Measuring how much time the new South Lawrence Trafficway really will save you
I’ve had this article on my list to do for nearly 25 years. No, I’m not quite that big of a procrastinator. I’m talking about an article detailing how much time the completed South Lawrence Trafficway would save motorists once it was completed.
I bought the stopwatch shortly after I wrote my very first article as a Douglas County journalist in 1992. It was about how the South Lawrence Trafficway project was in its final phases. Turns out, I was just a bit off. It seems I also could have saved the money on the stopwatch and used my sundial instead to measure the project.
That is all history, however, as the long-debated and long-litigated eastern leg of the trafficway opened to motorists this week. So, I spent some time driving it on Thursday — with the stopwatch on my phone. (You needed a really long cord to pull that off in 1992.) Here’s what I found.
• Rock Chalk Express? The SLT project is estimated to have about a $3.7 billion economic impact on the region in the years to come. I’m guessing a good part of that is additional health care spending by pickup basketball players who now will play more because they have a quicker route to the multitude of courts at the Sports Pavilion at Rock Chalk Park in northwest Lawrence.
In all seriousness, one of the concerns some have expressed about Rock Chalk Park is that it is a long ways away from certain parts of the city. The SLT project should help in some regards. But how much?
Here’s what I did: I started in the Prairie Park neighborhood in southeast Lawrence. Specifically, I was near the corner of E. 26th Terrace and Bishop Street because I know for a fact that there is a resident near there who is a pickup brick layer . . . I mean basketball player. (Don’t worry, such insults won’t cause him to pass me the ball any less.)
I would take two routes: One via the trafficway, and another route assuming that the SLT had never been built. That part is important because it means I stayed off the new section of 31st Street between Haskell and O’Connell because all indications were that project wasn’t going to happen without the SLT.
The route I took through the city was O’Connell Road to 23rd Street, which turns into Clinton Parkway, then Wakarusa Drive to Sixth Street, and then George Williams Way to Rock Chalk Park. That drive took 25 minutes and 45 seconds midday Thursday.
Then I took the SLT route. I again took O’Connell Road to 23rd Street, but this time I turned east and got on the new SLT interchange that is just basically right around the corner from the Prairie Park neighborhood. I could have taken the new 31st Street west over to the Haskell Avenue/SLT interchange as well. But the philosophy in the Lawhorn house is the quicker you can get to 70 miles per hour, the quicker you will get there. (Warning: That philosophy at times has made getting auto insurance difficult.) So, I got on the SLT as soon as I could, and stayed on it until the Sixth Street interchange, and then took Sixth to George Williams to Rock Chalk Park. The time was 19 minutes and 18 seconds. So, a savings of about six and a half minutes. Just think of what you could do if you get to the Sports Pavilion about six minutes earlier. My buddy could put up about 3,000 shots and ruin at least five basketballs.
• From end to end. A big reason Kansas Department of Transportation officials stuck with the SLT project through more than 20 years of delay is because they believed the state was in need of a better route for motorists traveling between Johnson County and Topeka. Interstate 70 doesn’t go through Johnson County, and some of the connecting routes to I-70 in the metro area can get pretty congested. The SLT provides that link between Kansas Highway 10 — the major east-west route into Johnson County — and I-70.
So, I wanted to time how long it would take to go from the western end of the trafficway to the eastern end, and then how long it would take to go from the same two points by using Lawrence city streets instead.
For this exercise, I also pretended I was a semi-truck driver, which means I stuck to truck routes through the city. (It also was a good excuse to make lots of air horn noises, and say phrases like “keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your . . . bumper.”) I mainly did it, though, because truck traffic is expected to be a major beneficiary of the new road.
I started at the Lecompton interchange on the Kansas Turnpike, which is the western terminus for the SLT. For the non-SLT route, I took Interstate 70 to the West Lawrence interchange, then took McDonald Drive to Iowa Street, and Iowa Street to 23rd Street and stayed on 23rd until I got outside the city limits. Time: 21 minutes and 45 seconds.
The SLT route is simple enough: I started at the same Lecompton interchange and took the SLT to its eastern terminus just outside the Lawrence city limits. Time: 14 minutes and 10 second. That’s a difference of about seven and a half minutes. Perhaps some people expected it would have been a bit more of a time savings, but you have to remember that the old route did include a good stretch of 75-mile-per-hour roadway — the turnpike section between the Lecompton interchange and the West Lawrence interchange. By avoiding that stretch of interstate, you are not really saving any time. Your time savings comes by avoiding the Lawrence city streets. Whether the time savings is enough to justify the expense and trouble of the road probably will be debated. But it seems clear that trucking companies would be foolish not to use the SLT. Saving more than seven minutes and a lesser toll will be big selling points to the trucking companies.
