KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A new temporary normal for Kansas City metro drivers is seeing a mixture of orange cones, detours, and road closure signs.
No matter where you live or work, construction seems to be everywhere, whether it’s in the Northland, downtown, or in Kansas.
“I normally drive up here, and I tried to get up on I-35 but it was closed so I just had to exit on Broadway and that took an extra 10 minutes,” said Dylan Springer of Lee’s Summit.
He visits the downtown area every other week and said it seems like the construction zones are always changing.
“It’s kind of just a fun little maze at this point,” he said.
On the Missouri side, more than 40 construction projects are underway in Jackson, Cass, Platte, Clay, and Ray Counties, according to the Missouri Department of Transportation.
Many of those are bridge rehabilitation projects or pavement repair. Meanwhile in Kansas, roughly 20 projects are happening in Wyandotte, Johnson, and Leavenworth counties, much of it repair work, per the Kansas Department of Transportation.
None of the 60-plus closures includes streets in downtown Kansas City, which have its own issues from street car construction to sidewalk resurfacing.
“It’s irritating, yeah. It’s like everywhere you go you got to turn left, turn right, detour this, detour that,” added Twaun Murray from the Midtown area.
Murray’s lived there his whole live and noted how drastically the areas changed, mainly the road work.
“Every week something new is going on,” Murray said.
One of the bigger projects remains the Buck O’Neil Bridge. The southbound lanes (U.S. 169) are closed, forcing drivers coming in from the north to either drive through North Kansas City or utilize I-29 south, which has its own issues, from lane closures to a total closure of the I-35 south ramp from I-70 west until November.
Still, some drivers like Springer are looking at the positive of it all.
“I love to see improvements overall being made, because there was a while where it was pretty much just standstill of nothing happening,” Springer said.
To see the current projects happening in Missouri, click here.
For closures on the Kansas side, click here.