ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
As part of a continuing process of improving the state’s transportation system, the Kansas Department of Transportation is looking at ways to update and refine its highway project scoring and selection process.
As part of this, KDOT officials want to understand what is important to Kansas motorists, and the agency recently hosted five listening sessions, including one in Dodge City, for them to provide input on ways to refine the existing scoring process and help identify areas for improvement.
KDOT’s current scoring process has been called one of the most robust in the country and has served Kansas well for many years, and shifting trends and technology advancements offer an opportunity to refresh and modernize approaches.
No projects were discussed at the listening session, and KDOT Deputy Secretary Vanessa Lamoreaux said the events are a prelude to the local consult meetings the agency hosts in odd years as part of the Eisenhower Legacy Transportation Program, or IKE.
“We go out every two years, and we engage with community members, local officials and members of the public at large to gain insight on what their transportation needs are,” she said.
Lamoreaux said the IKE program is designed to be responsive to emerging needs within Kansas communities, and the recent listening sessions are one of the ways KDOT keeps a pulse on what needs are in those communities.
“It also enables us to deliver transportation investments that meet those needs while maintaining and addressing the overall statewide system,” she said.
In the Dodge City listening session, Lamoreaux said the discussion centered on a specific aspect of local scoring, and that is project scoring.
“When we go out and do local consults, we discuss every district or region of the state’s different projects that have the potential and KDOT is considering to move forward into our development pipeline, where the project basically begins life before it ends up being constructed,” she said. “Project scoring is a specific component of that where we look at things like a proposed change to the transportation asset.”
Lamoreaux said KDOT officials likewise look for why a proposed change is being considered, what modernization improvements such as shoulder width and vertical sight distance should be considered and the crash history of a road.
“We look at all those things to understand how that asset is performing, and that is something we engage the public in,” she said. “We explain what the project scoring is in a broad sense, and that is a component that helps elevate a project for consideration during local consult.”
However, Lamoreaux said KDOT’s project scoring process has not changed for many years, so agency leaders are interested in learning from the public ways to improve the process.
“We talked about some pretty broad buckets,” she said. “As stable or static as roads and bridges are, the industry changes. The needs of a community change in terms of what they care about, and there are different trends we need to be responsive to. Just like people change, communities also change, and that means our project scoring needs to keep pace.”
As for what changes are being looked at, Lamoreaux said several things are being addressed.
“We heard from partners over the years that perhaps, we need to look at our population distribution in the state differently in terms of how projects are scored or how that impacts project scoring,” she said. “We also have heard perhaps, there is additional consideration we need to take into account concerning the type of traffic that’s on the road.”
Lamoreaux said the impact on a transportation asset can be quite different with many trucks on a road as opposed to many cars on the same road.
“We also are looking at internal things we can do to modernize our approach in terms of taking advantage of different data elements, automating some of the process,” she said. “It’s a pretty labor intensive process at this point in time. We’re also looking at things we see shifting on the national scale.”
With population distribution and how that impacts scoring, broadly speaking, Lamoreaux said this can be categorized as equity considerations, and the value of how resilient the state’s transportation system is also part of this equation.
Lamoreaux said resilience in a broad sense means how quickly the state’s transportation assets and system recover after significant events such weather events like tornadoes or man-made events such as fires.
“These are all things we need to contemplate as we look to modernize our project scoring approach so KDOT continues to be able to deliver transportation that keeps Kansas moving forward and does so in a way that is responsive to local needs,” she said.
Lamoreaux said KDOT’s current scoring system focuses broadly on engineering, geometrics, safety and a structure’s capacity, all of which makes up what she called pavement health.
“We also look at other things like route continuity, whether or not we’ve made a previous investment on that particular asset and how this investment would tie into it,” she said. “We also look at things like gross regional product and traveler benefits.”
Lamoreaux said this leaves little room for the consideration of resiliency as a standalone item or to be more broadly considered, as well as population distribution.
“We do currently score urban versus rural differently, but that’s not necessarily the same thing,” she said. “It could be broadened.”
The next local consult meetings are scheduled for 2025, 2027 and 2029, and Lamoreaux said project scoring is a component of those meetings. However, no change will likely be seen until 2029, which is also the year KDOT will unveil its next 10-year transportation program.
“That sounds like a ridiculously long time away, but the reason we need that kind of time to make this change is because project scoring is a very complicated thing, and it takes us a significant amount of time to develop projects we want to consider,” she said.
Lamoreaux said KDOT then scores projects and moves forward into the local consult process.
“It’s going to take us that amount of time to move from where we currently are to where we want to be in ’29,” she said. “In ’25 when we’re out, we’ll be testing what we heard during these listening sessions with the broader community. In ’27, we would be looking at what I like to think about as dual scoring, where we would show projects using the current scoring process, and we would say this is what they would like if we switched to a new scoring system we’re currently developing.”
Lamoreaux said KDOT leaders can then take feedback which helps them understand how to tweak and refine the process.
“Our goal is to get the best product for KDOT and for Kansans in relationship to project scoring,” she said. “Practically speaking, what this means is nothing is going to change in ’25. This is not a retroactive thing. We’re not going backwards in time and rescoring projects. In ’25, we’re going to be using the same scoring process as we used in ’23.”
No immediate change in terms of impact to projects would be seen until 2029, the target date for turning on the new scoring process. Lamoreaux said this also corresponds to when KDOT would be looking to use local consults to stock the new transportation program for delivery.
Lamoureaux did say she would not characterize the listening session initiative as necessarily big or small in terms of impact.
“One of the reasons KDOT enjoys a broad advocacy base across the state is because of how we go out and engage Kansans to understand what their needs are and how we can help deliver those needs on the state transportation system,” she said. “It is something not a lot of DOTs do at this pace and in this particular way. The impact we are hoping to make through this initiative is more about being able to continue to serve Kansans and serve them better.”
Lamoreaux said she was delighted with the turnout with the recent listening session in Dodge City.
“These events were a little smaller in attendance than what we would see at a traditional local consult, but that’s because we weren’t talking about projects,” she said. “We were talking about project scoring, which involves a lot of math, and nobody likes it, but the quality of the conversations not just in Dodge City but across the state in five events was amazing. It’s just what we need to begin to wrap our minds around understanding how Kansans feel about these issues and how we can better respond to Kansans and evolve our project scoring to do that.”
Lamoreaux said KDOT is preparing for 2025’s local consult meetings, including one in Liberal, and those should be taking place in late September and October. However, dates and locations have not been finalized at this time.
