Narrowing Douglas a $7 million waste, but City Hall’s not listening | Opinion
“Call me a skeptic. I’ve lived here long enough that we’ve gone through numerous renditions of Douglas getting wider and narrower and wider and narrower and now we’re back to narrowing Douglas. I struggle with what we’re trying to achieve, turning it back into three lanes and encouraging more congestion along that corridor.”
This was not a comment made at the public meeting on Monday evening to discuss Wichita City Hall’s plan to squeeze the four traffic lanes on Douglas down to two between Washington and Grove.
It was not a comment made at the Nov. 3 District 1 Advisory Board meeting, where townsfolk gathered to discuss the plan and collectively wondered why.
It was not a comment made at an earlier open house, where the current plan was quietly unveiled to a crowd estimated somewhere between six and eight people.
No, the comment above was made by Jeff Longwell, former mayor of Wichita, on Nov. 12, 2019. That was the day the City Council accepted a $25,000 grant from the Knight Fund for initial planning, and it became etched in asphalt and concrete that a four-lane Douglas would eventually pass away.
After the pandemic and other delays, the City Council is ready to begin narrowing the street, and could vote it through as early as Dec. 9.
Pretending to listen to citizens
We are currently in the part of the decision-making process I refer to as the illusion-of-public-participation phase.
This is the time when the City Council and staff pretend to listen to objections to what they want to do.
An exchange on the city’s Facebook page following Monday’s meeting, between Delano advocate Christopher Parisho and the city communications staff, is illustrative of the way these things go:
Christopher Parisho: Hey, notice about a public meeting after the meeting.
City of Wichita - Government: Christopher Parisho tonight we had over 50 people! Be sure to sign up for calendar alerts on our website so you don’t miss our next community events!
Christopher Parisho: City of Wichita- Government you might have had more if people were properly notified.
City of Wichita- Government: Christopher Parisho we actually sent out direct invites to neighbors, via our website, social media and in the media. There’s a lot of news and events so it’s understandable to miss a few things.
Christopher Parisho: City of Wichita- Government your condescension doesn’t help your argument.
As regular readers of the Eagle’s Facebook page can tell you, Parisho and I get along about as well as rival gangs in a too-small prison yard.
But he is an informed citizen who’s been on several city advisory boards. And he’s right about one thing. The city government is condescending.
Whether the issue is narrowing the streets, paid parking downtown, or subsidizing luxury apartment projects, the city’s default mode is to treat legitimate dissenting voices like ignorant hicks standing in the way of progress.
The fix is in
The city’s already narrowed thoroughfares like Broadway, McLean, Main and Lincoln, along with several other less traveled streets.
The deep problem here is our civic leaders are hypnotized by the concepts of “Strong Towns,” a national movement to make every city try to look and act like a faux New England fishing village selling kites and beach chairs to the tourists.
The central element of the plot is “road diets” — narrowing the streets and jacking with the traffic lights to curtail car traffic.
It’s always done in the name of “walkability” and “bikeability.”
Never mind that Wichita weather isn’t conducive to those modes of transportation for most of the year, between the freezing cold, the blistering heat, the roaring winds and the pop-up severe thunderstorms.
Businesses along the section of Douglas that’s slated for narrowing are by and large against it.
The heavy commercial and industrial companies along that stretch would get no benefit from the walk-by traffic that narrowing Douglas is supposed to encourage. The owners are rightly more concerned about how the narrower street will accommodate the large shipping and delivery trucks that are their lifeline.
I saw a preview Tuesday morning.
Part of the recently reconfigured Main Street north of Douglas squeezes northbound traffic down into one lane.
The driver of a large truck carrying building supplies simply parked in the traffic lane and threw out a few safety cones, and the only way around was to wait for a gap in the oncoming traffic so you could slip by going the wrong way in the turn lane.
And then the exact same thing happened again Wednesday morning. This time, it was a document shredding truck.
When all’s said and done on Douglas, the council will probably agree to move a few bushes around or stripe in a bike lane or something. And then they’ll say, “See, we listened to you,” as they vote to waste $7 million changing what doesn’t need to change.
This kind of municipal folderol might be nominally acceptable if the city was flush with cash and there weren’t a lot of other streets needing attention far more urgently.
My own suggestion would be Maple Street. I used to happily ride my little motor scooter down Maple to work on nice days, but years of neglect have left the pavement so chewed up that I don’t anymore.
Here’s my challenge to any council member: Ride my scooter down Maple from Towne West Square to Equity Bank Park and back. If you live, I’ll print a column from you on why it doesn’t need fixing.
So, if you’re an ordinary resident and care passionately about what species of trees they plant along Kellogg, or what color they paint the benches, you’re welcome to come to the City Council meeting and your ideas may get listened to.
If you want to keep Douglas four lanes, I hate to say this, but you’re probably wasting your breath, like Jeff Longwell did six years ago when he tried to head this off and got outvoted 6-1.
If that sounds cynical, it’s because I’ve seen this movie a few dozen times before, and it always ends the same.
