Hey Wichita speeders, there’s no ‘passing lane’ on the Kellogg freeway | Opinion
So you’re driving down the Kellogg freeway, a little over the speed limit and minding your own business, when some Bubba Wallace wannabe crawls up your tailpipe trying to force you to move out of his way.
If you stand your ground and stay in your lane, he gets all road-ragey, flashing his headlights and honking his horn in a fit of juvenile entitlement, because you’re preventing him from going way over the speed limit.
It happens all the time on Kellogg. So do crashes — those that kill or maim, and those that at best just clog up the freeway and grind traffic to a standstill.
There are two problems with the Kellogg freeway.
No. 1 is that too many people in Wichita have cars with more horsepower than they’ve got brains or driving skills.
No. 2 is that there is a very broad misunderstanding in this city of the difference between interstate highways like the Kansas Turnpike and urban freeways like Kellogg.
I can’t do much about No. 1. It’s pretty much up to the police to deal with those folks.
Item No. 2 is a matter of education, which is why I’m writing this.
If you take away only one thing from this column, let it be this: There is no such thing as a “passing lane” on the Kellogg freeway.
Who’s the bad driver here?
What brought this to mind is an anonymous Facebook post I saw in a group called “Wichita Bad Drivers 2.0.” The person posted a picture of three cars on Kellogg driving side-by-side with the caption:
“Why do yall do this (expletive deleted) No one in front of them btw, just riding side by side for miles A passing lane is for passing folks, not sitting”
Last I checked that post, it had 365 likes.
I hate to break it to you, Anonymous Participant, but you are dead wrong.
I know this because I was there at the state Capitol when they passed the state’s “left lane law,” which mandates that you drive in the right lane except to pass on state highways. It was very carefully drafted to not include freeways within cities.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the lowdown from a #TrafficTipTuesday post by the Wichita Police Department:
“The speed limit still applies, and the left lane is not the ‘fast lane.’ Kansas has a left lane law . . . If you have ever wondered why WPD officers don’t write citations for this, it is because highways within city limits are excluded in the statute.”
So to Anonymous, whoever you may be, the drivers of the three cars you photographed are under no obligation to get out of your way so you can drive however fast you intended to go.
They’re not the bad drivers. You are.
There’s no good reason to speed on Kellogg
The reason traffic planners add lanes to urban freeways in the first place is so that large numbers of motorists can spread out across all the lanes and everybody can proceed across the city at a reasonable rate of speed.
The idea is not to cram hundreds of cars into the right lane at 60 or 65 mph, and leave the other lanes empty for those who think speed limits are optional (for themselves, anyway).
I could play that game if I wanted. I have a Dodge Stealth (the USA rebadge of the Mitsubishi 3000GT sports car) that could show nothing but taillights to 95% of the cars on Kellogg if I ever turned it loose out there.
But I don’t drive it like that for two reasons: 1) I’m not an idiot and 2) There’s nothing really to be gained by it.
Kellogg is uninterrupted freeway from 119th St. West to 143rd St. East.
That’s a distance of 17.3 miles. At the speed limit of 60 mph, it takes a little over 17 minutes to go all the way across town.
Each 10 mph you drive over the limit shaves about two minutes off the travel time. So if you go 70 mph, you’ll essentially convert a 17-minute trip to 15 minutes.
And very few Wichitans drive the freeway end-to-end anyway.
I drive about half of it twice a day, five days a week, between my home at the west edge of the city and The Eagle’s office in the Epic Center downtown.
If I drove Kellogg at 70 instead of 60, it would cut about a minute each way off my commute — at 80, two minutes.
The risk exceeds the reward. So drive with the flow of traffic (usually five mph or so over the speed limit anyway) and maybe we can all get to where we need to go when we need to be there.
This story was originally published March 20, 2026 at 5:05 AM.
