If you’re driving to work on one of Kansas City’s four-lane roads, you have to be a quick thinker.
You might be in the right lane until a car slows to a stop in front of you — so you weave into the fast-moving left lane. Until you hit the brakes, because the car in front of you is waiting to turn left. But switch back to the right lane to escape that bottleneck and you risk pulling in front of other drivers.
Hopping between lanes makes those four-lane roads — like Troost Avenue, 39th Street and Independence Avenue — the most dangerous places for car crashes in the city.
The Kansas City Council approved an ordinance in October to put those dangerous streets on “road diets,” reducing the number of lanes the next time they’re resurfaced. And soon, the city will update its street design guidelines to make safer, if slower, roads the default rather than the exception.
“There’s too much space on the roadway,” said Bobby Evans, a transportation planner at the Mid-America Regional Council. “People are driving too fast. If you correct the size of the roadway, it will make people drive more safely.”
Road diets, he said, are proven to reduce the number of serious car crashes by half.
First up for dieting are eight stretches of road spanning four City Council districts: 12th Street, 63rd Street, Gregory Boulevard, James A. Reed Road, North Chouteau Trafficway, Southwest Boulevard, 22nd Street and Paseo Boulevard. The dieted portions will cover 12 miles.
Five out of eight are due for resurfacing this year. Once the new asphalt is dry, the city will repaint the streets with fewer lanes.
Most critically, that will mean — in most cases — converting traffic in two lanes in each direction to one lane each way, plus a center turn lane. That middle lane aims to avoid the danger point of a driver trying to escape a bottleneck and pulling into the faster traffic on the right.
The removed lane will be replaced with street parking on seven of the roads. A short stretch of James A. Reed Road, near Longview Lake, will get bike lanes.
After that, 19 other roads will be added, including all of Troost Avenue south of Armour Boulevard and large swaths of Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard, 39th Street and Independence Avenue. An additional road diet on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is being considered.
Nearly one in six traffic deaths in 2022 and 2023 — 31 deaths — occurred in car crashes on one of these 28 stretches of road. The goal of the proposed road diets is to bring that down to zero.
What it means for your commute
When traffic engineers design major roads, they try to aim for around 10,000 cars per lane per day.
Any more than that and the road is too congested. Any fewer and the road is overbuilt — too many lanes for too little traffic.
A largely empty road is a safety problem. Without enough cars on the road, drivers tend to speed, run red lights and swerve between lanes more.
Evans said that removing lanes from a road could cause traffic problems if the redo is poorly planned. But they usually only extend commutes by 20 or 30 seconds here or a minute or two there.
And in some cases, replacing a driving lane with a turn lane might even shorten commute times and reduce backups.
“Intersections are going to be those points where you get your backups,” he said. “If you get those left turns out of traffic and make those left turns more feasible, you won’t get the backups.”
Evans said it’s important to distinguish between concerns about traffic and concerns about not being able to speed.
“Someone might be saying, ‘I used to drive on Cleaver at 50 mph, and now I have to drive down Cleaver at 30 mph,’” he said. “To that person, that’s a backup. You have to weigh the very myopic concerns of an individual motorist against the community concerns for safety.”
The busiest road getting a diet is Wornall Road between 63rd Street and 75th Street, which sees about 18,000 vehicles per day — 4,500 per lane.
Different design possibilities to prevent car crashes
A road diet can take a variety of forms. And some can be more effective at preventing car crashes than others.
Michael Kelley, the policy director at BikeWalkKC, said the bare minimum road diet means repainting the road to get rid of a lane. That could mean turning a four-lane road (two lanes each way) into a three-lane road — one lane in each direction with a center turn lane.
“That could be something like we painted in dedicated parking spaces or we painted in more places for people to bike,” he said. He prefers bike lanes to parking.
A new paint job is the cheapest option.
Kansas City plans to repaint most of the roads on its list the next time they’re resurfaced. The roads would have been repainted anyway, so it costs no additional money, according to city spokesperson Sherae Honeycutt.
But Kelley said that a road diet is safest when there’s a physical barrier between cars and the bike or parking lanes. The cheapest options are flexible bollards or concrete curb stops (similar to what you would see at the front of a parking space).
“We know that the way that our roads are built makes them unsafe for a whole host of reasons,” Kelley said.
Some of Kansas City’s proposals include more expensive construction work, including Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Northeast 48th Street and Northeast Vivion Road.
The cheapest way to implement road diets is to wait until they’re due for resurfacing.
But Councilmember Eric Bunch, who represents the 4th District, said at a committee meeting in early November that some roads, like 39th Street, need to go on a diet sooner.
In 2022 and 2023, two people died in car crashes along the stretch of 39th Street that’s planned to be dieted. It’s on the “high-injury network,” a list of streets that a 2022 study determined were most deadly in Kansas City.
That stretch of 39th Street “is a high-injury corridor,” Bunch said, “but I’m told it’s not on the resurfacing schedule until 2030. And I don’t think it’s fair to those communities and fair to the lives who could be lost, just to say, ‘Well, we’ve got to wait till 2031 to resurface it.’”
There is no firm schedule for when all of the roads will be resurfaced and dieted. Some may be dieted sooner than others if they experience particularly harsh damage one winter or if the council decides to make them a priority.
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
