Who Is Mutilating Our City, and Why?

PUBLISHED JANUARY 2026

Some years back, I taught for a year through the Fulbright program at a university in eastern France. The assigned textbook in my urban-studies class featured the four great planned cities of the western world. I assumed the dean chose this textbook because Nancy, the city where I was teaching, was on the list. Paris was too. So was Bath in England, but color me delighted to find Kansas City among the chosen.

Having lived here for seven years by that time, I understood the author’s reasoning. The J.C. Nichols overlay on top of George Kessler’s “city beautiful” foundation rendered Kansas City not only graceful but also functional. As a bonus, we had more freeway miles than any city in the world, and this further eased the stress of urban living. 

In the five years I worked Downtown I never once got caught in traffic. I could plan my trips to the airport to the minute. Early on I discovered a 15-minute shortcut to the ballparks. For someone who had commuted daily into Manhattan for four years, these were genuine wonders.

Our halcyon days were numbered. Gradually at first, and then frantically, someone started butchering our city. Everyone not-iced, but no one was quite sure who the butchers were or why they were carving us up. To find out, a group of concerned citizens invited me to a small breakfast with three Kansas City officials.

We citizens detailed our concerns: the gratuitous bicycle lanes, the narrowing of traffic lanes, the concrete barriers, the plastic dividers, the bizarre green and red paint schemes on city streets. None of us had voted for this or been consulted in any meaningful way, and none of the city people could exactly explain why we hadn’t.  

Jason Waldron, the city’s amiable director of transportation, told us that this “road dieting” was a response to the spike in pedestrian deaths
that accompanied COVID. Kansas City was not unique in this regard. Nationwide there was a surge in pedestrian fatalities starting in 2020. 

The experts made the argument that with fewer cars on the road during COVID, drivers felt free to speed. “Counter-instinctive” does not do this argument justice. It was borderline nuts. 

To sell this argument, the experts had to overlook the ob-vious answer—the death of George Floyd in that same year. Seeing what happened to their colleagues in Minneapolis, police everywhere became wary of making routine traffic stops, especially in inner cities. 

There was a precedent for such a police action, closer to home. Crime expert Heather Mac Donald called it the “Ferguson Effect.” Wrote Mac Donald: “Arrests, summonses and pedestrian stops were dropping in many cities, where data on such police activity were available. Arrests in St. Louis City and County, for example, fell by a third after the shooting of Michael Brown.”

The results were disastrous for inner-city residents. In 2015, the murder rate rose almost 11 percent, the most dramatic spike in 50 years. In 2016, murders increased an additional 8.5 percent over 2015. Nearly 3,000 more Americans were murdered in 2016 than in 2014, the great majority in inner cities.

Pedestrian deaths, especially in the cities, tracked almost perfectly with murders. The homicide rate and the pedestrian death rate settled down from 2017 to 2020. Then both spiked dramatically in 2020 and for the following few years. Criminologists did not call this spike the “Wuhan effect.” They called it the “Minneapolis effect.”

As genuine as the pedestrian safety movement seems to be, it does not ex-plain the real reason Kansas City is being deformed. My suspicions were stoked when, upon returning to Kansas City in October after a month away, I found the street in front of my office, Westport Road, lined with concrete protrusions on both sides. 

I could at least see the logic behind the “dieting” measures, but I could see no obvious rationale for unsightly abutments that eliminate nearly half of the parking spaces on an already parking-stressed street of small shops and restaurants. 

Call me a conspiracy theorist—many have—but I had to wonder whether the changes on Westport Road were tied to the grand opening of the KC Streetcar Main Street Extension weeks later, a streetcar extension that no city in the world needed less than Kansas City.

At breakfast, I suggested there was an ideological rationale for these diet-ing measures unrelated to safety. Said I, “They want us out of our cars.” I asked those gathered if they were aware of the “15-minute city” movement. Jason Waldron and Councilwoman Andrea Bough were not. 

The one person at the table who did know was Councilman Jonathan Duncan. I was not surprised. Duncan, not yet 40, made his bones in Kansas City as a community organizer with KC Tenants, a radical collective that has championed, among other bad ideas, the “defund the police” movement. Of course, the surest way to improve traffic safety is to hire more cops. That is not on KC Tenant’s agenda.

As to the 15-minute city, The New York Times traced the idea to France (where else?): “The idea is that everyday destinations such as schools, stores and offices should be only a short walk or bike ride away from home.” 

Under one name or another, progressive city planners have advanced this concept for the 20 or so years I moderated business roundtables here at Ingram’s. The motive changed from attracting the “creative class” to moderating the climate, but “safety” never came up as a rationale for getting people out
of their cars. 

As I learned at breakfast, radicals like Duncan have co-opted the safety movement to advance their own collectivist agenda. To succeed, Duncan counts on the slumber of the citizens in his own largely middle-class district, my own, and the naiveté of city officials.

Woke, well-spoken, and bearded, Duncan aspires, I suspect, to be Kansas City’s own Zohran Mamdani. If I guess right, he will be flattered by my suspicion.