Transportation and Infrastructure
A long-time crossroads for American commerce takes on new significance.
Some things you just don’t see very often: Halley’s Comet. A Chicago Cubs World Series championship ring. Or the birth of an interstate highway.
Well, the celestial iceball won’t be back until 2061 and the Cubs are 0-for-the-last 105 years. But Kansas City added a new interstate designation to its range of asphalt assets at 12 p.m. on 12/12/12—something else you won’t see for a while—when the 180-mile stretch of four-lane divided roadway formerly known as U.S. 71 became Interstate 49, the newest piece of the nation’s interstate highway grid.
It was a happy addition for a region already standing at two key crossroads. Kansas City has long been bisected by Interstate 70, one of a handful of highways that runs nearly across the continent, linking West Coast commerce to markets in the east. And Interstate 35, running from Mexico to the Great Lakes port of Duluth, Minn., provides a vital path for goods moving under the North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Those two great pathways connect in Downtown Kansas City.
Currently configured in two segments, I-49 launched with its original segment in Louisiana. The addition of the Missouri segment leaves a span that will eventually connect Kansas City with New Orleans. It also completes an interstate triangle linking the Springfield area in southwest Missouri to both Kansas City and St. Louis.
When the final pieces are in place in Arkansas and Texas, I-49 will be another feather in Kansas City’s distribution/logistics cap. I-35 does more than connect to markets in Mexico and Canada; from its southern terminus in Laredo, Texas, it morphs into the Pan-American Highway, which then runs all the way to the Panama Canal before resuming its path to the southern tip of South America. That gives Kansas City direct access to markets not just in Central America, but Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina.
A Long Transit History
America’s first highways, of course, weren’t highways at all—they were rivers. Kansas City is here in large part because two of them meet up here. The Kansas and Missouri Rivers, whose confluence is just west of Downtown, is where Lewis and Clark first set foot in 1803. Though diminished in significance with the advent of modern transit, the Missouri still plays a key role in water-borne commerce, particularly for the agricultural sector, providing a vital link to shipping on the Mississippi River to the east.
Far more important to both the regional and national economy was the advent of the railroad, and Kansas City retains a formidable position in terms of its importance with rail shipping. It’s the second-largest rail center in the country, and No. 1 overall in terms of rail tonnage shipped every year.
Among the major lines running through Kansas City, both BNSF and Union Pacific operate a huge network into the west and south. Each of these leading rail companies eventually links Kansas City to Pacific ports in Oakland and Los Angeles in California, Seattle and Portland in the Pacific Northwest (via Denver and Salt Lake City); Chicago on Lake Michigan and Duluth, Minn., on Lake Superior (via Des Moines and Minneapolis), and Dallas and Houston on the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
In addition to those familiar rail names, 125-year-old Kansas City Southern today is a realization of Arthur Stilwell’s founding vision for a direct rail line to the Gulf of Mexico. KCS serves the central and southern U.S., and it owns both a Mexican subsidiary and a 50-percent share of the Panama Canal Railway Co., connecting rail traffic for ocean-bound shipping to either the Atlantic or Pacific.
… And by Air
Many who fly into and out of this region think of Kansas City International Airport as passenger airport first and foremost. And with nearly 400 daily flight operations, it is indeed that.
But KCI also is a huge freight channel. Within a six-state area, in fact, no other airport moves more air cargo each year, and the addition of business logistics centers around the periphery of the 10,200-acre airport suggest that it will play in increasing role in cargo shipments for this region.
On a regional level, the Max B. Fisher Skyhaven Airport in Warrensburg, operated by the University of Central Missouri, has inched its way up the air-traffic ladder and now stands as the second-busiest in the region, with more than 200 daily operations, on average. It wrested that position away from the Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport in Kansas City, which serves as the region’s corporate jet hub by offering just-across-the-river access to Downtown business settings and facilities to house nealry 200 aircraft, a capability lacking at KCI.
Other notable air facilities include Johnson County Executive Airport and the nearby New Century AirCenter on the Kansas side, forming bookends around the county seat of Olathe. And less than an hour’s drive to the west is the larger Philip Billard Municipal Airport in Topeka, just three miles from the business center of the Sunflower State’s capital city. 