Planning

The division and improvement of lands within Wichita or portions of unincorporated Sedgwick County must comply with the Wichita-Sedgwick County Subdivision Regulations. The Subdivision Regulations regulate many elements of the physical environment, including sidewalks, parking, and street designs.

View the Wichita-Sedgwick County Subdivision Regulations

The Wichita Bicycle Master Plan outlines the engineering, education, enforcement, encouragement, and evaluation strategies to promote bicycling in the city of Wichita. The plan outlines a priority network of bicycle facilities. The plan also includes detailed design recommendations that accommodate both bicycle and pedestrians. The plan can be closely tied to the Pedestrian Master Plan when considering multimodal street improvements for both bicycles and pedestrians, improvements for bicycles are also often improvements for pedestrians.

View the Wichita Bicycle Master Plan

The Wichita Parks, Recreation, and Open Space Plan is a guide for the provision of parks, open spaces, recreation opportunities, and paths/trails by the City of Wichita and Sedgwick County. The plan acknowledges both the need for well-connected recreational walking facilities within parks but also calls for high quality pedestrian facilities such as sidewalk, shared-use pathways, curb cuts, safety improvements at intersections and roadway crossings, and wayfinding to accommodate pedestrian access to parks. The plan recommends providing parks and neighborhood centers within walking distance of all city residences by acknowledging that walking is a low cost, recreational activity that is in high demand by Wichita residents.

View the Wichita Parks, Recreation, and Open Space Plan

The Multi-Modal policy directs staff to consider multiple modes of transportation and the context for improvement and maintenance projects in street rights-of-way and public access easements. The policy helps formalize the City’s design practices and coordination with planning efforts. The Street Design Guidance provides guidance for the design of public streets. It provides greater levels of predictability and layout options for multi-modal design of Wichita streets.

View the Wichita Multi-Modal Policy and Street Design Guidelines

Project Downtown is the downtown master plan for the City of Wichita. It guides development, the provision of infrastructure and municipal services within downtown. The plan outlines a vision for downtown that enables people to live, work, shop, play, and learn within a short walk. One of the key goals of the plan is to support development that fosters walkable connections. Downtown streets are identified as walkable development focus areas with recreation overlays. The plan gives specific recommendations per downtown district (outlined below in table) and calls for better pedestrian street crossings, pedestrian maps, wayfinding signs, links across large blocks and more public art.

View the Project Downtown Master Plan

The WAMPO Pathways Plan provides an assessment of existing bicycle/pedestrian facilities and identifies, prioritizes, and recommends future connecting links for bicycle/pedestrian use within the WAMPO planning area including the City of Wichita. The plan incorporates recommendations from the WAMPO Metropolitan Transportation Plan 2035. It also recommends the use of the AASHTO Guide for the Planning, Design and Operation of Pedestrian Facilities as the region’s pedestrian guidelines and standards and calls out the accommodation of pedestrians in all public and private projects.

To further cater the AASHTO guidelines to the region, the plan structures recommendations by defining four pedestrian environments: intolerant, tolerant, supportive, and pedestrian places and provides specific guidelines and strategies for each environment. The plan includes additional non-infrastructural recommendations. Benchmarks are established for monitoring mode split.

View the WAMPO Regional Pathways System Plan

The MOVE 2040 plan is the WAMPO region’s long-range transportation plan. It identifies regional transportation goals and performance measures. The MOVE 2040 is very important for the region because it allows local jurisdictions access to federal transportation funds. The plan includes an Eligible for Funding List of transportation projects that will receive federal funds through 2040. Projects move from the planning list to the Transportation Improvement Project (TIP ) list for implementation.

View the WAMPO MOVE 2040 Plan

The WAMPO Safety Plan (2010) is guided by the timeline and goals identified in the Metropolitan Transportation Plan 2035. It addresses how safety in the region can be improved and the number of road crashes reduced. It provides information about the type of crashes, how they occurred, and where they were located. This can be useful information to identify areas that need special attention when planning for pedestrian accommodation. This information should be used for benchmarking purposes toward reaching specific safety targets related to pedestrian safety.

View the WAMPO Safety Plan

This plan includes an action plan that identifies issues that impact student travel behavior within the WAMPO area and suggests actions to address the issues. The plan also lays out a phased approach to funding the SRTS program from the State of Kansas and other sources. The planning process included a survey and stakeholder meetings.

The survey provided some valuable information related to the obstacles to walking to school. The survey found that the following factors limit children from walking to school: distance (46%), traffic volume (43%), Traffic speed (41%), intersection safety (35%), perceived personal safety issues (35%), weather (35%) and inadequate sidewalks (28%). In 2008 45% of school children lived within ¼ mile of school and 21% lived within ½ to 2 miles. This information could help set a benchmark target for the number of children who walk to school. Another finding was that 50% of children want to walk to school but programing and school support is limited. The plan identifies 3rd to 6th graders as the best age groups to focus SRTS programing on.

View the WAMPO Safety Plan