This holiday season, as Kansas receives from the national government a Christmas present of $2.6 billion dedicated to infrastructure spending, my wish for 2022 would be for elected leaders, city planners, and traffic engineers alike to spend federal highway dollars a little bit differently.
How different? Let me focus on my home of Wichita as an example.
Wichita, Kansas’s largest stand-alone city, has many urban amenities. But if you measure those amenities in terms of the city and state money spent to support them, then Kellogg Avenue, or U.S. 54, the east-west highway which divides the city in half, is likely hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of its competitors. Municipal accounting is insanely complicated (often intentionally so), but some estimates suggest that the city of Wichita has spent well over $1 billion over the decades extending and improving Kellogg (which at one time apparently absorbed over 80% of sales tax revenue generated in the city as well).
This money hasn’t been wasted. It has made it ridiculously easy to drive in Wichita, with one recent study concluding that my city has the least traffic congestion of any large city anywhere in the USA. If driving quickly from one side of Wichita to the other — which, of course, inevitably encourages developers to expand the city’s suburban footprint even further out, with all the consequences such sprawl entails — was the goal, then this investment has been a great success.
Perhaps my city should thus declare victory, and focus its infrastructure money elsewhere? Public transit, environmentally friendly transportation alternatives, catching up on the repainting of cross walks and traffic lines on Wichita’s over 5000 miles of road? Some of that might happen! But close to a third of the infrastructure money from Washington, D.C. is already committed to the “Eisenhower Legacy Transportation Program,” a 10-year plan for repairing and, yes, further expanding Kansas’s highways, with Kellogg itself slated to receive $166 million (the highways of Johnson and Wyandotte counties have $360 million on tap, by comparison).
I know: legislation is like sausage-making. The Biden administration’s huge (and desperately needed overall) infrastructure bill probably would never have passed if it hadn’t been loaded up with hundreds of specific commitments to different legislators and interest groups, any number of whose requests, however politically popular, might also have some socially disruptive, fiscally indefensible, or environmentally harmful results, if you dig into the policy details.
Kansas’s spread-out development pattern has always required an extensive system of roads, bridges, and highways; nothing will change that, and the fact that KDOT will finally have the means to complete many long-delayed projects is something to celebrate. Poor state financing has slowed bridge repairs and safety upgrades for too long! But still, it is not an attack on the “American way of life” to be reminded that every new mile of road built means that many more decades of maintenance costs, and that every additional lane of highway constructed means that many more drivers choosing to use of it, instead of calling for other means of transportation.
Reams of studies have shown that making it a priority for people to be able to drive everywhere, quickly, all the time, whatever its immediate economic benefits, has not been ideal for the health of Kansas’s citizen or its cities. As those engaged in making decisions about highway projects look forward to using this mighty Christmas gift, I hope that they’ll keep that in mind.
Dr. Russell Arben Fox is a professor of political science at Friends University in Wichita.
