ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
The Kansas Department of Transportation recently hosted a round of six public meetings in Western Kansas communities, including one in Liberal, as part of the Southwest Kansas Highway Mobility and Expansion Strategy (SWKHMES).
That initiative is a study looking at ways to address highway mobility, safety and accessibility in 43 Southwest Kansas counties. Study teams reviewed survey results from the earlier first round of public meetings, existing transportation conditions and the plan for the study.
Before KDOT officials, along with those from the state’s consultant firm HNTB, gave their presentation, though, Kansas 125th House District Representative Shannon Francis was introduced to the audience, and he talked about his passion for improvements to U.S. Highway 54, which he said will allow the region to continue to grow and prosper and its citizens to get needed products across the state.
“As the world becomes more and more global and interconnected, it gets harder and harder to get some of the things we need every day like health care, airlines, even shopping,” he said. “Highway 54 is my passion, and I want to thank KDOT for kicking off this expansion strategy. It costs a billion dollars to four lane Highway 54 from Liberal to Pratt. That’s real money in the State of Kansas’s budget.”
With a limited budget to work with for transportation, Francis said the state needs a plan going forward to expand infrastructure.
“We need a plan we can count on because we realize we can’t get a billion dollars spent for years on Highway 54,” he said.
KDOT Director of Planning and Development Mike Moriarity said SWKHMES is a four-phase effort.
“We have essentially completed phases one and two,” he said. “I think of phases one and two as the research phases before we go into phases three and four, where we’ll start to identify some recommendations and improvement concepts. We are in the research phase.”
As part of this phase, Moriarity said KDOT has established an advisory group.
“We have great representation from the study area on that group,” he said. The counties are represented. The larger cities are represented. We feel good about that committee. They’re a steering committee for us for this process.”
Moriarity said KDOT hosted listening sessions earlier this year, and transportation officials likewise put together a transportation history for Southwest Kansas.
“Phase Two got a little more technical,” he said. “We started to analyze some of the existing conditions. We started to forecast some future conditions – future traffic, things of that nature. We’re working on our evaluation process for the corridors.”
The Liberal public meeting took place in late May, and at that time, Moriarity said KDOT was about four months into the 14-month study.
“We’re about to wrap up phases one and two and kick off phases three and four,” he said. “We’ve not completely scoped out phases three and four yet. We’re working on that right now.”
Moriarity said the third and fourth phases were scheduled to be scoped out by the end of June.
“Then we’ll proceed with the analysis work in Phase Three, and we’ll start Phase Four in December,” he said.
KDOT’s primary consideration, Moriarity said, is safety, and with this aspect, agency leaders looked at traffic issues such as existing and future traffic, as well as truck, oversize and overweight traffic
“We looked at roadway conditions – pavement, bridge, how are those things shaping up right now,” he said. “We’re looking at some of the environmental factors in the area to make sure there are no red flags for any improvements we may want to pursue in the future.”
As always, Moriarity said KDOT is trying to gather as much public feedback in this planning process.
“At the end of this planning process, we’ll develop a strategy which will inform future transportation investments in this part of the state,” he said.
Other public meetings took place in Dodge City, Garden City, Scott City, Great Bend and Pratt, and Moriarity said about 170 people attended the meetings. Another 280 responded to a survey as part of the listening sessions that took place earlier this year.
He said much of what was heard there focused on investments not only for Hwy. 54, but also U.S. Highway 50, U.S. Highway 56 and U.S. Highway 83.
“There was a lot of discussion about the need for four-lane corridors,” he said. “There was discussion about additional passing lanes. In addition to those larger improvements, we had a lot of discussions with folks about needs, safety concerns and congestion at specific locations in Southwest Kansas. It could be an intersection. It could be a smaller section of highway that needs shoulders or turning lanes. We listened to those conversations. Those conversations go straight to our district office. We have conveyed those comments to our traffic engineering folks.”
HNTB consultant Kip Strauss said a draft of a baseline conditions report was scheduled to be turned into KDOT in late May.