• Shopper savings. I wanted to see how much time it would save somebody coming from east of Lawrence to get to the shopping district on South Iowa Street. This one was difficult because all Lawhorn vehicles have made the trip down 23rd Street over to Haskell and then to 31st Street and then to Ousdahl so many times that it was difficult to get the truck to take a different route.
But I managed, and here are the results. I started at the Davenport Winery and Orchard which is right near K-10 and County Route 1057. It was just an easy place to start from. My ending location was the Wal-Mart parking lot. For the non-SLT route, I took the route described above. Time: 13 minutes and 20 seconds.
The SLT route was simply starting at Davenport and taking the trafficway to the Iowa Street interchange, and then turning off of Iowa Street into the Wal-Mart parking lot. One note here: There is an odd change in speed limits between the Haskell interchange and the Iowa Street interchange. The speed limit for westbound traffic drops from 70 miles per hour to 65 miles per hour. The reason is because it is a transition zone. Remember, the SLT west of Iowa Street is still two lanes. Imagine how many out-of-town motorists are going to wonder why that road was built that way. Don’t worry, though, the eastern leg of the SLT is still a real time saver. This is maybe the key statistic of the whole trafficway. You can drive from Iowa Street to east of the city limits in four minutes by taking the trafficway. But, how much time did I save on the trip to Wal-Mart? The total time was seven minutes. In this particular case that is about a 50 percent reduction in total trip time. That’s a scary thought for my wallet. In all, the time savings was about six and a half minutes.
If you’ve noticed, that has pretty much been the savings each time. The SLT: The seven-minute trafficway. Or the 25-year trafficway. Take your pick. Probably the bigger quandary will be figuring out whether the time savings and other benefits of the road have been worth the cost and trouble. I’ll leave that to others to figure out.
But don’t plan on doing so during your commute. You may not have the time.
Measuring how much time the new South Lawrence Trafficway really will save you
photo by: Nick Krug
I’ve had this article on my list to do for nearly 25 years. No, I’m not quite that big of a procrastinator. I’m talking about an article detailing how much time the completed South Lawrence Trafficway would save motorists once it was completed.
I bought the stopwatch shortly after I wrote my very first article as a Douglas County journalist in 1992. It was about how the South Lawrence Trafficway project was in its final phases. Turns out, I was just a bit off. It seems I also could have saved the money on the stopwatch and used my sundial instead to measure the project.
That is all history, however, as the long-debated and long-litigated eastern leg of the trafficway opened to motorists this week. So, I spent some time driving it on Thursday — with the stopwatch on my phone. (You needed a really long cord to pull that off in 1992.) Here’s what I found.
• Rock Chalk Express? The SLT project is estimated to have about a $3.7 billion economic impact on the region in the years to come. I’m guessing a good part of that is additional health care spending by pickup basketball players who now will play more because they have a quicker route to the multitude of courts at the Sports Pavilion at Rock Chalk Park in northwest Lawrence.
In all seriousness, one of the concerns some have expressed about Rock Chalk Park is that it is a long ways away from certain parts of the city. The SLT project should help in some regards. But how much?
Here’s what I did: I started in the Prairie Park neighborhood in southeast Lawrence. Specifically, I was near the corner of E. 26th Terrace and Bishop Street because I know for a fact that there is a resident near there who is a pickup brick layer . . . I mean basketball player. (Don’t worry, such insults won’t cause him to pass me the ball any less.)
I would take two routes: One via the trafficway, and another route assuming that the SLT had never been built. That part is important because it means I stayed off the new section of 31st Street between Haskell and O’Connell because all indications were that project wasn’t going to happen without the SLT.
The route I took through the city was O’Connell Road to 23rd Street, which turns into Clinton Parkway, then Wakarusa Drive to Sixth Street, and then George Williams Way to Rock Chalk Park. That drive took 25 minutes and 45 seconds midday Thursday.
