Photo by Jessica Stewart / St. Joseph News-Press / Purchase this photo

Traffic travels on Village Drive on Tuesday afternoon. The city would like to turn many busy streets to boulevards, with landscaped medians and bike lanes.

St. Joseph has outgrown its belt.

The concern lies not with the city’s collective waistline, but with the Parkway System designed decades ago as a green belt around the community.

Winding roads carry drivers from Krug Park in the north to Hyde Park in the south, with smaller ribbons of green space shooting off to the side. Yet, years of eastward growth have left a large part of St. Joseph unserved by the Parkway System.

A new plan could stretch a larger, but slightly different, belt around the entire city once again.

City Planner Mike Kellam presented the city’s new Boulevard System Master Plan last week to City Council members.

The use of boulevards will differ from the parkways locals are accustomed to. A parkway occupies a space hundreds of feet wide, often with no buildings in sight and landscaping along the roadway. The city’s idea of a boulevard will include a manicured median, bicycle lanes in each direction, wide sidewalks and a canopy of trees. Think of Ashland Avenue with a median and more room for bicycles. Or Village Drive with a full complement of trees.

“A parkway is more or less a linear park on city property,” Mr. Kellam said. “The boulevards will be built on a right-of-way where the city does not own the property along the roadway.”

The plan designates Cook, Riverside, Pickett, Waterworks and Ajax roads, along with McArthur Drive, as boulevards. The idea includes new roads as well, such as a connector that would carry Cook west toward the riverfront, where it would join Waterworks Road.

Many miles of roads in the plan travel through undeveloped areas, which provide room for a 150-foot right-of-way with two lanes of traffic in each direction, striped bike lanes on each side, three rows of planting space and eight-foot sidewalks.

In developed areas such as the neighborhoods along Pickett and Ajax roads, the city will alter its plan to make sure it does not have a negative effect on property owners. Options with 100-foot and 70-foot right-of-ways would cut two lanes of traffic, narrow the green spaces and sidewalks, and require bicycles to share the road with automobiles.

“We understand that some areas are developed, and we’re not going to take away people’s front yards,” Mr. Kellam said. “It kind of takes away from the park feel if there is a house right on the road.”

The city condemned large chunks of land when it built the original Parkway System. Mr. Kellam said the practice will not be used in the new plan.

Like the city’s Land Use Plan, the Boulevard Plan is not a binding document and does not set policy. Instead, it serves as a guide for the City Council when it makes decisions, possibly decades down the road.

Before the plan can take effect, it must be adopted as a resolution by the council and ordinances must be passed to establish development codes and regulatory policies that would allow the city to implement the plan.

A copy of the proposed plan given to the council suggests including a portion of the plan — possibly Waterworks Road and McArthur Drive — on the 2012 Capital Improvements Program. If development occurs elsewhere, the boulevard system could begin in another part of town.

“Every roadway we’ve identified has the potential to be the first,” Mr. Kellam said. “It just depends on where we can get the funding and cooperation from the council, developers and the community.”

Clinton Thomas can be reached at clintonthomas@npgco.com.