Should Kansas City turn US 71 Highway into a parkway? Residents say yes | Opinion
Imagine U.S. 71 highway as a beautiful tree-lined parkway surrounded by walking and biking trails winding through the East Side neighborhoods in Kansas City.
That seems to be the way city and community people are leaning when it comes to talking about how to improve this controversial and problematic roadway, also known as Bruce R. Watkins Drive.
I heard the arguments that support this proposal, and they all sounded good to me. Will it actually happen, and if so, when, are questions for which there are no answers at this point.
The process, and it’s a long one, is still in the refining the vision stage. “Nothing is final yet,” Mayor Pro Tem Ryana Parks-Shaw told a gathering of community members recently.
Maybe so, but city officials leading the project, after analyzing months of community input, were pretty clear at that meeting this week that they have landed on what they think is the best option for the city and the community that the road impacts the most — and would be a parkway. At least one group of residents seems to think the city nailed it.
The section of road up for reconfiguration is a stretch between Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard on the north and East 85th Street on the south end.
Reconnecting project: community’s decision
City leaders have said repeatedly since the start of this project, which they are calling Reconnecting the East Side, that no matter what happens, they want it to be the community’s decision. Numerous neighborhood listening sessions have been held over the last year.
The last of these was on Tuesday evening at St. James United Methodist Church, where roughly 80 Kansas City residents, including some city officials and staff, gathered to have the final talks about deciding on the safest, most environmentally friendly, economically promising, and feasible design for 71 Highway.
There were three options on the table. Around the room were schematics, representations and sketches of what the road could look like as a freeway, a boulevard, or a parkway. An earlier fourth option to return the roadway to its original design — before the highway was built and divided an entire, predominantly Black community — had already been eliminated. Few community members liked that return-to-beginnings idea because of the potentially astronomical cost and the likelihood that it would never happen.
The highway goes north and south smack through East Side Kansas City neighborhoods. It was primarily built — despite pleas from community members for it not to happen — to give motorists coming from the suburbs easy access into the city.
City Manager Mario Vasquez said that when he came to Kansas City in 1997 the highway was in its last stage of construction. “I couldn’t believe they were building that,” said Vasquez, who has a background in urban planning. Destroying minority neighborhoods by building a highway through the middle of it, he said was something most cities hadn’t done since the 1960s. I moved to KC the same year as Vasquez. I’m not a city planner, but I had a similar thought at the time.
But here we are 30 years after the highway was completed, looking for ways to undo what probably never should have been done.
Now the city — working with the Missouri Department of Transportation, the Mid-America Regional Council and members of the affected community — says it wants to repair the economic, social, health and safety problems caused when the roadway was built between 1987 and 2001, and in the 25 subsequent years.
High pedestrian, cyclist crash rates
One of the most pressing concerns for the community and the city is the safety issue created by the configuration of 71 Highway — as part thoroughfare and part urban street crossing. I proposed in an earlier column that regardless of what ends up happening with this enormous highway project, the safety issues need to be addressed sooner rather than later.
Since 2010, there has been a 37% increase in crashes in Kansas City, and the 5-mile corridor encompassing the Reconnecting the East Side project along 71 Highway sees the highest rate of crashes for pedestrians and cyclists in the entire city.
The parkway alternative for the highway proposes to eliminate the current traffic light crossings in three locations on 71 Highway: at 55th and 59th streets, and at Gregory Boulevard, which is now one of the most dangerous intersections in the city.
The plan would connect neighborhoods with more pedestrian-friendly surface streets. In those areas, the roadway would be lowered so that 71 traffic would drive underneath and not interfere with pedestrians crossing over the east-west surface streets, which would remain at their current elevations. That’s the safety part that I really like.
Also, the plan would address noise and air pollution that have caused a disproportionate number of health problems for the predominantly Black and brown residents who live in the neighborhoods that abut this section of the roadway.
While all of this sounds great, it is contingent on the city getting courts to lift a federal consent decree that outlined how the highway needed to be built. If that doesn’t happen, all plans are off. On top of that, officials told me that right now they have yet to secure millions of dollars in funding that it would take to reconstruct the roadway.
At the meeting on Tuesday, residents who attended were asked to drop a colored ball into one of three jars. They were to vote yes, no or neutral to mark their support of the parkway alternative. The yes jar filled quickly. I didn’t vote, but if I had, I would have dropped my colorful ball in the yes jar, too.
