Wichita’s new ‘road diet’ fad: Redone street has arrows pointing drivers into a river
Wichita missed a golden opportunity when the Goodyear Blimp was in Kansas last week.
They could have landed it in the middle of McLean Boulevard between Central and 13th without stopping traffic.
OK, that may be a bit of an exaggeration — but not by much.
Wichita City Hall has taken a major thoroughfare linking northwest and downtown Wichita and made half the street into a ridiculously wide median, in essence a mile-long but purposeless swath of asphalt where two traffic lanes used to be.
To make absolutely certain that no one uses that pavement for its intended purpose, the city’s also added a crosswalk with a raised concrete island spanning the middle of the road at Ninth Street.
The new bottleneck on McLean — and others already built or yet to come — are being done in the name of a “road diet,” a city planning fad of recent years otherwise known as The War on Private Automobiles.
The underlying theory is that if you make it difficult enough to drive from place to place, residents will have no choice but to resort to walking or riding bicycles.
How fortunate we are to be able to live in a city that seems to always know better than us how we should live.
Never mind that for about 11 months of the year, it’s too freezing, too hot, too windy, too thunderstormy or too tornadoey — or any combination of those conditions — to rely on pedal power for basic transportation on a daily basis.
A good rule of thumb is whenever you hear the buzzwords “walkability,” “bikeability,” “traffic calming,” or “complete streets” during a City Council meeting, take a shot of tequila and mentally add another 10 minutes to your daily commute time.
The McLean redesign stems from a $49,000 traffic study that started in 2020. And the results of that study don’t even begin to justify the inconvenience to the motoring public.
Over a span of 5 1/2 years, there were 11 accidents there — an average of two per year on a road used by 14,000 drivers a day.
The street has a 40 mph speed limit and the traffic study found 85% drove it at 43 mph or less north of Ninth and 46 mph or less south of Ninth. The 85th percentile is the point at which drivers are presumed to be operating safely in ordinary conditions.
And it’s debatable whether the new street is even any safer than the old one.
Before, motorists turning north from Central to McLean had an open lane to turn into. Now, they have to try to merge into a single lane in a pathetically short merging zone that’s an accident waiting to happen.
As for the new crosswalk at Ninth, a city report stated: “A dedicated pedestrian count near 9th Street showed a minimal number of people crossing McLean Boulevard.” That “minimal number” would have been better served with a regular crosswalk and pedestrian-activated crossing light.
So basically, we have a “traffic calming” street where the traffic was already calm with an island crosswalk to nowhere.
Part of this is actually kind of hilarious.
In their enthusiasm for two-way turning lanes, city traffic honchos failed to notice that there’s no place to actually turn to the east on this entire stretch of road. Undeterred, they painted arrows on the street that, if followed, would run you straight into the Arkansas River.
The one upside of this is the city is always looking for new places to jam in more pickleball courts. The new median on McLean could hold almost 100 of them — that’s not an exaggeration, it’s math — and we’ve already paid for the paving.
We have two choices here:
We can politely ask our city leaders to give up their bizarre delusions of turning Wichita into a bike-walk mecca like Portland or San Francisco, and deal with the reality here on the ground.
Or we could go out some dark night with sledgehammers and a pail of yellow paint and put McLean back the way it ought to be.
At this point, I could go either way.
This story was originally published September 29, 2022 at 6:05 AM.
