ShawneeDispatch.com

Contributed image from Mid-America Regional Council

The Mid-America Regional Council’s Creating Sustainable Places initiative calls for plans and demonstration projects in six key corridors in the greater Kansas City area. The map’s Shawnee Mission Parkway/Metcalf corridor has been extended west to include the portion of the parkway between Metcalf Avenue and Interstate 435.

The Kansas City area’s busiest thoroughfares may jockey for position in traffic counts from year to year, but Shawnee’s portion of Shawnee Mission Parkway is consistently a contender.

A 2008 count revealed that 45,000 vehicles a day drive the parkway between Nieman Road and Goddard Street — more than any other road in the metropolitan area, Shawnee traffic engineer Mark Sherfy said. He said that in 2010, only Metcalf Avenue near Interstate 435 edged Shawnee’s portion of the parkway.

“It’s a tremendous asset,” Sherfy said. “We shouldn’t overlook it.”

Considering sky-high car counts, redevelopment needs and pedestrian challenges, Shawnee is welcoming a chance to piggyback — and possibly expand — on a metrowide traffic corridor study.

In early stages the Mid-America Regional Council’s Creating Sustainable Places Initiative — including a $4.25 million grant to study six area corridors — covered the parkway only to Metcalf. MARC has since officially extended the study west to Interstate 435, Sherfy told city leaders during a recent joint meeting of the Shawnee City Council and Planning Commission.

Sherfy said it was critical for Shawnee to study the corridor to prepare for future development, laying a plan that outlines a vision for a sustainable and economically viable place.

“What do we want Shawnee Mission Parkway to look like in the long-term?” he said.

MARC staff has already created a series of maps illustrating demographics along the corridor. Color-coding makes it easy to see where older people versus younger people live, where high-priced versus low-priced homes are and where the population is most dense. Other maps pinpoint employment and retail centers, schools, bikeways, low-income housing projects and flood plains along the parkway.

Sherfy said a study should explore topics such as what types of retail and residential development would be needed for mass-transit to work, as well as ways to link pedestrian and bike routes to surrounding neighborhoods.

Planning Commissioner Tom Beckenbaugh said that especially with today’s generation “thinking green,” transit should connect Shawnee with the entire region. He also said Shawnee needed attractions to bring in residents from other cities.

“We should be looking for magnets,” he said. “We need something big along the Shawnee Mission Parkway corridor.”

City manager Carol Gonzales said she expected to present the Council with options for the parkway study within the next several months.

She said city leaders must determine what they wanted to study beyond what the MARC grant included, then determine how much they’d be willing to spend.

With redevelopment being a major focus, Gonzales said it’s unlikely the city would try to tackle extending the study farther west. However, she said, the parkway west of 435 could be an important component for regional public transit.

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