St. Louis is well-known for the Gateway Arch, the Mississippi River, and great music. Soon, it will be known for great walking and biking conditions.

Alta Planning and Design is working with HNTB Corporation, Susan Pinsof, and TrailNet, Inc. to create an innovative new regional bicycling and walking plan for the St. Louis, Missouri metropolitan region. The plan will serve as a guidebook for eight counties in Missouri and Illinois, as well as the City of St. Louis. The plan will provide tools to local jurisdictions in this 4,500 square mile region to help plan, design, and implement sidewalks, bike lanes, bike routes, trails, and other facilities. It will also establish goals, objectives, and policies with regards to education and marketing efforts to increase bicycle and pedestrian activity.

Alta will draw on our bicycle and pedestrian planning work across the country to provide best practices guidance for the plan. However, this plan differs greatly from other plans in its general approach. Whereas many other regional plans are preoccupied with determining demand "corridors" and creating static "suitability" maps, this plan will focus on addressing and evaluating the shortcomings of typical bicycling and walking environments and, in turn, providing tangible and practical solutions. The plan's sponsor and regional Metropolitan Planning Organization (East-West Gateway Council of Goverments) expressed a concern about the past bicycle plan being used against them. For example, some jurisdictions did not provide bike lanes on roads because the roads were not identified as "official bike corridors" in the old plan. Under this new plan, bicycle and pedestrian accommodations will be recommended as essential to standard transportation planning and design practice, therefore making the transition to "Complete the Streets". The effort will culminate in a toolbox of local planning and design options, and regional evaluation and project selection alternatives.

Look forward to a more livable St. Louis! For more information about this project, contact Alta Planner Arif Khan in our Portland office.

During the building boom of the 1980s and 1990s in Sunbelt cities, roadway engineers were designing and building the most advanced roadway interchanges known at the time. However, in this heyday of modern roadway engineering, many jurisdictions did not plan for pedestrian, bicycle, or disabled access through many automobile-centric intersections.

Now, we are in an age of transportation re-planning, or retrofitting, in order to find innovative ways to transform inhospitable environments into safe and convenient accessways for pedestrians, bicyclists, and disabled users. The task is more difficult than it sounds. Retrofitting is often expensive, difficult to implement, and impacts the goal of the original intersection design - to move motor vehicles quickly and efficiently with little delay. However, in some cases with high pedestrian traffic, there is a strong need to address non-motorized access through these types of intersections.

Alta Planning + Design has been working in conjunction with Alan Plummer Associates in Austin, Texas for the Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) at one such intersection: I-205/Ben White Blvd. and Lamar Blvd. Pedestrians frequently use the intersection to cross from one shopping area to another, but are doing so without proper facilities. The frequent crossing of the intersection has created demand paths on level areas where sidewalks should be, and across large swaths of concrete. Other issues at this intersection include:

Alta recently completed the Trinity County Bikeways Master Plan in northern California. Trinity County is located in the remote reaches of northwestern California between the Sacramento Valley and the Redwood Coast. The County encompasses the southern tip of the Cascade Range and is bounded by Humboldt County to the west, Mendocino and Tehema Counties to the south, Shasta County to the east, and Siskiyou County to the north.

The main purpose of the Plan is to encourage the development of a unified bicycle system throughout Trinity County that serves the needs of bicycle commuters and recreational bicyclists with connections to other regional non-motorized systems. Recommended projects contained within this plan will be given priority for various State and federal funding sources programmed through the Trinity County Transportation Commission (TCTC).