Road Rage

The KC Strip, your meaty narrator, has occasionally spoken of its dry-aging days in other parts of the country. In particular, this slab of steak spent considerable time cruising the highways of car-obsessed Los Angeles and knows a thing or two about roads and traffic.

So with that background, this frank filet can say with confidence that Kansas City's Bruce R. Watkins Drive is the most half-assed excuse for a highway it has ever seen.

A misguided monument to political correctness, the Frankenstein creation also known as Highway 71 starts out as a sensible freeway that provides an important connection between different parts of the metro -- whether you're coming from the downtown loop on the north or the Grandview Triangle on the south.

But then there's that incredibly stupid part in the middle, when a nicely designed superhighway becomes a deathtrap. Signaled intersections at 55th Street, 59th Street and Gregory Boulevard force traffic to congeal like blood clots, causing long backups during rush hour for no discernible reason other than to create the perfect opportunity for tire-screeching collisions.

Back in February, Craig Bland, Missouri's state representative for the 43rd District, which includes that dangerous stretch of highway, did what any other sensible lawmaker would do when his constituents found themselves taking their lives into their hands every time they crossed the freakish road. Bland introduced a bill that would create a state committee to study Highway 71, the first step in doing something to change it.

Then a curious thing happened. The Kansas City Star blasted the bill in an editorial, all but calling Bland a jackass, and told readers that everyone had better just keep their meddling hands off Bruce Watkins Drive.

What the -- !

Why would a newspaper be so protective of a road with more dangerous design flaws than a speeding 1961 Chevy Corvair with low tire pressure?

Well, there's a story behind it, of course.

More than 50 years ago, highway designers drew a line on a map, figuring a freeway would eventually be needed to connect downtown Kansas City with suburbs to the south. In 1951, they were drawing that line through neighborhoods that were largely populated with white folks. But by the time the state got serious about building the road, some 15 years later, those neighborhoods had changed and were largely black.

An alternative route would take a major freeway through the Plaza and down the west side through affluent white neighborhoods. The City Council considered that plan for about 30 seconds before spiking it.

There was no question. The new freeway would come through the black part of town. The state started buying up houses along the new route to begin demolition.

Naturally, black leaders were unhappy, and in 1973 a lawsuit stopped the project in its tracks. The case dragged through the federal courts for 12 years before the parties reached a compromise and construction could begin. Over the state's objections, federal highway officials caved to the concerns of the black community, which demanded that the new road be less than a freeway and something more along the lines of Ward Parkway -- a glorified boulevard with nicely landscaped intersections.

In the early 1990s, when road construction was nearing that dangerous middle section, state officials tried to persuade then-mayor Emanuel Cleaver that the intersections called for in the 1985 court decree were a very bad idea.

Cleaver and the Star, however, were convinced that the half-freeway, half-parkway design was somehow a matter of racial justice. "The resentment [toward the highway] I hear is that every major roadway is planned through the black community for the convenience of suburbanites, who are mostly white. It adds to the paranoia of the black community that things are always planned to damage us," Cleaver said years later in a typical quote.

The Star, meanwhile, hailed the parkway concept and defended it against every attempt by the highway department to convince people that safety, not politics, was the more important consideration.

Was the location of Highway 71 a racially motivated slap at black communities?

Yes, of course it was. And Cleaver was right to get millions of dollars from the city to make sure that the highway was far more lavishly appointed than originally planned, to make up for the disruption. The northern stretch of highway, built last and designed most like a freeway, includes beautifully designed overpasses and other niceties that were a direct result of Cleaver's push to keep the road from being just another ugly, concrete intrusion.

But fighting racism by putting three intersections in the middle of a freeway made no sense then and makes none now.

In 1993, James Gamble, a member of the state's highway commission, tried to change Cleaver's mind about the parkway concept. Citing a state highway department study, he predicted that the three intersections would produce 31 injury accidents and one death every year.

By that prediction, you would expect in a three-year period to find 93 injury accidents and 3 deaths. In the three years from 2002 to 2004, however, those three intersections actually produced 443 accidents, 209 injuries and 2 deaths.

Gamble doesn't enjoy being proved right. When the Strip called him recently, he didn't want to comment, saying that his involvement in the debacle was finished.