| As they settle in, however, they want to know just what kind of transportation options the family members will face down the literal and figurative road. On the plus side, of course, the Wagoners quickly discover that Kansas City has arguably the best freeway system in the world, with 30 percent more freeway miles per capita than any city in America. This, they see as a huge improvement over the New York area. In that Mr. Wagoner travels a lot, the family has staked out a home in Platte County, given its closeness to Kansas City Inter-national Airport (KCI). There is a lot for the Wagoners to like about KCI. Its three easily accessible terminals were recently upgraded, including a sophisticated IT overhaul. And although boardings have steadily increased to record volume, check-ins have gotten swifter and on-time departures remain high. Plus, given the dependability of the roads, Mr. Wagoner can time to the minute exactly how long it will take him to get to the airport from his home or from anyplace else in the metro. The same could not be said for LaGuardia or O’Hare or LAX or most large American airports. One of the reasons Mr. Wagoner’s company settled in the Kansas City was because of its increasing value as a transportation hub. KCI, for instance, is beginning to see its long untapped commercial potential come to life. In 2005, the city of Kansas City launched a serious effort to exploit the airport’s 8,000 undeveloped acres—an area half the size of Manhattan island—for appropriate development. In addition, the Charles B. Wheeler Airport, right across the Missouri from Downtown and the region’s major corporate jet facility, recently enjoyed a $20 million upgrade. As Mr. Wagoner also discovered, only Chicago is a more significant rail hub than Kansas City, and Kansas City may be narrowing the gap. The Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) and the city of Gardner, Kansas, are each reviewing ideas for the intermodal logistics park planned by Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad and developer, the Allen Group. One challenge is to integrate the 4,000 daily truck trips anticipated by full build-out in 2025 into local traffic patterns. MARC and the cities of Kansas City and Belton, Missouri are doing comparable reviews for a planned state-of-the-art regional and international rail cargo operation at the former Richards-Gebauer air base. In late 2005, a Chicago industrial developer purchased the property for $5.6 million. Kansas City Southern Railway plans to use the facility as an “inland port” for shipping directly from Mexico and has purchased the assets of a Mexican rail line to make this happen. Since moving to Kansas City, the Wagoners have found that they can track transportation progress, both in the planning and execution stages, more efficiently than they ever could have done in the past. The easily navigable web sites of the various transportation agencies make this possible. But here is the rub. Nowhere else in the country, maybe nowhere else in the world, does a curious family have to sort through so many transportation planning agencies to plot its own future. Although the bi-state nature of the region helped Kansas City secure so many interstate miles—four United States senators for one city—it has made planning hugely more complicated. The jigsaw of county lines does not help much either. New York City may spread over five counties, but it has 8,000,000 people. Kansas City, Missouri spreads over four counties with just 450,000 people. There are also at least three core metro counties of the Kansas side. And unlike New York, where the Port Authority has jurisdictional control over all the bridges and tunnels crossing state and county lines into the city, responsibility here is much more diffuse. That much said, the respective counties assume serious transportation responsibilities, not just in the maintenance of county roads but in their planning. And they do it well. When the Wagoners check to see how safe Barry Road will be for the new drivers in the family, they have no trouble finding out. The Platte County “Roads Master Plan,” like most county plans, is easy to find and understand. The Wagoners learn that the county and the city of Kansas City are working together on a variety of safety improvements along Barry Road. Inevitably, though, the sharing of planning responsibility between city and county presents challenges. Platte County, for instance, depends on the city for a planned expansion to three lanes and bicycle paths, and this enhancement depends on traffic demands and money for construction. Mrs. Wagoner will be commuting to work in Overland Park so she is concerned about traffic flow on both sides of the state line. In 2006, she discovers, the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission approved a Statewide Transportation Improvement Program, or STIP, with a price tag in excess of $7 billion over a five-year period. The program earmarks $5.7 billion for highway and bridge projects, $700 million for other projects including aviation, railroads, waterways and public transportation, and $700 million for city and county transportation projects. MARC serves as the regional and metro planning organization for the STIP. More than $650 million in total construction costs is targeted for the urban Kansas City area on the Missouri side over the next five years and another $85 million is targeted for rural areas in greater Kansas City. The Missouri Department of Transportation (MODOT), Mrs. Wagoner sees, does a good job in breaking out the specific projects, their costs, and their completion schedules. She is particularly heartened to see the $25 million plus set aside for the widening to four lanes of Missouri Route 45 in Platte County from Route K to Route 9. Kansas, Mrs. Wagoner discovers, also has a statewide improvement program, and it goes by the name of the Comprehensive Transportation Plan (CTP). Under the relatively generous terms of the CTP, some $400 million a year in state and federal funds is being spent on road and bridge improvement in Kansas. This figure will likely drop to $200–250 million range once the CTP expires in 2009. The Kansas Department of Transportation, affectionately known as KDOT, trusts its future to the LRTP, an unpronounceable acronym that stands for “Long Range Transportation Plan.” The LRTP, which is a policy document rather than a project-by-project breakout, is in the process of being drafted and reviewed. Given her commute, one of the on-going KDOT projects that interests Mrs. Wagoner most is “Focus 435.” This is KDOT’s ambition plan, in conjunction with the city of Overland Park, to simplify driving on I-435, US-69, and Antioch Road. Construction, especially the opening of an Antioch exit off I-435, has made traffic through that area anything but simple. KDOT has an answer for this as well, and that is a program in which it participates called Kansas City Scout. Launched three years ago by MODOT and KDOT, Kansas City Scout is a bi-state traffic management system that monitors traffic on 80 plus miles of metro free-ways. The system uses closed- circuit cameras, electronic message boards, and sensors to help keep the traffic moving. The feature that most intrigues Mrs. Wagoner is the network of live cameras. Between her Platte County home and her office in Corporate Woods there must be at least twenty cameras en route that narrow-cast live images of the traffic at a given site right to the computer in her kitchen. She has bookmarked kcscout.net and checks the relevant cameras before leaving. The always thoughtful Mr. Wagoner calls his wife with visual updates if the situation warrants a warning. As to public transportation for the Wagoner youngsters, well, check with us after February.
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