Kansas City’s new year’s resolution should be slimming its roads
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Transportation victories are hard-won in Kansas City.
City leaders and downtown boosters hail the 2-mile streetcar line on Main Street, slated to begin carrying passengers in 2016, as a long-awaited return to rail transportation for the city. As it stands, a rail line that covers 2 linear miles won’t make a dent in a sprawling city’s public-transportation issues.
The streetcar’s construction has been long, complex and expensive. Yet it will be completed before a much easier and much cheaper transportation innovation — a road diet on Grand Boulevard — is instituted.
Road diets are pretty simple. They require little more than planning and paint. They target wide streets, where vehicle traffic can be channeled into fewer lanes in order to adapt other parts of the road for parking, bicycle lanes and pedestrian walkways. The concept makes streets safer for drivers, bike riders and those on foot.
Grand Boulevard, a perfect candidate for a road diet, is where city planners have intended to realign five lanes to three, for traffic from the River Market to Crown Center. Under this scenario, vehicles would travel each way in one lane, with a center lane reserved for left-turning traffic. The two excess lanes would be used for on-street parking, wider sidewalks and bicycle lanes.
Change in Kansas City, particularly to the way people drive cars, can be slow. Grand Boulevard’s road diet was supposed to be enacted in 2015, but it has been pushed to next year. The delay has disappointed transit boosters, who had hoped that Grand’s conversion from an overbuilt roadway to a multiuse thoroughfare would be a high-profile example of what could be applied to several other roads.
“Sometimes it’s hard to make a policy shift because it’s easier to keep doing things the way you’ve always done it,” says Russ Johnson, a former Northland councilman who termed out of office earlier this year.
Johnson championed the idea of studying the city’s roads to determine which could be slimmed down. He served as the chairman of the Kansas City Transportation & Infrastructure Committee when an ordinance regarding which city streets were eligible for road diets was introduced.
At a December 4, 2014, meeting of the committee, Johnson stepped away from the council dais to testify to the committee he runs on behalf of the ordinance. The measure passed easily. Its result was a lengthy list of four-lane, undivided roadways that city workers would research to determine which were feasible for a road diet. In the end, 92 roads were analyzed and 45 deemed eligible.
Those feasible roads follow a general pattern: They have at least four lanes, no median and aren’t heavily trafficked. Generally, roadways that don’t have more than 10,000 vehicle trips a day are suitable for conversion to three lanes.
To date, only one road has been redone: Leeds Trafficway, a half-mile stretch from Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard to Stadium Drive. It’s not a well-traveled or visible roadway — not since General Motors abandoned the Leeds Assembly Plant in 1988. An estimated 3,700 cars a day traverse Leeds Trafficway, making it one of the least-traveled streets among the 92 studied.
It’s going to be a long time before other roads are converted. City planners expect to put eligible roads on diets in conjunction with street-repaving projects, meaning that instead of repainting eligible streets, the city will do road-diet conversions only when roads come up for repaving maintenance.
How often does the city repave its streets?
“Usually, at this stage, with our current budget, you’re looking at 30 years for us to resurface a road,” says Kansas City Public Works spokesman Sean Demory.
For supporters of the road-diet plan, three decades is too long.
Seattle doesn’t call its conversions road diets.
“It’s kind of negative,” says Seattle traffic engineer Dongho Chang. “There’s a perception that something is being taken away.”
Instead, Seattle planners call the process “re-channelization.” But it’s the same concept, and it’s one that the Emerald City, with traffic congestion far greater than what’s found here, has been employing since 1972. Motivated by safety, Seattle has trimmed 40 miles of its roads, and many more miles are targeted.
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In a way, four-lane, undivided roads are already kind of like two-lane roads. Imagine driving in the left lane and getting caught behind someone turning left at an intersection where there’s no dedicated turn lane. You and everyone else bottleneck behind that driver until he or she turns. The cars behind you, their drivers frustrated by the unexpected traffic stop, whip into the right lane, leading to rear-end accidents. The driver making the turn doesn’t always see oncoming traffic, either, with two lanes of vehicles approaching from the other direction.
“That perpetuates over and over again, and the result is, you have a lot of sideswipes and people who are making the turn feeling pressured so they make the turn quickly,” Chang says.
In 2013, traffic engineers in Seattle noticed that a mile-long commuter stretch of 75th Avenue was the site of several vehicle collisions, including a particularly nasty accident. So 75th Avenue went on a diet. Vehicle collisions have dropped by 50 percent since then, Chang says.
Even though Seattle has been doing road diets for 43 years, drivers still resist the change.
“The community actually did a self-polling and pretty much you look at the comments, people were very skeptical upfront,” Chang says. “They said it was the dumbest project ever. After living through it for a few weeks, they said it was better than what was there before.”
