Worst thing since sliced bread
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…
Scofflaw
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…
Block of the Month: 5400 block of Wyandotte
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.
Street or Road
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…
Center-running bike lanes on Main?
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.)…
75th and Wornall–a welcome makeover
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…
Block of the Month: 400 Block of East 71st Terrace
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…
Apple Maps adds bike routes
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,…
Trash City USA
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…
E-bike Laws Demystified
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,…
Father of the Week
While riding on the trail that parallels the Blue River north of MLK Jr Boulevard, I came upon three small children riding northbound and a little further along two more small children. I was alarmed that these kids were riding alone on this trail when I noticed a man driving slowly along Coal Mine Road…
Early Fall along Brush Creek
As Fall arrives, the Brush Creek trail takes on a yellow and gold hue. Bridges carry the Bruce Watkins Drive over Brush Creek. The entire route from the Plaza to the eastern terminus near the Blue River is completely grade separated from traffic.
Cleaver II protected lanes open for business
The new protected bike lanes on Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard between Oak Street and Troost Avenue are now complete, giving cyclists a safe connection between the Trolley Track Trail to the south and the Gillham Road protected lanes to the north. It’s a short but important link in the city’s bike-lane network. Cleaver II Blvd.…
Gillham dedicated lanes revisited
Before the city created dedicated bike lanes on Gillham a few years ago, we had identified a nearby parallel route to avoid using Gillham: southbound on Charlotte Street and northbound on Holmes Road–two one-way streets with a gentler grade and little traffic just to the east of Gillham. Gillham was just too busy to recommend.…
Street Trees of KC
E-bikers get the best feel for the canopy of trees in our city. That canopy is both grand and neglected. Glorious and sad. When I ride Route G: Benton, with its aging canopy of pin oaks, I wonder what our boulevards were like before the Dutch elm disease destroyed nearly all of the American elms…
Benton–a great East Side ride
The Benton Curve is an ominous, dangerous bend taken by I-70 east of downtown, a much reviled example of poor civil engineering. Benton Boulevard, which is more an assemblage of several road segments into an official KC boulevard, is a great way to get around on the East Side on an e-bike. The segment of…
Cycling Frou-Frou comes to Cleaver II
The urban arterial freeway known as Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard is getting two of the best protected cycling lanes in the city between Troost Ave and Oak Street, eliminating the gap between the Trolley Track Trail and the Gillham protected lanes.
More racks in Brookside, please
I’m reluctant to criticize Brookside, with its generous sidewalks, excellent mix of mainly local businesses, streets lined with buildings. But it gets a C- for bike racks. On Brookside Plaza, the central shopping street, there is one forlorn rack in front of Commerce Bank on the south end, and another around the corner on 63rd…
Missing bike rack? Missing sales.
Yesterday I had four errands to run, including a stop at one of my favorite stores: Soil Service on Troost Ave. I needed some insect soap for the garden. I pulled up to the front and as expected, no bike rack. And no good alternative for securing my e-bike elsewhere. Now I am willing to…
Winter schminter
Perhaps no posts in two months have left the impression that my e-bike is in hibernation for the winter. Actually it’s more an indication that I’ve been riding so much I haven’t had time to post anything. Until this year I’ve always hated riding in winter. That’s probably because I’ve never done it before, assuming…
Bicycling in the winter, what to wear
Guest post from veteran KC urban bicyclist Shawn Tolivar Winter bicycling at first might seem like a daunting task, It’s cold, dark, wet, and miserable. Why would anyone in their right mind do this? For many, bicycling seems like a Spring, Summer and Fall activity, and it’s only natural to store the bike for the…
e-biking in Kansas City 
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