Original Wichita freeway plan

[Revive 755]

This map excerpt of a once proposed elevated inner loop freeway in Wichita comes from Map 5I in Transportation Study for the Wichia-Sedgwick County Metropolitan Area Volume Two Traffic Analysis Transportation Plan Proposals, October 1964.


The western end of the route was at the US 54/Seneca Street tight cloverleaf, while the eastern end was to be at the I-35W interchange with 9th Street.  The line with the longer dashes is the proposed route, while the lines with shorter dashes was a proposed feeder street.

East of I-35W, the corridor was to have continued as an at grade expressway with channelized intersections called the NorthEast Diagonal.  This route would continue along 9th until meeting a now abandoned railroad grade at Holyoke Street, follow the grade to around halfway between Woodlawn and what now appears to be Rock Road, then angle Northeasterly to end at the NorthEast Circumferential, which seems to have evolved into the KS 96 freeway.

Much of Wichita seems to have been developed or redeveloped since this plan, making some of the routes hard to pin down.

I've attempted to show most of the other routes in this map.  The Inner Loop appears to be the only freeway cancellation.
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&ll=37.699578,-97.295609&spn=0.188794,0.308647&z=12&msid=117499567522166489363.00047fe40ffa09fdc9fb5

[Retitled thread. -S.]

[Truvelo]

Looking on Google Maps it appears there's plenty of spare land inside the ramps at the 9th St interchange. Was this built to allow loops to be added at a later date?

[J N Winkler]

I am familiar with this proposal--it was progressed through the 1960's and early 1970's and a DEIS was prepared in 1976.  The proposal was considered so controversial that the Wichita City Council voted not to proceed with it.

The western end of the route was at the US 54/Seneca Street tight cloverleaf, while the eastern end was to be at the I-35W interchange with 9th Street.  The line with the longer dashes is the proposed route, while the lines with shorter dashes was a proposed feeder street.

The Seneca Street cloverleaf no longer exists.  It was converted to a diamond (with a slip ramp for Sycamore Street) when this portion of Kellogg was widened and converted to a full freeway in the 1990's.

N.B.  Much of the detail in the 1964 transportation plan is spurious.  When the Inner Loop DEIS was prepared, it was not even known whether the Inner Loop would be built as an elevated highway on viaduct, or on fill.  Cost estimates and noise contour maps were developed for both options.

East of I-35W, the corridor was to have continued as an at grade expressway with channelized intersections called the Northeast Diagonal.

Part of this was actually built.  The 8th-9th Streets interchange on I-135 (or I-35W as it was back then) was deliberately built on spread right-of-way, and the cross road (which joins 8th Street on the west and 9th Street on the east) has a boulevard cross-section with a center island.  This would have been the northeastern terminus of the Inner Loop and the southwestern terminus of the Northeast Diagonal.

This route would continue along 9th until meeting a now abandoned railroad grade at Holyoke Street, follow the grade to around halfway between Woodlawn and what now appears to be Rock Road, then angle Northeasterly to end at the Northeast Circumferential, which seems to have evolved into the KS 96 freeway.

The Northeast Circumferential as shown in the 1964 plan was progressed to a public hearing in 1972, but for one reason or another, funding was not made available to build it.  The K-96 Northeast Freeway was eventually built in the late 1980's as a joint project between the City of Wichita and Sedgwick County, with the city building the northern flank while the county built the eastern flank.  The western terminus was also relocated to a trumpet on I-135 rather than the originally proposed direct connection to K-254, probably to provide more convenient access to parts of built-up Wichita which would otherwise have been served by the Northeast Diagonal if that had not been cancelled.

Much of Wichita seems to have been developed or redeveloped since this plan, making some of the routes hard to pin down.

Actually, not much has changed.  The routes you have drawn in Google Maps are accurate for the most part.  I drew a similar map a while ago:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&ll=37.842277,-97.589921&spn=0.558508,1.234589&z=10

Based on older city maps, I would say that most of the Northeast Diagonal corridor southwestward of 21st and Oliver was already urbanized by 1970.  Northeastward of there, much of the development is recent.  The Northeast Freeway was built completely on a greenfield location in the late 1980's, but there has since been significant development, with housing subdivisions, doctors' offices, specialty hospitals, and the Rock Road retail corridor emerging in the 20 years following completion of the freeway.

