If you find yourself driving on one of Kansas City's four-lane roads, you quickly learn the art of quick thinking. You might be comfortably in the right lane until a car slows to a stop ahead, forcing you to weave into the fast-moving left lane. But then, you have to hit the brakes as the car in front waits to turn left. Switching back to the right lane to avoid the bottleneck risks pulling in front of other drivers. These four-lane roads, such as Troost Avenue, 39th Street, and Independence Avenue, have become the most dangerous places for car crashes in the city.Why Road Diets Matter
The Kansas City Council approved an ordinance in October to implement "road diets" on these dangerous streets. This means reducing the number of lanes when the roads are resurfaced. The goal is to make safer, albeit slower, roads the norm rather than the exception. Bobby Evans, a transportation planner at the Mid-America Regional Council, explains, "There's too much space on the roadway. People are driving too fast. By correcting the size of the roadway, we can make people drive more safely." Road diets have been proven to reduce the number of serious car crashes by half.First up for dieting are eight stretches of road across 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.Most importantly, in most cases, traffic in two lanes in each direction will be converted to one lane each way, along with a center turn lane. This middle lane helps avoid the danger of a driver trying to escape a bottleneck and pulling into the faster traffic on the right. On seven of the roads, the removed lane will be replaced with street parking. On a short stretch of James A. Reed Road near Longview Lake, bike lanes will be added.After these initial roads, 19 more will be added to the road diet program, including all of Troost Avenue south of Armour Boulevard and large sections of Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard, 39th Street, and Independence Avenue. An additional road diet on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is also being considered.In 2022 and 2023, nearly one in six traffic deaths, or 31 deaths, occurred on these 28 stretches of road. The proposed road diets aim to bring this number down to zero.
Impact on Commutes
When traffic engineers design major roads, they aim for around 10,000 cars per lane per day. If there are more cars than this, the road becomes congested. If there are fewer cars, the road is overbuilt with too many lanes for the amount of traffic. A largely empty road can be a safety problem as drivers tend to speed, run red lights, and weave between lanes more.Evans warns that removing lanes from a road can cause traffic problems if the redo is not well-planned. However, in most cases, it only extends commutes by 20 or 30 seconds here and there or a minute or two at most. In some cases, replacing a driving lane with a turn lane can even shorten commute times and reduce backups."Intersections are the points where backups occur," he says. "If we get those left turns out of traffic and make them more feasible, we won't have backups."It's important to distinguish between concerns about traffic and concerns about not being able to speed. Someone might complain about having to drive at 30 mph instead of 50 mph on Cleaver Boulevard. But we need to weigh the individual motorist's myopic concerns against the community's concern 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, or 4,500 per lane.
Different Design Possibilities
A road diet can take various forms, and some are more effective at preventing car crashes than others. Michael Kelley, the policy director at BikeWalkKC, explains that the bare minimum road diet involves repainting the road to remove a lane. This could turn a four-lane road (two lanes each way) into a three-lane road with one lane in each direction and a center turn lane."That could involve painting dedicated parking spaces or more areas for people to bike," he says. He prefers bike lanes over 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 are resurfaced. Since the roads would have been repainted anyway, it costs no additional money, according to city spokesperson Sherae Honeycutt.But Kelley emphasizes that a road diet is safest when there is a physical barrier between cars and the bike or parking lanes. The cheapest options are flexible bollards or concrete curb stops, similar to those found at the front of parking spaces."We know that the way our roads are built makes them unsafe for many reasons," Kelley says.Some of Kansas City's proposals include more expensive construction work, such as on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Northeast 48th Street, and Northeast Vivion Road.The cheapest way to implement road diets is to wait until the roads are due for resurfacing. But Councilmember Eric Bunch, who represents the 4th District, believes 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 planned dieted section of 39th Street. It is on the "high-injury network," a list of streets determined to be the most deadly in Kansas City."That stretch of 39th Street is a high-injury corridor," Bunch says, "but I'm told it's not on the resurfacing schedule until 2030. I don't think it's fair to those communities or the lives that could be lost to wait until 2031 to resurface it."There is no firm schedule for when all the roads will be resurfaced and dieted. Some may be dieted sooner if they experience severe damage in one winter or if the council decides to prioritize them.
