It goes through no major cities (other than the suburban hell that is Johnson County) and it is basically a cutoff allowing traffic to avoid the Kansas Turnpike. How did the KTA let them get away with building it?
Maybe because KTA "won" between Wichita and Emporia? Original proposal (dating no later than 1947) for I-35 between Wichita and Emporia was via Newton, then following the US 50 corridor from Newton.
It is a bit strange, considering it only saves I-35 a whopping three miles, compared to routing I-35 along the whole length of the Kansas Turnpike.
Not to mention, routing it along I-70 to downtown Kansas City, MO would have made the downtown loop connections better, and the I-670 designation wouldn't be needed, because I-70 could just follow that freeway through downtown after the 70/670 split (but I already went on about this in a Fictional Highways post).
Quote from: froggie on December 19, 2014, 02:35:45 PM
Maybe because KTA "won" between Wichita and Emporia? Original proposal (dating no later than 1947) for I-35 between Wichita and Emporia was via Newton, then following the US 50 corridor from Newton.
You need to clarify. I-35 planning, along with the rest of the interstate highway system, didn't occur until the mid 1950's.
Quote from: skluth on December 20, 2014, 03:57:14 PM
I-35 planning, along with the rest of the interstate highway system, didn't occur until the mid 1950's.
QuoteEfforts to identify routes for the Interstate System continued well into 1947, as the PRA worked with the States to identify the network and resolve disputes about connections at State borders. On August 2, 1947, however, the PRA was able to announce the first designations approved by Major General Philip B. Fleming, the Federal Works Administrator, and MacDonald. The routes included 37,681 miles of the Nation's principal highways, including 2,882 miles of urban thoroughfares. The routes were assigned neither names nor numbers; they were simply black lines on a white map. To fill out the 40,000-mile Interstate System, the PRA had reserved 2,319 miles for additional urban circumferential and distributing routes that would be designated later.
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/fairbank.cfm
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/fairbank17.cfm
Quote from: froggie on December 19, 2014, 02:35:45 PM
Maybe because KTA "won" between Wichita and Emporia? Original proposal (dating no later than 1947) for I-35 between Wichita and Emporia was via Newton, then following the US 50 corridor from Newton.
Yeah, the FHWA route was always a screwy one to me. The KTA route made more sense, IMHO.
Quote from: skluthYou need to clarify. I-35 planning, along with the rest of the interstate highway system, didn't occur until the mid 1950's
As SPUI noted, Interstate highway planning actually began in the 1940s, and had its early beginnings in the late 1930s. What happened in 1956 was the funding mechanism...but there were segments in active planning long before then.
To cite a few examples, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Interstate system was sketched out by 1951...what became I-35E north of downtown St. Paul was originally designed in 1945...and the main Richmond, VA downtown Interstates (today's I-64 and I-95) were put on paper in a 1948 report.
It may have been pitched as a more direct Wichita—Kansas City route, bypassing Topeka.
I-35 got built--though the length between Emporia and Ottawa was built very late--because it was the originally proposed Wichita-Kansas City connection and it survived at least two attempts to cancel it.
Additional details here:
https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=10097
Quote from: Scott5114 on December 21, 2014, 05:01:21 PM
It may have been pitched as a more direct Wichita—Kansas City route, bypassing Topeka.
That's not the point. The point is that it has cost the Kansas Turnpike millions if not billions in toll revenue. And it's not much quicker unless you're going to the SW corner of the metro. Why didn't the KTA put a stop to it?
Quote from: bugo on December 22, 2014, 01:04:08 AMThat's not the point. The point is that it has cost the Kansas Turnpike millions if not billions in toll revenue. And it's not much quicker unless you're going to the SW corner of the metro. Why didn't the KTA put a stop to it?
They never had the required leverage in the Legislature--see link given upthread.
Plus politics wasn't always focused on money.
It is worth noting that if free I-35 had been killed on grounds that it duplicated the Turnpike (as the federal BPR proposed in the mid-1950's and some state legislators suggested in the early 1960's), Kansas would have lost Interstate Construction funds for over 100 miles of freeway. The Kansas taxpayer would therefore be contributing approximately the same amount for Interstates through the federal gas tax, but get less out of the program. That, I think, would have been too much of a pill for the pragmatic Kansas voter of yesterday to swallow. (Nowadays, of course, today's Kansas voter is pleased to subsidize Medicaid expansion in other states under Obamacare as long as it doesn't happen in Kansas.)
The Turnpike was never designed to be a profit-making enterprise and giving up a hundred miles' worth of free Interstate money was ultimately not necessary to pay off its construction costs. On the other hand, there is no free Interstate money available for a notional US 50 Newton-Emporia freeway that follows the originally proposed I-35 corridor, so nobody really talks about paying full whack to build a facility that would arguably siphon even more traffic off the Turnpike than free I-35.