I've attempted to show most of the other routes in this map.  The Inner Loop appears to be the only freeway cancellation.
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&ll=37.699578,-97.295609&spn=0.188794,0.308647&z=12&msid=117499567522166489363.00047fe40ffa09fdc9fb5

The Inner Loop was certainly the only explicit freeway proposal to reach an advanced planning stage before cancellation.  But the Northeast Diagonal and the 25th Street Express Arterial both fell by the wayside.  The latter road has left some traces:  (1) 25th Street still has a direct connection to I-235, and (2) the present 21st Street interchange on I-135 is on spread ROW because it was anticipated, during the early planning stages for I-35W (now I-135), that there would be a direct connection to the Express Arterial in the near vicinity.

In the late 1950's/early 1960's, the Kansas SHC and the federal BPR considered a modified trumpet interchange for the 21st Street interchange, which would have had slip ramps to provide easy connections to the express arterial.  NARA in Kansas City has a plan of the proposed layout.  There was at that time still no certainty about which corridor would be followed--21st, 25th, and 29th Streets (all of which are surface arterials at various points in Wichita) were considered.  In the end, as I-135 neared completion, the SHC opted to build a volleyball interchange.  This remained in place for more than 20 years but was eventually ripped out in favor of a conventional diamond in the early noughties.  This improvement was coordinated with revitalization of 21st Street east of the interchange--it is now considered Main Street for the black community in Wichita.

Regarding the Inner Loop, two facts have to be kept in mind.

*  In order to have utility as part of an overall transportation system, it would have had to connect with a facility of comparable standard to the east.  The Northeast Diagonal would have cut through the heart of the black part of town--a tough sell in 1975.  (The Canal Route, when it was finished in the late 1970's, was praised as an example of context-sensitive design because it followed an existing severance corridor rather than opening up a new one.)

*  City leaders were in denial about upgrading Kellogg to a full freeway well into the 1980's.  The current railroad viaduct on Kellogg to the immediate east of the downtown flyover (itself completed in 1996) was planned and built in the late 1970's as a replacement for an existing railroad viaduct dating from the 1950's, not necessarily as part of a longer freeway corridor.  In fact, the original plan for sales-tax-funded improvements to Kellogg, developed in 1985, did not explicitly call for it to be reconstructed as a full freeway.  Options which would have left flat intersections remained on the table until comparatively late in the process.  Cancellation of the Inner Loop probably contributed to the City Council biting the bullet and rejecting inferior improvements for Kellogg, which together with I-135 essentially replaces the Inner Loop as proposed in the 1970's.  Kellogg improvements to date have cost about four times what was projected in 1985, but much of this increase in cost is tied to increases in scope and scale--initially acceptance of a six-lane freeway as the standard cross section, and then later expansion of the freeway corridor east out to K-96 and west out to Goddard and a tie-in with the planned K-254 Northwest Bypass.

[Stephane Dumas]

here a shot from Kellogg street close to the trumpet interchange with I-35/KS Tpk. It seems then the freeway have a stub ramp, is it a future ramp for a future interchange upgrade with I-35?
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=117499567522166489363.00047fe40ffa09fdc9fb5&ll=37.678997,-97.232909&spn=0,359.963651&z=15&layer=c&cbll=37.679031,-97.232738&panoid=p2zJZ5YtjjHuB0YUmr1XnQ&cbp=12,286.16,,0,-11.03

[J N Winkler]

No, what you are seeing is Kellogg Drive, as the Kellogg Avenue frontage road is called.  It is not continuous and has existed in this location for a long time.  The channel delineators in the Street View imagery are part of the traffic control for the Rock Road interchange, which opened last November.

As a general rule, Kellogg Drive exists wherever there is significant retail development along Kellogg--it generally does not exist through residential areas (such as the length of Kellogg between West and Sycamore) or through major interchanges unless these have been designed Texas-style with ramps feeding directly into the frontage roads.

The City of Wichita does plan to rebuild the Turnpike interchange as part of a planned Webb Road interchange complex but, as far as I am aware, the design has not yet been finalized.

[J N Winkler]

The following perspective sketch shows a typical service interchange on a freeway and comes from Patterns for Thorofares, prepared in 1955 for the Wichita Metropolitan Area Planning Commission.



As far as I am aware, no interchanges were actually built to this particular design anywhere near Wichita except for I-135/Broadway and I-135/1st Street in Newton.  These interchanges no longer exist because they were ripped out and replaced with a split diamond (the actual connections to 1st and Broadway being made by elliptical roundabouts) in the early noughties.

