e-biking in Kansas City
a guide to using an e-bike for everyday transportation
Author: Dave
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I don’t mean to be critical, but who is the blithering idiot who designed this? The intersection of Brookside Boulevard, Main Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, already a testament to engineering incompetence, has gotten even more absurd with the addition of the streetcar tracks. The general configuration of the intersection comes from…
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Stopped at the light on eastbound 59th Street trying to cross Ward Parkway. It’s a long light. There is no southbound traffic coming on Ward Parkway for at least two blocks. After 20 seconds, I run the red light. And I repeat this crossing the northbound lanes of Ward Parkway a few seconds later. As…
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It’s a short stretch but one of my favorite streets in the city: the 5400 Block of Wyandotte. It includes a gentle eastward (when traveling south) curve and a set of wonderful homes. The video starts at 51st Street and ends at Westover, with some details for the Block of the Month.
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Street or road? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself as I ride through Kansas City ever since I read the book “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer” by Charles Marohn, founder of the organization Strong Towns. A road serves to move traffic from one place to another as quickly as possible. A street is a…
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Well…not really. However the cones used to limit traffic to one lane in each direction as streetcar construction reaches its conclusion created unofficial bike lanes for a time. Here’s a video of what a ride down Main might have looked like if things had worked out differently. (Switch the video settings to the highest resolution.)…
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The Trolley Track Trail’s nettlesome gap between 73rd and 75th Streets has been closed, thanks to a redo of the intersection by the city. The trail formerly dumped southbound users into a parking lot, where they would need to thread the parked cars for two blocks and cross a nasty intersection before picking up the…
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One of the best things about biking in the city is coming upon a stretch of side-street of great charm that you would never see from the main streets. One such block is 71st Terrace between Cherry and Holmes. Nearly all the houses are of the Tudor style, which proliferated in Kansas City neighborhoods due…
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Apple’s Maps app now will give you suggested bike routes. Pick your start- and endpoints and click the bicycle icon and you’ll get three suggested routes, each with turn-by-turn instructions and specifics like places you will need to dismount and walk your bike. Each segment is marked as a main road, side road, bike lane,…
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Perhaps no one has a better sense for just how trashy Kansas City is than cyclists. The city’s bike lanes are full of litter and debris. The bike trails, especially segments in the woods, serve as free landfills, fouled by pickup loads of junk. Roadsides and parks are full of trash. Streams have belched garbage…
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Both Missouri and Kansas have recently passed laws regulating e-bikes. Before that, e-bikes fell into a gray area between bicycles and motorized vehicles. All e-bikes are legal on streets and on most paths. Class 3 e-bikes, which provide assist up to 28 mph (the fastest category of e-bikes), can be banned from paths and trails,…
e-biking in Kansas City 