“KDOT will review it, probably make a few edits,” he said. “When KDOT is satisfied with it, it’ll go up on the project Web site. You will have an opportunity to read through this document and see the details.”
To get a better look at the transportation situation in Southwest Kansas, Strauss said officials wanted to also better understand what is going on with four lanes around the Midwest.
“Going into Oklahoma, there’s a lot of four-lane sections,” he said. “There’s not as many four lanes going into Colorado with our study segments.”
Nor does Hwy. 83 have four lanes in Oklahoma or Nebraska, Strauss said.
“We don’t want to have the blinders on and just look at our study area,” he said. “We want to look at what’s happening in the adjacent states. We coordinated with the Colorado DOT and the Oklahoma DOT to ask them what are they planning for those corridors in addition to what’s already on the roads.”
KDOT’s next local consult meeting in Liberal is scheduled for October, and there, Strauss said residents can present their ideas to agency officials.
“The next phase is they move into that development pipeline,” he said. “You can think of that as now, they’re doing the design. They’re engineering it. They’re figuring out the details of the roadway. They’re starting to buy the right of way.”
Strauss said the next phases center on the construction pipeline.
“Now dollars have been assigned,” he said. “In the development pipeline, there’s no dollars yet for the project to be built, but once it moves into the construction pipeline, there’s been dollars assigned. They set a schedule of when they’re going to start building the infrastructure.”
Strauss said a number of the projects on Hwy. 54, passing lanes are in the construction pipeline.
“Some of those have already been built,” he said. “We have a good understanding of the IKE program and what projects are moving forward.”
Historically, Strauss said transportation conditions in the 41-county study area are known, and leaders wanted to try to estimate what will take place through 2060. He added studies show a stable population in that time, but this does not mean things are not happening.
“When we look down at the county level, we’re seeing migration to the larger cities like Liberal from the more rural areas,” he said. “There’ll be a lot of shifting going on between now and 2060 of population to the more urban areas.”
Strauss said projections show a healthy increase of jobs in the study area.
“Currently there’s about 227,000,” he said. “That’s about 11 percent of the total jobs in Kansas, and by 2060, it’s supposed to increase to 250,000, about a 10 percent increase. We also looked at gross domestic product. What is the value of the goods that are produced in this region? It’s very important to this region. It’s very important to Kansas. It’s very important to the nation.”
Currently, Strauss said the study area produces $20 billion worth of gross domestic product.
“That’s expected to have a healthy increase of 39 percent up to $28 billion,” he said. “As there’s more jobs, as there’s more commodities produced, that means more trucks on the road, more movement of travel we need to be thinking about.”
KDOT likewise looked at 10 years worth of crash data, and in the study area from 2015 to 2024, there were 16,502 crashes.
“Trucks were involved in 17 percent of those crashes,” Strauss said. “The most common crashes were other motor vehicles, animals and fixed objects and overturned vehicles. Animals were involved in 43 percent of the crashes.”
KDOT is in the middle of its Drive to Zero campaign to bring fatalities and serious injury crashes to zero, and in 2019, the state saw no fatal crashes, which Strauss said was rare.
“When we look at expansion projects, we want to look at how can we have the biggest bang for the buck on driving those fatal and serious injury crashes down,” he said.
Now with the travel, safety and engineering foundation in the network, Strauss said the corridor evaluation process can begin.
“We’ve broken it into a three-step process,” he said. “The first step is what are these priority corridors that are in need of expansion. Based on the existing conditions data we have, we’ll take into account the future traffic we’re working on.”
After this, step two uses data to identify corridors most appropriate for four laning and passing lanes, and step three is the implementation plan.
“That’s when we’ll have the detailed costs, and we’ll identify which sections of those corridors will get the biggest bang for their buck,” Strauss said. “We’ll prioritize all of those expansion projects.”
Because not all projects cannot be done at once, Strauss said they will be spread over multiple programs and prioritized.