Patterns for Thorofares shows other freeway concepts, besides the Wichita Inner Loop, which did not come to fruition.  For example, what is now the K-96 Northeast Freeway was originally intended to function as part of an Eastern Circumferential Route, which would have included a freeway running from the Kellogg/Turnpike interchange north and west to I-235 and the Turnpike itself between the East Wichita interchange and projected separate interchanges (both of the trumpet type and closely spaced) with I-135 and I-235 in south Wichita.  In order to enable it to function as part of this circumferential route, the Turnpike would have been retrofitted with closely spaced service interchanges along this stretch.

Also, Patterns for Thorofares has a different concept for the Inner Loop.  Instead of being its own route and starting with a run along the Seneca Street corridor, it would have branched off a proposed Northwest Diagonal, built to freeway standard, and running in the McLean Boulevard/Central Avenue/Zoo Boulevard corridor.  Its connection with the Northwest Diagonal would have fallen somewhere between what are now the 2nd Street and Seneca intersections on McLean.  Patterns for Thorofares did not contain any proposals for a Northeast Diagonal within the postulated Eastern Circumferential.  Instead, its version of the Northeast Diagonal would have started at an interchange on the north flank of the Eastern Circumferential and proceeded northeastward along what is now more or less the K-254 corridor.  It is not shown with any intersections, so it is difficult to say whether it would have been built as a freeway, but it would not have had free-flowing access to the Eastern Circumferential.

Patterns for Thorofares calls for some unusual interchange designs, including two- and three-level roundabout interchanges (the 1965 Blue Book had not yet come out with language deprecating rotaries), a bean-shaped design for what are now the I-235/Kellogg (eventually built as cloverleaf; now slated for replacement with a stack/turban hybrid) and I-235/Zoo Boulevard (partial cloverleaf) interchanges, and a sui generis affair for what is now the McLean/Meridian/Central signalized intersection adjacent to the Arkansas River.

This illustration from Patterns for Thorofares shows, in plan view, the bean-shaped design for freeway-to-freeway interchanges.  North is up in the picture, with I-235 running from southwest to northeast and Zoo Boulevard running from southeast to northwest.  (They were called different things back in the 1950's, of course--Patterns for Thorofares refers to I-235 as the Western Circumferential and it was probably the US 81 Bypass in local vernacular for decades, while the then Bickel Boulevard was not renamed to Zoo Boulevard until the Sedgwick County Zoo opened in the mid-1970's.)  Parallel to I-235 on the north, and indicated by faint lines, is the Wichita-Valley Center Flood Control Canal, locally called the "Big Ditch."  Parallel to Zoo Boulevard, also on the north, is the Missouri Pacific railroad line, which is still in service and is the reason the present Zoo Boulevard interchange is a parclo rather than a diamond.  It is perhaps not coincidental that the other proposed location for a bean-shaped interchange (I-235/Kellogg) was also constrained by the Big Ditch and a railroad line (Central Kansas RR, and now largely abandoned, in this case).



It would have been an absolute nightmare to sign and drive through.

[Truvelo]

I wonder if the railway line had anything to do with bean design or whether traffic patterns dictated the mainline should be NW<>NE. If not, the left exits could have been fun.

[J N Winkler]

I think the authors of Patterns for Thorofares chose the bean design in both cases because of close proximity to the Big Ditch and a railroad line.  It is certainly true that in the case of I-235 and (now) Zoo Boulevard, their proposed design favors NW <--> NE movements with somewhat larger radii than are offered to the other movements with the exception of the NE --> SE movement, but in general the radii involved are so small (even for the generously provided for movements) that it would probably have been necessary within a relatively short period of time (say 20 years) to build flyovers to cater for heavily used movements at an acceptable level of service.

Patterns for Thorofares suffers from a disease which was very common in urban thoroughfare plans until about 1970, which is to specify freeways with so small a footprint for service interchanges that it is almost impossible to provide economically for significant exchange of traffic between the freeway and its feeder surface arterials in safety and at an acceptable level of service.  I think this realization that service interchanges needed not to be a bottleneck between surface arterials and the freeway, along with 1960's and 1970's macro changes like stagflation, civil rights, expensive motor fuel, concern about pollution originating from motor vehicles, etc. contributed to the cancellation of a number of urban freeways.  Even if there were no concerns about world oil supplies, motor vehicle pollution, "white men's highways through black men's bedrooms," etc., I suspect a number of urban freeways would still have had to be rejected as unbuildable to serve the intended function at an acceptable cost.  In these cases the fault would rest not with changing socioeconomic circumstances, but rather with shortcomings in the technical specifications for freeways which became evident only when a significant mileage had already been built in urban areas.