Construction crews are still plugging away at an $8 million widening of West Sixth Street, but, despite the upgrades, city leaders should brace for snarled traffic on the corridor even as the paint dries on the lane stripes, KDOT officials said.

“The situation you’re in now is kind of like juggling chainsaws,” said C.W. Harper, a Kansas Department of Transportation planner. “If you mess up, it can get really messy really quick.”

KDOT officials said Wednesday that based on proposed development plans, city planners could easily approve so much development for the area that motorists would be facing significant increases in rush-hour drive times.

Engineers with the transportation department told a gathering of city planners and neighborhood representatives that the city faced a difficult balancing act between allowing appropriate levels of new development without overwhelming the road’s capacity.

KDOT officials were concerned enough about the future of the road, which also serves as U.S. Highway 40, that they spent two months creating a series of traffic projections based on different development scenarios.

Three models

The models produced a worst-case scenario that showed an increase in the rush-hour drive time between the South Lawrence Trafficway and Folks Road from approximately 3 minutes today to upwards of 20 minutes in three to five years. That scenario assumed developers would be allowed to build all 1.2 million square feet of retail and commercial development that they desire along the corridor.

Construction continues on Sixth Street between Wakarusa Drive and Kansas Highway 10. The road work doubles the lanes that were previously there. The Kansas Department of Transportation is concerned that the area will become clogged with traffic soon after it is opened because of possible overdevelopment of the area. Pictured is the westbound, oncoming traffic west of Wakarusa on Wednesday.

A second scenario produced a drive time increase of seven to eight minutes for the two-mile stretch of road, with the assumption that developers would be allowed to only build half of the desired 1.2 million square feet of commercial space.

A third “best-case” scenario would have the city add more turn lanes and other improvements to the new road, which would result in drive times increasing by only a couple of minutes.

‘Worst nightmares’

The scenario sparked concerns among neighborhood leaders, who have long fought a proposed Wal-Mart for the Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive intersection because they were concerned the area’s roads could not handle the traffic.

“It not only confirms our worst nightmares, it is worse than our worst nightmares,” said Alan Cowles, president of the West Lawrence Neighborhood Assn. “It looks like this could become the next 23rd Street.”

Developers in the area, though, scoffed at that notion. Greg DiVilbiss – a partner in The Bristol Groupe, which owns the shopping center on the southwest corner of Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive – said he was confident the area wouldn’t become the city’s next traffic headache. He said city and state officials had taken steps to ensure that the road wasn’t lined with driveways, which have created many problems along 23rd Street.

6News video: Sixth Street’s future not looking pretty

Lawrence commuter connection

“I’m not worried about it at all,” DiVilbiss said.

DiVilbiss also said city leaders should realize that overly restricting development in the area also would cause problems.

“You have to have the commercial development out there because that’s where the people are,” DiVilbiss said. “If you don’t, you’ll have people driving across town to get goods and services that they should be able to get close to home.”

Review scheduled

City commissioners are scheduled to review the traffic projections at an 8 a.m. study session on Wednesday at City Hall. City Commissioner David Schauner said the issue was one of the more important ones the city would deal with in the near future.

“I’m very concerned about re-creating 23rd Street,” Schauner said. “I can’t tell you how concerned I am about it.”

Schauner said he thought commissioners would have a very difficult time balancing development with traffic concerns.

“I’m not opposed to commercial development out there, but we have to do it in a way that doesn’t cause people to hate us,” Schauner said. “I guarantee you that people will hate us if it takes 20 minutes to drive that stretch of road. We just need to learn to say no.”

Planning for the widening of Sixth Street began in the late 1990s when city officials submitted the project to the state for approval. Thomas Dow, regional/urban planning manager for KDOT, said that when the project was proposed his department was comfortable that the road would meet the needs of the community for the next 20 years or more. But he said that was based on land-use projections provided by the city. He said it appeared the development requests were now coming in faster than anticipated.

“We believe there really is a problem, but it is the type of problem that is difficult for us to address because KDOT is not responsible for land-use decisions,” Dow said.