Many people in Kansas City have spent decades learning to live around rather than with a particular stretch of highway. Bruce R. Watkins Drive, also known as U.S. Highway 71, slices through the East Side of the city like an unhealed wound. It has never been just a road for the predominantly Black communities on either side. It has served as a barrier, a source of pollution and noise, and a constant reminder of choices made in the past with little input from those who had to deal with the fallout.
The city now has a new strategy. It’s also one that people are cautiously willing to believe in for the first time in a long time.
Early in April 2026, city officials unveiled what they are calling the “Parkway Alternative”—a plan to reconstruct a five-mile stretch of the highway below ground level between 85th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The plan is to physically reconnect the neighborhoods that have been divided for almost forty years by sinking the road, narrowing the lanes, and constructing overpasses at street level. At one community gathering, which took place at St. James United Methodist Church, which is only a short stroll from the highway, locals had a unique opportunity to voice their opinions using a simple yet strangely effective method: colored balls were dropped into buckets marked “yes,” “no,” and “neutral.” The “yes” bucket received the most votes at the conclusion of the meeting.
That picture sticks. It doesn’t bind anyone to anything and isn’t a formal vote. However, there’s something telling about a room full of people, many of whom have spent the majority of their lives next to this road, choosing to think that something might actually change.
Rudy Rhodes, who was raised close to the highway and still has relatives there, attended his first Reconnect the East Side meeting that night. He claimed that the parkway idea felt more livable and human than previous ideas. “For the parkway, the trees and things is more relaxing, more of a family feeling,” he stated. Although it’s a small observation, it suggests something genuine. Better traffic flow is not the only thing that people want. They want to feel like they own the neighborhood once more.
The project did not appear out of thin air. The Biden administration awarded Kansas City a $5 million federal grant to research alternatives to the highway corridor. Before deciding on this hybrid strategy, city employees narrowed down their options over the course of several months, taking into account three different options: a traditional highway rebuild, a return to the original street grid, and a boulevard-style conversion. During the community summit, Mayor Pro Tem Ryana Parks-Shaw put it simply: “Reconnecting the east side is about making sure that we reconnect the businesses, the communities that were broken up.”
Naturally, the more difficult question is whether the city can truly deliver. Large-scale urban highway projects are infamously difficult from a financial, logistical, and political standpoint. Before construction ever starts, the Reconnecting the East Side plan still has a long way to go. Large-scale funding has not yet been obtained. City budgets are rarely flush, and federal infrastructure spending has become less predictable in recent years. A cautionary tale can be found in Kansas itself: years ago, state budget cuts caused a dangerous 17-mile stretch of U.S. 69 near Pittsburg to be delayed indefinitely, leaving locals to navigate a road they described as a matter of “when, not if” for tragedy.
However, Kansas City’s momentum feels different now than it has in the past. There is a tenuous but pervasive feeling that the city is actually taking into account the costs of Highway 71 to the East Side, both in terms of traffic and people. Similar projects, such as highway caps, urban boulevard conversions, and below-grade rebuilds, have been undertaken by other cities. A few have been successful. Some have taken much longer than anticipated. None have been easy.
It’s more what this moment represents than the engineering proposal that makes it worthwhile to watch. A city looks at a road it constructed that passes through people’s homes and neighborhoods and considers how to fix it—possibly with seriousness this time.
