Downtown Kalamazoo has been called a spaghetti bowl, with a traffic pattern motorists compare to tangled pasta.
One knot of noodles is at the west end, where two major streets cross; West Main Street and West Michigan Avenue, which becomes Stadium Drive when you travel Southwest.
A railroad track runs alongside the intersection and a web of little streets branches off to the north. One of those streets is called Elm Crossover.
There’s no good way to go west from this intersection. With the help of Elm Crossover, you used to be able to go north on Elm Street and then west. But the road closed in 2024.
“It was nice to have it. It was a shortcut,” Kalamazoo resident James Voigt said.
Voigt lives a few miles away, he explained that Elm Crossover made some trips at lot easier, such as going to Kalamazoo's North Side or the Douglas Community Association, where he would give blood.
“I asked, 'Why's That?' Any chance we'll get the Elm Street crossover back?”
Elm Crossover: vital or nightmare?
How do people in the neighborhood feel? In an unscientific survey, opinions varied.
Diomedes Rabago lives on a cul-de-sac just up the street from Elm Crossover.
Rabago said he misses the crossover.
“My only ways to access the bigger streets, the bigger avenues is going on to Elm on each direction. And if I need to go to like Stadium Drive or coming from Stadium Drive, nowadays I have to go around the whole neighborhood,” Rabago said.
"It takes me more time to get home or to access one of the major avenues like West Main or Stadium Drive."
Natasha Blake-Beach lives not much farther away, but her opinion lied on the opposite end of the spectrum to Rabago's.
She said the closure has actually made the neighborhood safer.
“It seemed a little bit inconvenient at first, but it has cut down on the speeding through the neighborhood.”
Beach noted that Elm Crossover allowed more drivers to access Elm Street.
“They would be cutting across the main road right there and just didn't slow down as they came through here. And there's lots of kids and animals in this neighborhood and it was a real problem.”
Will it come back?
Question-Asker James Voight wanted to know if Elm Crossover’s ever coming back. For an answer, we reached out to Dennis Randolph, Public Works Manager and Traffic Engineer for the City of Kalamazoo.
After meeting at the crossover, Randolph explained that there’s no chance it will return, adding that one of the reasons it closed was because, in the coming years, Elm Crossover will no longer be needed, as the nearby one-way streets will be converted to two-way traffic.
“What that means is it'll be a lot easier for people to backtrack. If they miss a turn that they can turn around easily and be able to get back without taking a half mile trip or a mile trip to go back to where they wanted to be.”
According to Randolph, the converted streets will include West Main Street, West Kalamazoo Avenue, Michikal Street and West Michigan Avenue.
But why not still keep it open after the conversion?
Randolph explained that if the city wanted to do this, they would have had to convert the one-way crossover into a two-way, which would have required adding an additional railway crossing gate for the other lane.
“We would have had to put gates and arms on this side also and it amounts to a significant amount of money, a quarter of a million dollars, a lot of money to add the crossings.”
Why close it before the conversion?
According to Randolph, there are a couple different reasons for this, the first being that the original plan was to start converting the nearby streets earlier.
"We had thought our schedule was going to start a little earlier. Unfortunately, it got held up because of bureaucratic red tape."
Randolph added that railway crossings are also simply dangerous and costly to maintain, adding that the Federal Highway Administration and the Michigan Department of Transportation are always looking to eliminate crossings where ever possible.
“They came to us when we started talking about the two-way conversion and said would the city consider closing some crossings as part of that work?" Randolph said.
"Again, it makes the system safer for folks. And I think in the long term it cleans things up. We don't always have car crashes at our crossings, but a lot of pedestrians get hurt and killed on the railroad through Kalamazoo here."
Randolph said that the new Kalamazoo Event Center going in a few blocks away also helped doom the crossover.
He said the city expects to see more traffic in the area when it’s completed and that closing the crossover will reduce the amount of that traffic that goes through the Stuart Neighborhood, which includes Elm Street.
"We've been concerned from the beginning of trying to protect the Stuart neighborhood from just people getting in there, going to the event center and trying to park and it being a load on the neighborhood," Randolph explained.
"What we're really trying to do is make sure that event center traffic stays around the event center and towards downtown."
James still misses the Elm shortcut, but he said he’s happy to know why the city decided it had to go.
“It helps to know the safety concerns. And I appreciate the explanation.”
Michael Symonds reports for WMUK through the Report for America national service program.
