“Wyandotte County has never had a comprehensive, collective, collaborative conversation about our transportation futures,” said Gunnar Hand, director of planning + urban design for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, at last week's KC Downtowners virtual luncheon event.
Historically, Wyandotte County’s transportation policies could be found in several different county plans, but they never were integrated into a single document, until recently. Wyandotte County has completed the first phase of its countywide strategic mobility plan called goDotte.
Funded by a Planning Sustainable Places grant from the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC), and covering all incorporated cities in Wyandotte County, the County has issued a Foundations Report which sets forth the County’s priorities in developing its strategic mobility plan and details insights of its study.
“So when we started doing our initial analysis, we obviously wanted to do it through the lens of some level of community value,” Hand said.
Wyandotte County is generally more disadvantaged and more diverse than other parts of the region, and because of that, Hand said it carries certain implications and connotations about behavioral travel patterns as well as access opportunity.
“First and foremost, for the last 60 plus years, the last couple of generations, …[we] have been building an automobile-oriented society. And that reliance on the automobile does have significant social, environmental, health and economic impacts. So while we've been building this automobile-centric society, we have not been building a balanced transportation system,” said Hand.
He said Wyandotte County has an extremely fragmented alternative transportation system which makes it unsafe and especially dangerous for pedestrians. And, on the County’s most heavily used corridor, State Avenue, wait times for a bus can run anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes.
“If you have a car in Wyandotte County, you can get anywhere pretty quickly. But if you don't have a car in Wyandotte County, you are stranded and really have problems accessing basic services,” Hand said.
Hand said that the data gathered in their study revealed that the roads in Wyandotte County are overbuilt.
“So if we don’t have traffic on our freeways in Wyandotte County, then why are we spending the vast majority of our federal transportation dollars on freeway expansion,” he said.
The study also revealed that Wyandotte County has a jobs/housing imbalance. The majority of workers in Wyandotte County commute there from outside the County, while a majority of residents commute to outside the County.
“Now, for me, at least, that raises the question of what is the right metric to determine economic success because jobs alone don't seem to be getting it if we're building jobs for people who don't live in our community,” said Hand.
Hand said the County must change its focus to people instead of automobiles, taking advantage of public rights of way.
“So if we focus on people instead of automobiles, I think we can start to deliver a multi-benefit opportunity with our public rights of way as we look at each corridor that we plan, design, operate and maintain not as an engineering problem with a single engineering solution, but something with multi-benefits,” he said.
Hand said the completion of the goDotte planning process, which will define the County’s priorities going forward, will coincide with the release of funds under the federal infrastructure bill.
Because transportation networks don’t end in political boundaries, Hand said the County recognized that it needs to do a better job to strengthen its connection to Kansas City, Missouri, which, he said, is the reason Kansas City, Kansas exists as a community.
Whereas streetcar lines once connected Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, those connections eroded over time, leaving the viaduct now as the primary connection between the two downtowns, located approximately two miles apart but separated by a serious elevation change (“from a bluff to the Bottoms back up to another bluff”) and the Kansas River.
Hand and the Unified Government are exploring connecting the two cities by an aerial lift which would move passengers through the air in gondola cars. They hired consultants, HR&A Advisors and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, to guide them through their thinking. Hand emphasized that so far they’ve only created a “thought piece”, not a feasibility study.
Hand said the aerial lift will provide two major benefits. The first would be to create connectivity between two pedestrian business areas, benefiting Kansas City, Kansas by creating a direct pedestrian link to the largest job center in the region. But more importantly, he said, it would open up all types of affordable housing options to people who work in downtown Kansas City, Missouri.
“Rents in downtown Kansas City, Missouri are pretty high. I mean some of them are Chicago rates. . . . Two miles away you have some of the most affordable housing in the entire region,” said Hand.
At approximately $25 million per mile, the cost to build an aerial lift is about half the approximately $50 million per mile cost of a streetcar.
There are aerial lift projects throughout the world, and a few in the United States, but more are starting to percolate right now, Hand said, including one in Chicago and another in Los Angeles.
Hand said this is definitely a bi-state project, and the Unified Government is working through the idea with the City of Kansas City, Missouri.
“But at the end of the day, I think conceptually, for me at least, this makes the most sense to be a RideKC gondola,” said Hand.
The aerial lift currently is proposed to be added as an unfunded project to MARC’s long-range transportation plan. If it gets on MARC’s list, the next step would be to pursue a feasibility study that Hand said would probably go through the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.