Kansas City's Bold Plan: Parkway Over Highway

0:00It's April 28th, this is Kansas News Today, AI-powered stories from your city. I'm Cory with the story. City planners in Kansas City are pushing a bold idea to transform a stretch of U.S. Highway 71, also called Bruce R. Watkins Drive into a parkway. The plan, part of the reconnecting the Eastside project, targets the busy section between 85th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. To ease traffic jams, boost safety, and heal divides in local neighborhoods. This parkway alternative would sink the highway deeper into the ground, add bridges and surface streets over it, and narrow the lanes to create wider. Green buffers, over 150 feet in spots, pushing traffic farther from homes and businesses. Decades ago, building the highway split up mostly black communities on the Eastside, and now this aims to reconnect them by separating East-West. Local traffic from the north-south commuter rush, with sidewalks and paths of high for safer walks and drives. Key spots like Gregory Boulevard and 55th Street would get overpasses instead of risky intersections,

1:05while 59th Street goes under due. To the terrain, all with better pedestrian setups and greenery to come after more input. Feedbacks rolling in until May 8th on the city's website, and officials say reactions are mostly positive as they head to court this summer for. Judge approval under a civil rights consent decree still years from shovels in the ground, but a step toward real change.