Missouri Bicycle News Archives

I found this bit of news interesting because just yesterday I came across an article by legendary Kansas City developer J.C. Nichols, advocating the same thing (see below).

Personally I think sidewalks on one side of the street only might be a reasonable solution in a quiet neighborhood street--a curved, low-speed, "skinny street" of the type that J.C. Nichols advocated. But I doubt many Grain Valley neighborhoods are like that.

It's possible to make streets that can be safely shared between motor vehicles and pedestrians, but experiences like the recent death of a Raytown postal carrier show that this doesn't work very well in the context of Missouri drivers http://m obikefed.org/2002_12_01_newsarchive.html#90127727).

IMHO, what they are likely going to find, is that 10 or 15 years down the road they will end up digging everything up & reducing their front yards, in order to put sidewalks in on the other side of the street as Fairway, KS, recently did http://www.ka nsascity.com/mld/kansascity/4841872.htm).

I think Grain Valley is running in the exact opposite direction of the entire rest of the country and is going to be rather sorry later on . . .

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From http: //www.umkc.edu/whmckc/PUBLICATIONS/JCN/JCNPDF/JCN005.pdf:

From a speech by J. C. Nichols, 1917:

On purely residence streets I have done less and less grading, giving steeper and steeper grades, to the greater pleasure of the people living upon these streets, on account of the discouragement of through traffic. The very narrowing of the improvements in the street itself is a constant discouragement to business conditions and through traffic, and gives additional assurance and holds the permanent residential character of the neighborhood.

In many of these streets, I am laying sidewalks only on the side most convenient for coming and going to the [street-]car line, saving half of the sidewalk construction, and occasionally on very minor streets omitting the sidewalk entirely. In many places I have greatly reduced the cost of street construction and prevented the too frequent unpleasant intrusion of the inharmonious stretches of paving by the replacing of the most unimportant streets is by pedestrian ways 8 to 12 feet wide, with a 4 to 6 ft. sidewalk, bordered with a pivet hedge or stone walls. These purely residence streets are and should of course be well related to the main boulevards, business streets and traffic ways, of ample width and easy grades. The plan of these residence streets should eliminate alleys, follow the contour of the land, be fitted to the lots and blocks, affording sites of interesting shapes, and permitting individual landscape treatment.

One reason city councils & planners need to stand up to developers on issues like this:

The lack of sidewalks is going to affect the value of homes in a *new* subdivision very, very little. The houses are new, they're shiny, everything looks neat and nifty. Prospective buyers are looking at square footage and acreage, and all the other new home details.

It's only later on down the line that the loss of value becomes evident. Soon the area becomes just another frumpy neighborhood with no amenities. Homeowners lose because their houses don't retain (or increase) their value as well as they could. Municipalities lose because they have to try to play catch-up to fill in all the gaps that should have been filled in when the neighborhood was built in the first place.

The "donut effect" takes over, as neighborhoods just 10 and 20 years old are left to rot, and everyone runs to the "neat, new" neighborhoods a little further out.

Meanwhile, developers are long gone, counting their profits all the way to the bank. They don't care--they don't have to live with their products for the long term. The rest of us do.

Just one small example:

Today my six-year-old son and I walked home from his school. On the way we passed schools buses dropping off kids 0.24 miles, 0.26 miles, and 0.4 miles from the school.

So, because some developer saved a few nickels on sidewalks 40 years ago, we all have to pay in school buses, fuel, drivers, wear and tear on the roads, air pollution, and flabby, obese kids. Did you all catch the statistic printed in the Star last week: In Jackson County, 16 percent of 5- to 20-year-olds are overweight, and 27.3 percent are obese (WIC study, see http://www.mobikefed.org/2003_01_01_cyclingtipsarchive.html#90144614).

I'm guessing that most of the new neighborhoods being built in Grain Valley are far enough away from schools that most all of the children will require busing. But . . . with well-designed, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods it would be quite possible for the school bus to drop of 10 or 20 kids at the entrance to a particular subdivision. The kids could walk the last 1/10 mile, 5/10s mile, or whatever. This would be good for the kids and good for the buses, which would cut many miles, and even more wear-and-tear, from their routes.