Road diets aren’t merely the province of progressive coastal cities. St. Louis has been far ahead of Kansas City in terms of slimming its roads, reconfiguring more than a dozen five- and four-lane roadways into three-lane streets in its downtown and inner-core neighborhoods. Some of those roads have included bicycle lanes.
“It’s a great way to reallocate the space that was there to incorporate all modes of transportation,” says Deanna Venker, commissioner of traffic for St. Louis.
St. Louis doesn’t have a formal program for road diets. Rather, the city dedicates funding when an opportunity arises. Similar to those in Seattle, projects in St. Louis have met with initial skepticism.
“There’s always a little bit of hesitance for folks that have always had four-lane roadways,” Venker says. “They don’t look at it kindly that they’re giving one of their lanes for a bicycle lane.”
In Sioux Center, Iowa, a decision to do a road diet on a main thoroughfare there was heavily criticized. Prior to the conversion, a poll commissioned by the Iowa Department of Transportation showed that 18 percent of respondents supported the idea, while 45 percent opposed it. The remaining 37 percent were neutral on the issue.
The Iowa DOT’s study of the U.S. Highway 75 corridor found that residents were concerned about automobile accidents and speeding on the 25 mph downtown stretch. The seven-month study before the roadway conversion found that 43 percent of the vehicles traveled more than 5 miles per hour over the posted speed limit and there were 30 crashes, a third of which caused injuries. After converting the highway to three lanes, there was a 70 percent drop in speeding in the seven months that followed. Crashes fell from 30 to 13 in the same time frame, with no injury accidents.
The conversion seemed to please Sioux Center residents. Afterward, 45 percent approved the new design compared with the 17 percent who liked it when it was just a concept.
Earlier this year, the city of Seattle converted a 1-mile stretch of Rainier Avenue to three lanes to resolve safety issues. The city didn’t wait for Rainier to come up on a street-maintenance budget. Workers just water-blasted the existing paint off and repainted the street. It was finished overnight.
“These projects are very low-cost,” Chang says. “They’re mostly paint.”
Kansas City doesn’t share that view.
In Kansas City, cost has been a sticking point for proposed road diets. Demory, the Public Works spokesman, says it costs $6,000 to remove paint from one block of road and another $4,300 to restripe it.
That’s why Kansas City decided to go with road diets when eligible streets come up for repaving; the roads need to be repainted then anyway.
“I’m very sensitive to budgetary issues,” former Councilman Johnson says. “My resolution said just roll this into your street-resurfacing program. If you find money elsewhere, you can accelerate it. If you don’t have other money, you’re just going to have to wait your turn.”
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But even when the city does have the money, it doesn’t always use it. In 2012, the Missouri Department of Transportation awarded Kansas City a $400,000 grant under a federal air-quality program. The money was earmarked for bike lanes along Armour and Benton boulevards. In midtown, Armour makes a good candidate for bike paths and a realignment of street lanes. The east-west road has been increasingly lined with new apartments, giving the street something of a community feel.
“Armour is ripe for trying something new, slowing down traffic and, frankly, enhancing the boulevard aspect,” says Nadja Karpilow, vice president of Old Hyde Park Neighborhood Association.
Neighborhood leaders in Old Hyde Park, along with those in the nearby neighborhoods of Squier Park and Center City, have been meeting with City Hall to discuss working on Armour. Specifically, they would like to see Armour Boulevard reduced from four lanes to three, its sidewalks widened, and angled parking and lanes for bicycles added.
Parking availability hasn’t kept up with the boom in apartment units along Armour. Neighborhood leaders say the city has been slow to move on realigning Armour and has put the $400,000 grant at risk of being reclaimed by MoDOT.
“I think there is funding that is available, but it won’t be available forever,” says Hyde Park resident Matt Levi, who has supported changes along Armour.
City staffers met with neighborhood leaders December 17 to present them with ideas for converting Armour and Benton boulevards. The neighborhoods were presented with two road-diet options, on which the city is expected to begin work next year.
Certain priorities factor in. The week of December 7, city crews stripped paint off a section of Main between 16th and 18th streets. Main Street was repaved just as major streetcar construction had finished. City crews repainted lanes, including a stripe for parking that was so close to the curb that cars needed to hug the edge of the sidewalk just to stay within the parking lane to avoid interfering with the streetcar (and getting a ticket).
The Kansas City Streetcar Authority received enough complaints about the alignment of the parking stripe that the city’s Public Works Department scraped the lines off and repainted them a few more inches from the sidewalk to make it easier for cars to park.
Kansas City Public Works picked up the tab.
