I-70 needs help in Missouri — but are more, wider highways the answer in Kansas City? | Opinion

If you live or work in downtown Kansas City, you’re familiar with the web of freeways and surface streets that carry vehicles to the suburbs and beyond. It isn’t easy for motorists to navigate now, and next month’s closure of the Buck O’Neil Bridge’s southbound lanes won’t make commutes easier.

Most Americans are dependent on automobiles. That’s especially true here.

“The Kansas City region has more than double the number of freeway miles per capita found in Denver … and exceeds all other Midwestern peer cities,” the Kansas Department of Transportation concluded a decade ago in its ambitious Five County Regional Transportation Study.

The problem hasn’t improved since then, as the metropolitan area continues to sprawl to the north, south and east. So it should be good news, then, that Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s new budget aims to pump $859 million of state funds into increasing the capacity of often-congested Interstate 70. The plan would add a third highway lane in urban areas, including in parts of Kansas City. That should open the bottlenecks right up, especially at rush hour — right?

That isn’t how it works out in real life. As the KDOT report warned: “Our roadway capacity is very high and the associated maintenance costs will last in perpetuity. This gives credence to the idea that the region can no longer afford to rely on adding lanes as the sole solution to its transportation issues.”

“Our high number of highway miles per capita as a metro is problematic on many fronts,” said 4th District City Councilman Eric Bunch, who takes a special interest in transit. “I applaud the governor wanting to spend money in Kansas City, but new highway lanes would add financial burden on (the Missouri Department of Transportation), which is already perpetually cash-strapped.”

Southwest Trafficway, Bruce R. Watkins Drive

Bunch, like other urbanists, is concerned that as cities build roads with increased capacity, “induced demand” will draw traffic to fill those roadways. It isn’t a new idea: City planners have realized for a century that if you pave it, they will drive. New lanes may initially ease congestion, but vehicles eventually fill the expanded space.

After several years of arguing and planning, Kansas City began in earnest to acquire land for the construction of Southwest Trafficway as the midpoint of the 20th century approached. “The viaduct will run from a point north of 20th Street to Penn Valley Park south of 26th Street,” said a 1948 Kansas City Times story. “It will be part of an inter-regional highway through the city.”

Today, the trafficway is a slow-moving six lanes stretching to Westport Road, then turning into Belleview Avenue as it goes to the Country Club Plaza, and then the boulevards of Ward Parkway. With a 35-mph speed limit, parking allowed during off-peak hours and almost no legal left turns, it isn’t a racetrack — but it still divides neighborhoods, making Roanoke and Coleman Highlands especially into somewhat secluded, relatively inaccessible enclaves.

Southwest Trafficway was always envisioned as a connector of already-thriving commercial districts. By contrast, the path U.S. Highway 71 cuts through Kansas City’s East Side was partly sold to residents as a thoroughfare that would bring prosperity to an underdeveloped part of town.

“If you open up access to an area, generally you will get some positive economic development,” said a transportation specialist from Mid-America Regional Council in October 2001, shortly before the freeway’s official opening. The Star described it then as a “hybrid of a freeway and a parkway that would be compatible with the surrounding neighborhoods,” though that compatibility remains a question of fierce debate today.

The idea of another high-capacity north-south corridor through Kansas City got its start in the 1950s. By the mid-’60s, city officials set their sights on a path that would run east of Troost Avenue. And that wasn’t good news to many who lived in the neighborhoods it would run through.

At a 1966 public meeting at Southwest High School, former City Council member and Black community leader Bruce R. Watkins demanded: “Is that freeway going to become Kansas City’s own Berlin Wall, and are they going to try to keep the Negroes east of it?”

It took more than 50 years, a federal lawsuit and a consent decree, but some 60,000 automobiles per day navigate what’s now known as Bruce R. Watkins Drive — honoring its early detractor — from the southeast corner of the downtown loop to Bannister Road, with no easy connections to I-70.

Most of Watkins Drive operates like a highway with off-ramps, but a number of stoplights, crosswalks and lower speed limits from 55th Street to Gregory Boulevard meant to calm traffic and connect neighborhoods pose safety hazards to pedestrians and motorists alike, critics contend.

Nick Gadino, owner of Midland Hardware at 7107 Prospect Avenue, just west of the parkway, said, “I really have mixed emotions” about how the thoroughfare has affected the area and his store. He’s owned Midland since 1976, and has seen a lot of change. “If anything, it’s brought business because of the increased traffic flow,” he said. “As far as my business is concerned, it hasn’t hurt me.”

But he also remembers that the idea floated for a nearby pedestrian overpass for foot traffic “never materialized.”

Today, he sees two major impediments to the neighborhood’s progress: “Economically,” he said, “the greater problem is crime and drugs. … I don’t see businesses flourishing until they do something about that.”

But it’s clear that Watkins Drive has hardly flourished as a thriving commercial corridor over the 20-plus years it’s been open for business. “Freeways through urban areas are, by definition, not great for development in the parts of the city they pass through,” said Councilman Bunch. “The whole point (of freeways) is to move people past those places, not to get them to stop.”

Eisenhower wanted to involve states

President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Grand Plan” for a connecting and upgrading the nation’s network of roads was a sterling example of federalism. When he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, Eisenhower recognized that taking modern, multilane highways to places like his tiny home town of Abilene, Kansas, would be a boon to national security as the automobile age shifted into high gear.

He also thought the states should work with the federal government to determine which projects would best serve municipalities on a local basis. So it’s welcome to see that Gov. Parson appears to be consulting with lawmakers such as state House Majority Leader Jonathan Patterson of Lee’s Summit, who told us he’s “had a number of conversations with MoDOT,” and that work between Blue Springs and Odessa would include “reconstructing existing pavement, constructing new bridges and redoing some of the interchanges.”

There’s no single solution to moving people around in a city such as ours, whose far-flung footprint and limited river crossings make public transit especially difficult. But as new south Johnson County highway interchanges open, the Grandview Triangle morphs into the Three Trails Crossings, and motorists still sit inching along in their cars during every rush hour, we need to keep asking our elected officials and ourselves: Will future Kansas Citians look back at the 2020s wondering if more, wider highways were the best we could imagine?