But with the present configuration, parents will demand "for safety reasons" that children be dropped off in front of their own homes. In needn't be done this way, and in many areas of the country, it isn't.


(And, by the way: yes, the phrase "we passed school buses", on foot, is quite correct--we were quite able to walk the distances of .25 and .5 miles just as fast as school buses could drive them. The school buses, incidentally, all left the school before we left it on foot. The speed benefit of automobiles in getting a person around town is highly overrated . . . )

--Brent

Dale Crawford writes on KCBicycle:

The great thing about this new bridge having bike/ped accommodation is it will give 3 non-interchange crossings on I-35 south of I-435 (College Blvd., 143rd/Dennis w/ bike lanes and now 127th/Harold) within the developed areas of Lenexa and Olathe. Lone Elm Road is much further south, but is also slated for a new full interchange with heavy truck traffic anticipated given the industrial land uses of that area.

The final design for the bike/ped accommodation is still in underway although the rest of the project is 90% complete due to the timing of the CMAQ award. The project includes a new 1/2-mile road connecting Mur-len (Renner everywhere else but Olatheland) and KC Road with a bridge over Rogers Road, I-35 and the BNSF RR tracks.

First off, bike lanes won't fit across the bridge. The deck width was set before the funding application was submitted and awarded. Current bridge deck is about 6' to narrow for full bike lanes next to a vertical pedestrian guardrail. It would require redesign of a 90% completed bridge to widen it, require purchasing additional right-of-way after right-of-way acquisition has already be completed and would cost more than the award would cover with consultants change order and additional land & construction cost.

As of my last meeting with Engineering, the project includes an 8' wide sidewalk for on the north side (AASHTO bike minimum) except over the bridge where its slightly wider but less than AASHTO minimum as a bike facility due to the require 2' additional shy zone from vertical obstacles (guardrails). A 5' sidewalk is on the south side. 8' on the north was all that was possible within the newly acquired right-of-way, which had been completed prior to the award of the CMAQ funds.

The new roadway/bridge will have 14' wide furthest right through lanes and share the road signs between Mur-Len and KC Road, but only 13' wide furthest right through lanes in the transition zones east of Mur-Len and west of KC Road where the 6-lane new road narrows back to the existing wide 2 lane minor arterials on either side of the project area. I'm working on getting 14' lanes in the transition zones, but Engineering is resisting. It requires more extensive redesign of the transition zone (moving curbs, storm inlets, traffic signals, median curbs, narrows sidewalk-curb distance 1', etc.) because it can't be made up in adjust traffic lane strips without narrow the inner driving lanes to less than 11'.

I specifically said furthest right through lanes because there are four locations where there area long right-turn only lanes. Where the outside lane becomes a right-turn only lane at Mur-Len and at KC Road, the 14' wide lane moves over to the "furthest right" through lane.

I'm comfortable with the accommodation on the new road/bridge portion. It meets AASHTO as the wide sidewalk becomes an enhanced pedestrian facility that's minimally wide enough for non-road cyclists and the 14' wide lane becomes the official bike facility. Eventually this section line road (127th east of I-35 & Harold Street west of I-35 - only in Olatheland!) is supposed to have bike lanes on all but this new road, but this new section will have the wide outside lanes. I don't like changing facility type in the middle of a corridor, but its the best I could get given the timing situation.

If anyone from Olathe is on this list or if you know cyclists from Olathe who'd be willing to help, let me know. I can use some citizen help on getting "full" AASHTO accommodation through the transition zones. Granted the will be better than any other bridge I'm aware of in Johnson County, but the rest of the transition zones can be better. I also need Olathe voices stepping up to push for a full intermodal transportation network study. We had it 2002 budget but it got cut during budget reductions after the 2003 budgets were approved assuming the study was going to happen with 2002 money. This study would improve the initial design criteria for major project so we don't have to shoehorn in bike facilities in the middle of the process.

Dale Crawford