Traffic experts and city planners in Kansas City have tried to make it quick and easy to drive in and out of downtown.
That — spurred by urban sprawl in the 20th century — created wide four-lane roads, two lanes in each direction whisking cars to and from Kansas City’s suburbs.
At the time, it was great for getting office workers home in time for dinner.
But over the years, interstates and highways bloomed to carry commuters into and out of the city center more quickly. That meant those old four-lane surface streets became an overbuilt legacy. With so many lanes and so little traffic, drivers went faster and the roads became, counterintuitively, more dangerous.
“If the only thing you’re doing is trying to move cars as fast as possible and as much as possible,” said Achilleas Kourtellis, an assistant program director at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transportation Research, “then you’re going to sacrifice and have (safety) issues.”
Safety and speeds are typically at odds. Same goes for mixing cars, bikes and pedestrians.
So, Kansas City Hall is slimming down many of those wide open roads. They hope it will slow drivers down to make car crashes less fatal.
You might not get home in time for dinner, but you’re more likely to get there safely — and so will the pedestrians and bicyclists.
Wide roads, fast speeds, fatal car crashes
On a four-lane road, traffic gets hectic and confusing.
If one car needs to turn left, traffic grinds to a halt in the left lane while the driver waits for an opening. Cars stack up behind the left-turning driver and swerve into the right lane to go around.
Or maybe a driver in the right lane stops for a pedestrian at a crosswalk, but the driver behind them gets impatient and swerves to the left — not seeing the pedestrian they’re about to injure.
But if you take the left lane from both directions and convert it to a center lane with a dashed yellow line, it pulls left-turning cars out of the flow of traffic. At crosswalks, the center lane can be used as a refuge for pedestrians.
This is just one way city planners can implement a “road diet,” and it’s one of the cheapest ways to make a road safer.
By narrowing the road, you open space for other things.
“It can be protected bike facilities,” said Michael Kelley, the policy director at BikeWalkKC. “It can be expanded sidewalks. It can be dedicated parking.”
The Federal Highway Administration has studied road diets for nearly 20 years and found that slimming a road down from four lanes to three can reduce crashes by nearly 50%.
“If we’re serious about addressing traffic safety, climate change and equity,” Kelley said, “road diets have to be part of the conversation, period.”
Kansas City already slimmed down its most dangerous roads
Consider Armour Boulevard running through midtown from Broadway Boulevard to The Paseo. It’s lined with apartments and three different schools.
Ten years ago, it had a nasty reputation.
It had two lanes in each direction. Crosswalks were few and far between. That left schoolchildren fending for themselves against two-ton hunks of metal zooming past at 40 mph. At that speed, car crashes are usually fatal for pedestrians.
So, the city slimmed down the road in 2018.
Today, Armour has a single lane in each direction, and a line of street parking separates a bike lane from traffic. Now the prevailing speed is 28 mph — 30% slower — and crashes fell by 16%.
Drivers were initially concerned about increased congestion caused by removing a lane of traffic, but that worry quickly fizzled out. Cars no longer stacked up behind drivers making a left turn, which made traffic smoother and compensated for the lower speeds.
It turned out that Armour Boulevard didn’t need two lanes in each direction. Its average daily volume of roughly 7,000 vehicles is far below the U.S. Department of Transportation’s threshold of 25,000 cars for a three-lane road diet. Only a few streets in Kansas City — Southwest Trafficway is one — see more than 25,000 cars per day.
Kansas City made similar changes to 31st Street, one of the city’s most dangerous roads. City Councilmember Eric Bunch, who represents the 4th District, said it was long overdue.
A car crashed into a flower shop at 31st Street and Cherry Street in 2012. The shop owner said it had happened to their shop front three other times before.
“The property owner lost tenants because they were traumatized,” Bunch said. “We’ve seen streets like 31st Street become more hospitable, which means now people feel safer walking down that street.”
The Kansas City Council passed a resolution in October 2023 directing the city manager to study an automatic process for road diets on the city’s most dangerous streets. The city’s Vision Zero plan, which aims to eliminate all fatal car crashes by 2030, calls for road diets to make the most dangerous stretches of pavement safer.
Next up for slimming down for safety are 23rd Street between I-70 and I-435, Gregory Boulevard between Oak Street and The Paseo and sections of Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard.
Bunch said that most road diets require little construction. It’s usually a matter of repainting streets and sometimes adding bollards or other obstruction to protect bike lanes. That adds minimal costs to resurfacing projects.
“The no-brainers are (roads with) 10,000 vehicles a day,” he said. “It has no business having four lanes of traffic. Like, done deal, let’s redo it.”
Troost Avenue (north of Brush Creek) and Prospect Avenue, both of which appear on that list of Kansas City’s most dangerous roads, fall under that threshold.
Other four-lane roads like 39th Street, Linwood Boulevard, Truman Road, 63rd Street and 75th Street are also potential candidates for a road diet. They see between 10,000 to 15,000 vehicles a day — low enough for a three-lane road diet.
Ask people what they think
In theory, the city could automatically swap out every four-lane road with a three-lane road diet as a matter of routine. But the city learned a frustrating and expensive lesson last year when the construction of bike lanes caused uproar among business owners on Truman Road.
The Mid-America Regional Council conducted a study in 2018 on how to make that road safer. In 2022 and 2023, a total of 13 people died in car crashes on Truman Road.
Part of their plan was to construct bike lanes in both directions on Truman Road. But that meant blocking street parking for certain businesses, making scheduled deliveries more difficult.
After those business owners complained, the Kansas City Council agreed to a compromise to remove the bike lanes from one side of the street, costing an added $250,000.
Yet, Bunch said, most of the complaints raised by the business owners could have been avoided.
“A lot of them were like, ‘Hey, I have deliveries at this time every day and I just need a place for this truck to pull off,’” he said. “We could have solved that had we had that conversation.”
This time around, City Hall is trying to get ahead of that debate by hosting public meetings with affected neighbors and business owners. The city’s public works department hosted one of those meetings on July 11 at the Cleaver Family YMCA to discuss the proposed road diet on Gregory Boulevard.
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
