Overland Park to make its biggest, baddest street bike/ped friendly

Hoorah to Overland Park, one of the largest city in the Kansas City metro area,

image by neoyogyrt

which is planning to take one of its very biggest, baddest, most bicycle, transit, and pedestrian UNfriendly streets and turn it from a place that is friendly to automobiles (if your idea of friendly is 8 lanes of heavy, fast-moving traffic that at times closely resembles what you might see at a demolition derby) and turn it into pedestrian, bicyclist, and transit users paradise:

Walking.

It’s not exactly a way of life on the broad, busy thoroughfares of Kansas City’s sprawling suburbs.

But the area’s biggest suburb, Overland Park, is on track to radically change the way people get around on one of its most congested corridors.

Overland Park has embarked on a $1.1 million study that is moving the city toward making a nine-mile section of Metcalf Avenue friendlier to pedestrians, cyclists and bus riders.

“The challenge here, of course, is moving from a paradigm that’s 100 percent auto-oriented to a paradigm where it’s 50 percent pedestrian-oriented,” said consulting team leader Tony Nelessen.

Read the rest of the story in the KCStar.

It may seem impossible to make such a busy street more conducive to walking and bicycling, but in fact it has been done in many other places, it has worked, and what's more--people like it.

Of course pedestrians and bicyclists like it.

Safety advocates like it.

But yes, motorists like it, too. (PDF link)

Nobody likes driving in the "demolition derby zone".