History
The choice of the number 96 comes from the telephone number of the Wichita Automobile parts store of F.W. "Woody" Hockaday. During the 1910s, Hockaday marked distances between towns at his own expense along the major auto trails with a large red "H" and arrows pointing the direction. When the state began numbering the routes, they allowed Hockaday to pick the number of the route that was posted with the most signs, which consisted of the Kansas-Colorado Boulevard, the Central Route, and the Ozark Trail.
The Wichita-Hutchinson segment was straightened in the early 1970s, bypassing the towns of Maize and Mount Hope. In recent years, urban sprawl has brought the highway within city limits. Near the Amish community of Yoder, symbolic warning signs were placed on the road to warn drivers of the presence of carriages on the cross streets.
By 1996, the roadway had been widened to a four-lane expressway, and the symbolic warning signs near Yoder were not retained, as the signs did not comply with the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices at the time. An interchange was built at Yoder Road; however, carriage traffic still crossed the roadway at-grade. In September 2000, a minivan heading home from the Kansas State Fair struck a carriage, killing the elderly occupants and their horses. The driver of the van could not see the carriage in time to avoid the accident, and was cleared of wrongdoing. The Kansas Department of Transportation received bad publicity in the wake of the accident because of the removal of the carriage warning signs. Despite the non-compliance with the MUTCD, new symbolic signs were installed along the roadway in 2001. The expressway segment of K-96 has been posted with a speed limit of 70 miles per hour (110 km/h) since the repeal of the national speed limit. This has also been a contention in accidents along this stretch, and some state legislators have attempted to write legislation to lower the speed limit along this stretch.
Read more about this topic: K-96 (Kansas Highway)
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