Sam Correll and Spencer Claiborne have watched cars speed past their house on Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard for years.
During that time, they’ve witnessed several crashes from their front porch. The speeding is so bad that the noise from the traffic often keeps Claiborne up at night — he says he can tell what time in the morning it is just from the sound of traffic.
“If you're just driving by on your way from 71 to the Plaza, you might not notice the speed,” Claiborne said. “But if you spend a lot of time in this area, you notice the speed. You notice the frequency of hearing brakes and then a crash.”
The section of the road east of the Plaza is listed as a top priority on the city’s High Injury Network. In the last five years, there have been more than 30 crashes on Cleaver Boulevard between Troost and Oak. The road has also been on the city’s bike plan, because it would connect the Gillham Cycle Track and the Trolley Track Trail — two of the city’s longest pieces of bicycle infrastructure.
Crews began work last week to change a stretch of Cleaver Boulevard between Oak Street and Troost Avenue to make it safer. The project is expected to take three months as part of the city’s Vision Zero plan to eliminate traffic deaths. It also marks a change in how the city coordinates road improvements and repaving.
Community advocates are celebrating the redesign, but hope this is the last time the city takes so long to fix its dangerous streets.
A delayed plan and more crashes
When Correll and Claiborne heard that the city planned to change the design of Cleaver Boulevard last year, they were excited to see their neighborhood get safer. Then the project stalled in Kansas City Council chambers and the road was restriped exactly as before.
The data showing how dangerous Cleaver Boulevard is should have made the section of road between Oak and Troost ripe for a road diet — when the number of car lanes is reduced to make it safer, often by adding mobility lanes. But a lack of coordination between the city’s road resurfacing schedule and road diet plan meant it got repaved in 2023 the same as it was before.
The road stayed at four lanes and the unprotected bicycle lanes were so narrow at points that the bicycle symbol couldn’t even fit within the lines.
That’s when Correll and Claiborne decided to amp up their advocacy.
The pair made a petition for the city to fix the road. They knocked on neighbors' doors to discuss how the road affected them. They got letters of support from the nearby Nelson Atkins Museum of Art and Midtown KC Now. Then they built a website and X account to publicize the message and show how dangerous this section of street was.
They went to community meetings about the road redesign. Correll wrote an OpEd in the Kansas City Star about the problems getting the road fixed. The couple even messaged Mayor Quinton Lucas every time there was a crash.
After work from Correll and Claiborne, the neighborhood association, advocacy groups like BikeWalkKC and councilmembers like Bunch, the road diet — delayed for a year — work finally began.
When the months-long project is done, driving lanes on Cleaver Boulevard between Oak and Troost will be reduced from four lanes to two or three in some places. It will also feature protected bike lanes on both sides of the street and a raised median for pedestrians crossing the street.
Kansas City Councilmember Eric Bunch had been trying to get Cleaver Boulevard changed since before the first design stalled and has been working with groups trying to fix the road. He also sponsored legislation last year for the city to create an annual road diet plan based on which streets are up for resurfacing.
That way, there would be a new design in place to change the road before it got repaved — saving money and time improving the streets.
“Ultimately, the goal here is to ensure that not only is the street safe for bicycles, but it's a safer street for the people who live there, a safer street for people who drive there,” Bunch said. “The main focus has been calming the traffic and slowing it down so that people are driving at safer speeds.”
Karen Moninger is a board member of the Rockhill Homes Association and was on the group's “Cleaver Committee,” where she and others worked with the city to come up with a design for the project. She thinks this project will benefit everyone in the neighborhood, and harkens back to a time when Cleaver Boulevard used to be a two-lane street. The association has been working for decades to return to that.
“Cleaver (Boulevard) is dangerous,” Moninger said. “It splits our neighborhood — no one wants to walk across because the traffic is so dangerous. We're looking forward to having some crosswalks and reducing the lanes. I think it's going to really help to slow down traffic and make things a little quieter.”
Moninger hopes the city continues to collaborate with neighborhoods on its road diets so that each area gets a solution tailored to its needs.
The new coordination between the city’s road diet plan and its resurfacing schedule should prevent another years-long redesign situation like what happened on Cleaver Boulevard again. Bunch hopes this will be the last time a road has to get repaved twice in two years because of that lack of coordination.
“The bottom line for me here is that safety should always supersede the free flow of traffic,” Bunch said. “Under no circumstances should fast-moving traffic be prioritized over the safety of folks visiting the city, living in the city. A road diet is probably the most effective way to help with that and it should be prioritized over speeding traffic.”
Making roads that aren’t just for cars
Connecting the Gillham Cycle Track with the Trolley Track Trail will give the city more than 10 miles of uninterrupted protected bike lanes that the city can continue to expand out of.
Transit advocacy group BikeWalkKC found that these protected bike lanes also get more people out of their cars. The group’s recent study on the Gillham Cycle Track found that 80% of users feel safer with its protection from traffic and nearly 70% of people would have driven a car without it.
BikeWalkKC spent the past year pushing alongside neighborhood advocates to get the city to improve this section of Cleaver Boulevard and connect the city’s two major bikeways. Eric Rogers, the executive director and co-founder of the organization, said closing the gap between these trails makes pedestrians and cyclists safer and will help reduce pollution from cars — Kansas City’s leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions.
“The challenge is that the need is so great,” Rogers said. “We've spent the last 50 years building a city around the car. It's going to take a lot of years to reverse that.”
Correll and Claiborne can still see plenty of traffic from their front porch. They’re excited to see the new road, which they hope will help people enjoy the area surrounding the Nelson Atkins and Plaza more. They’re also excited to see fewer crashes. In the meantime, the construction is slowing down traffic just fine.
“This is an area where you're really going to enjoy it if you slow down it,” Correll said. “There's no benefit to flying through here in your car. Slowing everyone down is going to help the whole community around here — the Nelson, everyone that commutes through here, all of the arts, the shopping and even the neighbors.”
