ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
In March, the Kansas Department of Transportation hosted a series of six listening sessions in Western Kansas, including one in Liberal, as part of the agency’s Highway Mobility and Expansion Strategy.
The study looks at various ways to improve highway mobility, safety and accessibility in 44 counties in and near Southwest Kansas.
KDOT Director of Planning and Development Mike Moriarity said the idea for the listening sessions came out of local consult meetings, which he considers KDOT’s premiere public engagement effort.
“We go around the state, and we visit different communities,” he said. “We talk to our customers, learn about transportation needs and priorities, safety concerns. We do that every two years in addition to the normal public involvement events we’re doing like here.”
Issues discussed during listening sessions included four-lane highways, passing lanes, adding shoulders, roadway conditions, economical and environment factors and transportation networks in bordering states.
Local consults will take place again this year, with one scheduled for October in Liberal, and Moriarity said as part of the last two or three rounds of local consults, KDOT leaders have heard Southwest Kansans express interest in expanded highway corridors to meet travel and truck demands, as well as safety concerns.
“That’s a very significant undertaking to upgrade a number of two-lane highways to potentially four-lane highways,” he said. “We felt conducting this sort of strategic planning process could give us a roadmap or a blueprint or a guidebook for how these highways could be expanded over time.”
Moriarity said expanding highways is something that takes much in the way of both money and time to happen.
“It’s going to take a number of years,” he said. “It’s going to take decades. It could take a number of additional transportation funding programs to get this work done. We’re trying to create this strategy to help us understand what that looks like from a long-term standpoint.”
KDOT likewise will be conducting a study of Western Kansas roads that will include the area from south of I-70 to the Oklahoma state line and going from Wichita west to the Colorado state line.
Kip Strauss, consultant for HNTB Corporation, the firm conducting the study, said the study itself should take about 12 to 14 months.
“We’re going to be looking at safety,” he said. “We collected all the crash data. We understand the types of crashes, what causes them, where are they located. Are trucks involved? Is that causing crashes?”
Strauss said HNTB has also been collecting traffic data from the study areas.
“KDOT has continuous counters out there that help us collect data, that help us understand seasonal variations over time,” he said. “We’re going to be understanding where are the heaviest corridors and origin destination patterns. Where are people traveling to and from?”
Strauss said engineers are looking at everything related to roadways, including placement of shoulders, pavement and geometrics.
“We’re really understanding the roadway conditions,” he said.
Strauss said understanding how Southwest Kansas contributes to the entire Sunflower State is important, so HNTB will look to understand the area’s economic competitiveness.
“We’re going to understand where traffic generators are and framing the importance of this area,” he said. “We’ll be looking at where are the environmental fatal flaws we want to be careful of.”
Strauss said public feedback is of utmost importance in the study.
“We do all our technical analysis back in the office, but I learn so much by talking to you and understanding what the issues are,” he said.
Strauss said the study too will form future transportation priorities and investments in the region.
“Our study doesn’t stop at the state borders,” he said. “We know life continues into Oklahoma and Colorado, and we’ve been talking to both departments of transportation on what are their planned projects, understanding what the traffic generators are in those state. We continued our study corridors into Oklahoma and Colorado too.”
Strauss said the study will be done in four phases.
“We are focused right now on Phase 1 and 2, and that’s to understand the existing conditions,” he said. “We had to ask what are the problems? We started by establishing an advisory board to make sure we have good representation all over our study area. We are identifying one representative from each of the 44 counties.”
Strauss said Kansas communities with populations of more than 10,000 can have a representative and the chairmans of both the Kansas House and Senate transportation committees will be advising the board directly.
“We’ll be coordinating with the public regularly, but we need an advisory group to make sure we’re heading in the right direction, we’re looking at the right issues, keeping us on track,” he said.
Strauss said listening sessions such as the one in Liberal provided an opportunity to begin understanding the region’s transportation problems.
“We’ve been reviewing the transportation history,” he said. “We know there’s a long history in this area of KDOT making improvements, studying corridors. We want to make sure that’s what we’re jumping on, and we’re not forgetting anything that was looked at previously.”
Strauss said Phase 2 will feature analysis of safety, traffic and roadways themselves to help forecast future conditions.
“We’re looking at two different data sets,” he said. “They both forecast population and employment out to 2060. That’s going to help us fully understand growth patterns when we look many decades out.”
Strauss said an evaluation and screening process will be developed, as well as many ideas which will be screened down to determine reasonable and realistic options from a budget standpoint.
“We’ll have to think about a budget in this process,” he said. “We’ll host a public meeting in Phase 2.”
In Phase 3 and Phase 4, Strauss said alternatives will start to be analyzed, and their benefits will likewise be understood.
“We haven’t scoped that out yet,” he said. “We wanted to understand Phase 1 and 2 first. We’re starting to develop that scope, and we’ll be a smooth transition into Phase 3 and 4. There won’t be a lag.”
The study’s first two phases are scheduled to run through May, with the final two stages running from June to January 2026.
“Phase 4 is finishing up the recommendations,” Strauss said. “We’re planning a public meeting in May, but we’ll also have public meetings tentatively in November and February. We’re thinking those could shift a little bit. There’ll be lots of opportunities for you to provide us feedback.”
Moriarity talked about some of the feedback KDOT leaders got from previous local consults.
“About 60 percent of the respondents felt safety was a very important factor for KDOT to be considering with our project selection scoping process,” he said. “Preserving our existing system is very important to Kansas as well. We want to take good care of what we have and maintain a good state of repair.”
Moriarity said KDOT has a number of popular transportation programs, and many want to see those continue to be funded at the highest level possible.
“In Southwest Kansas, a lot of the interest was safety, economic growth within the different areas and the continuity of infrastructure investment in Southwest Kansas,” he said.