Then I took the SLT route. I again took O’Connell Road to 23rd Street, but this time I turned east and got on the new SLT interchange that is just basically right around the corner from the Prairie Park neighborhood. I could have taken the new 31st Street west over to the Haskell Avenue/SLT interchange as well. But the philosophy in the Lawhorn house is the quicker you can get to 70 miles per hour, the quicker you will get there. (Warning: That philosophy at times has made getting auto insurance difficult.) So, I got on the SLT as soon as I could, and stayed on it until the Sixth Street interchange, and then took Sixth to George Williams to Rock Chalk Park. The time was 19 minutes and 18 seconds. So, a savings of about six and a half minutes. Just think of what you could do if you get to the Sports Pavilion about six minutes earlier. My buddy could put up about 3,000 shots and ruin at least five basketballs.
• From end to end. A big reason Kansas Department of Transportation officials stuck with the SLT project through more than 20 years of delay is because they believed the state was in need of a better route for motorists traveling between Johnson County and Topeka. Interstate 70 doesn’t go through Johnson County, and some of the connecting routes to I-70 in the metro area can get pretty congested. The SLT provides that link between Kansas Highway 10 — the major east-west route into Johnson County — and I-70.
So, I wanted to time how long it would take to go from the western end of the trafficway to the eastern end, and then how long it would take to go from the same two points by using Lawrence city streets instead.
For this exercise, I also pretended I was a semi-truck driver, which means I stuck to truck routes through the city. (It also was a good excuse to make lots of air horn noises, and say phrases like “keep the bugs off your glass and the bears off your . . . bumper.”) I mainly did it, though, because truck traffic is expected to be a major beneficiary of the new road.
I started at the Lecompton interchange on the Kansas Turnpike, which is the western terminus for the SLT. For the non-SLT route, I took Interstate 70 to the West Lawrence interchange, then took McDonald Drive to Iowa Street, and Iowa Street to 23rd Street and stayed on 23rd until I got outside the city limits. Time: 21 minutes and 45 seconds.
The SLT route is simple enough: I started at the same Lecompton interchange and took the SLT to its eastern terminus just outside the Lawrence city limits. Time: 14 minutes and 10 second. That’s a difference of about seven and a half minutes. Perhaps some people expected it would have been a bit more of a time savings, but you have to remember that the old route did include a good stretch of 75-mile-per-hour roadway — the turnpike section between the Lecompton interchange and the West Lawrence interchange. By avoiding that stretch of interstate, you are not really saving any time. Your time savings comes by avoiding the Lawrence city streets. Whether the time savings is enough to justify the expense and trouble of the road probably will be debated. But it seems clear that trucking companies would be foolish not to use the SLT. Saving more than seven minutes and a lesser toll will be big selling points to the trucking companies.
• Shopper savings. I wanted to see how much time it would save somebody coming from east of Lawrence to get to the shopping district on South Iowa Street. This one was difficult because all Lawhorn vehicles have made the trip down 23rd Street over to Haskell and then to 31st Street and then to Ousdahl so many times that it was difficult to get the truck to take a different route.
But I managed, and here are the results. I started at the Davenport Winery and Orchard which is right near K-10 and County Route 1057. It was just an easy place to start from. My ending location was the Wal-Mart parking lot. For the non-SLT route, I took the route described above. Time: 13 minutes and 20 seconds.
The SLT route was simply starting at Davenport and taking the trafficway to the Iowa Street interchange, and then turning off of Iowa Street into the Wal-Mart parking lot. One note here: There is an odd change in speed limits between the Haskell interchange and the Iowa Street interchange. The speed limit for westbound traffic drops from 70 miles per hour to 65 miles per hour. The reason is because it is a transition zone. Remember, the SLT west of Iowa Street is still two lanes. Imagine how many out-of-town motorists are going to wonder why that road was built that way. Don’t worry, though, the eastern leg of the SLT is still a real time saver. This is maybe the key statistic of the whole trafficway. You can drive from Iowa Street to east of the city limits in four minutes by taking the trafficway. But, how much time did I save on the trip to Wal-Mart? The total time was seven minutes. In this particular case that is about a 50 percent reduction in total trip time. That’s a scary thought for my wallet. In all, the time savings was about six and a half minutes.
If you’ve noticed, that has pretty much been the savings each time. The SLT: The seven-minute trafficway. Or the 25-year trafficway. Take your pick. Probably the bigger quandary will be figuring out whether the time savings and other benefits of the road have been worth the cost and trouble. I’ll leave that to others to figure out.
But don’t plan on doing so during your commute. You may not have the time.