Wichita Interstate Project Gets Green Light With Federal Funds
Wichita residents don’t complain much about traffic. After all, the average commute time is just 18 minutes. Still, the city does have one major traffic headache – but it’s about to be remedied, thanks to $23 million in federal stimulus funds.
The Interstate 135/47th Street interchange has long been a thorn in Wichita drivers’ collective side, and local planners have worked on various ways to solve the problem for years. As is often the case with public works projects, even much-needed ones, the holdup was money. So when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided the funding, city and county officials wasted no time finding another $1 million to begin acquiring right of way and getting started.
“We selected this project several years ago to be design-ready, and we had that almost done when the stimulus money came through,” says Benny Tarverdi, Wichita metro engineer. “The south side of the community has wanted this for a long time, because the traffic flow on 47th Street is more than 40,000 vehicles a day, and the system we have now is not adequate to handle that kind of traffic.”
The project, which calls for reconfiguring traffic flow and replacing the bridge over I-135, will take between a year and a half to two years to complete from its summer 2009 start date. The finished project is expected to generate significant economic development in the area because it will provide better access to underdeveloped property, according to the Kansas Department of Transportation.
In the meantime, the project will provide 690 jobs during its life and pump an estimated $57 million into the local economy, according to KDOT.
“This is absolutely one of those wish-list projects,” Tarverdi says.
“It’s going to take care of many things.”
