It really shouldn’t matter who your representative is in order for your street to be safe,” he says.
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So in November, borrowing concepts from Nashville and elsewhere, Browning introduced a bill to create a “resident-led traffic calming system.” He’s fine-tuning the language in talks with Mayor Tishaura Jones’s administration, he says, but the gist is that a group of at least four residents or a neighborhood association could flag a problem spot; technicians in the Street Department would float a 60-percent traffic-calming design; the department would notify all of the block’s residents and businesses (via signs and postcards with QR codes) that they have a month to suggest tweaks; and after taking those into account, the department would put the project into a queue. The queue would then prioritize projects where the most people are getting hurt and where vulnerable populations live. To make all this transparent, anyone would be able to view on the city’s website the project status and an interactive map of what’s happening where. (Nashville actually lets people in the project area vote down a project, not merely comment; see that city’s tools here and here.)
This bill, Browning says, is the first in a series that’s meant to lay a foundation for the yet-to-be-formed Department of Transportation, the creation of which voters approved in November with 88.5 percent support. That consolidated department will officially emerge in 2029 and, in theory, professionalize to the point that aldermen no longer need to be intercessors on speed humps. Browning’s bill affects only traffic-calming projects costing less than a half million dollars. Those costing more will be dealt with by the Complete Streets Advisory Committee, whose processes were overhauled over the summer by an ordinance pushed through by 1st Ward Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer.
Indeed, the aldermanic speed-hump fiefdoms of today are an outgrowth of problems that begat solutions that begat their own problems. In 2014, the city adopted its “complete streets” policy to calm traffic more cohesively, but by 2021, alders were sufficiently fed up with delays and having to pay for $900 traffic studies on their requested projects that they grabbed speed-hump authority for themselves on non-bus-route streets, paying for it with their ward capital—that is, the allotments given annually to each alderperson to do things such as fill potholes and replace dumpsters.
Which brings us to funding. This could make the politics interesting. Browning says that eventually, these smaller traffic-calming moves will be funded by the city’s transportation department; until then, they’re funded by ward capital. But since his bill would empower residents and city technicians to install speed humps and bumpouts without aldermanic approval, it could theoretically allow ward capital to be spent against an alder’s wishes—something it’s easy to imagine them freaking out about.
In that scenario, Browning says, the city could find funding elsewhere, though alders will have a political incentive to go along, since they’d have to answer in the next election to residents who approved the project by a simple majority or more. Not to mention that alders aren’t cut out entirely from this process: Just like residents, they too can report a hot spot, thus initiating a design proposal. In any case, Browning points out, a speed hump—which will, in some cases, still be the best solution—costs about $6,000, which is a small piece of the $800,000 or so each of the 14 wards now receives per year.
“Our system is very reactive and makes St. Louis one of the humpiest cities in the U.S.,” Browning says. His goal, he adds, is to “professionalize city services and use experts and data to make our streets safer.”
Browning’s bill, BB 127, has been referred to the public infrastructure and utilities committee. It will likely get its first hearing in the new year, he says.
