Lawrence shifting focus to mass transit

Today, Lawrence’s paved streets run for 282 miles, stretching into all corners of a rapidly expanding community.

Not so 150 years ago.

The city, built along a dirt backbone known as Massachusetts Street, started its transportation network as a small collection of horse trails, soon to evolve into a tight grid of crisscrossing streets — numbered streets going east and west, and streets named for states heading north and south.

It would be years before major traffic arteries would blaze through and away from the city’s central core, pumping traffic into the curving streets and cul de sacs growing into new residential areas like asphalt capillaries.

“One of the problems we have is not thinking big enough,” said George Williams, who’s lived in Lawrence for nearly half of the city’s 150 years and spent 46 years working on its street network. “When we first started expanding to the west, Sixth Street — well, everybody figured two lanes would handle everything.

“It didn’t.”

Today, major roads projects are at the heart of Lawrence’s transportation life. U.S. Highway 40 is expanding from two to four and five lanes west of Wakarusa Drive, continuing Sixth Street’s four- and five-lane swath west from downtown.

The Kansas Turnpike, which brushed the northern edge of the city when built in the 1950s, is bracing for a widening from four to six lanes in the coming years. Preliminary work on a similar widening already has started on the turnpike at the northwestern edge of town, reaching west from the Lecompton interchange to Topeka.

And completion of the South Lawrence Trafficway — a bitterly controversial highway project to connect the turnpike and Kansas Highway 10 by running around the southern edges of Lawrence — remains in limbo, as state highway officials await a legal challenge to the federal government’s blessing of a route that would run a four-lane highway through the Baker Wetlands.

Not that roads are reserved only for automobiles. Today, city policies accommodate plans for bicycle lanes, sidewalks, recreational trails and other features to make room for those who choose not to drive.

“I think we’re becoming more and more aware of means of transportation beyond the motor car,” said Williams, who went to work at City Hall in 1955 as assistant city engineer, and retired in 2002 as director of public works. “The bus system — ridership can’t do anything but go up.”

Transit fits to a ‘T’

Today, Lawrence’s public-transportation system — known simply as the “T” — runs buses throughout the city, helping relieve pressure on crowded roads and helping people get to employment, shopping or recreational areas without having to bother with driving.

The system started in 2000, and within a year averaged 3.7 riders per hour. This year the city system expects to transport eight riders per hour.

The system came after the 1971 launch of KU on Wheels, a bus system created by and operated for Kansas University students. The system — which started in 1957 as the Lawrence Bus Co. — remains operational today.

The city's first electric street cars were operated by the Lawrence Light & Railway Co. Rides on the 50-seat cars cost 5 cents in 1909, when this photograph was taken in front of the Journal-World offices.

Public transportation has a long history in Lawrence. It started in 1871 with the Lawrence Street Railway Co., which laid tracks down the center of a muddy Massachusetts Street and sent a mule-drawn streetcar — named Progress — from the central business district to the railroad depot north of the Kansas River.

In 1902, a gunsmith and bicycle mechanic launched a competitor for the streetcar business. C.L. Rutter bought a nine-passenger steam-powered vehicle to connect downtown and the rail depot, but his business failed.

Floods in 1903 wiped out portions of the Kansas River Bridge, and repairs were not strong enough to support streetcars, flushing the Lawrence Street Railway out of business.

Electric streetcars started running in Lawrence in 1909. Lawrence Light & Railway Co. offered rides on the 50-seat cars for 5 cents.

In 1917, the Kaw Valley Interurban railway provided hourly shuttle service between Lawrence and the Kansas City area. The railway shared a depot — now the Free State Brewery — in downtown Lawrence with the streetcar business.

The streetcar business closed in 1933, the same year Kansas Electric Power secured permission to launch a five-route bus service that offered fares of 10 cents.

Airport takes off

Lawrence Municipal Airport celebrated its 75th birthday this summer.

The airport, located at the northern edge of North Lawrence, was dedicated in 1929, during a ceremony that attracted an estimated 6,000 people.

The airfield started with four grass runways that wouldn’t be paved until 1936, when 15 railcars full of cinder arrived. From 1939 to 1943 the airport was a hub of a flight-training program run by the Civil Aeronautics Authority, precursor to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Today, the airport accommodates more than 60 planes nightly, is home to cutting-edge Kansas University aviation research and frequented by NASCAR teams, musicians and corporate executives. The airport handles about 100 take-offs and landings each day.

Williams, now 74, figures the airport will continue to expand — both its physical presence and its operational role in Lawrence’s transportation network.

“I think Lawrence is probably going to improve and expand the existing airport, to make it another means of transportation beyond what we have now,” he said. “It’ll make it more usable for more people.”