When Jennifer Valdez looks outside her salon, JA Beauty & Skin, onto Southwest Boulevard, there’s traffic cones and construction everywhere.
Parts of Kansas City’s Westside neighborhood have been under construction since January 2025. The $43.6 million project includes water infrastructure improvements, repairing and adding sidewalks, and slowing down traffic with a road diet.
Now, the stretch of Southwest Boulevard from Broadway Boulevard to Grand Avenue in the Crossroads will be getting a road diet, too. Road milling began Monday.
Monique Ortiz, who serves on the board of the Westside Neighborhood Association, is hopeful that the construction will make the area safer to walk.
“I think it’s going to be a good thing at the end of the day,” Ortiz said. “It’s not going to be like Frogger.”
These changes are part of Kansas City’s Vision Zero initiative, which aims to end traffic fatalities by 2030. For years, the Crossroads Community Association and Westside Neighborhood Association had asked the city to make Southwest Boulevard more friendly to pedestrians.
The boulevard is one of the most dangerous roads on Kansas City’s High Injury Network — where the most traffic fatalities occur.
Westside residents have welcomed the traffic calming and beautification efforts, and the city conducted community engagement while planning. But some businesses, like Valdez’s, are feeling pinched while construction happens.
“It’s been a challenge for all of us down there,” Valdez told KCUR’s Up To Date.
Valdez says parking has been hard to find for her clients and employees, but the construction hasn’t affected her bottom line too much. Other restaurants and storefronts along the boulevard have been more adversely affected, she says.
Nicholas Grunauer, who owns the restaurant Grunauer and serves as president of the Crossroads Community Association, is excited for the Southwest Boulevard road diet to get underway near him.
“How our neighborhood was formed and built, it was really never built to accommodate residents and businesses of the entertainment nature,” Grunauer said.
- Savannah Hawley-Bates, KCUR local government reporter
- Nicholas Grunauer, president of the Crossroads Community Association
- Monique Ortiz, Westside Neighborhood Association
- Jennifer Valdez, JA Beauty & Skin
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