This dog is more than fed up with the proliferation of construction projects that seem to be multiplying exponentially along a number of streets and avenues in Northeast Kansas City, and we’ve just about reached a breaking point.

Driving in Historic Northeast has become like navigating an ever-changing obstacle course populated with front end loaders, orange cones, steel plates and huge, symmetrical holes where asphalt used to be.

Independence Avenue between The Paseo and Benton Boulevard has transformed into a traffic nightmare during peak traffic periods. This cunning lil’ pooch has become quite adept at traversing alternate routes to and from locations on the Avenue just to avoid a spike in blood pressure. St. John is the same between the Concourse and Van Brunt, often being reduced to a single lane due to the gas line maintenance. The steel plates put down often shift to reveal a trench large enough for a Smart Car to disappear into.

This dog avoids at all costs the intersection at Independence and Benton where two, north-south lanes on Benton have been blocked creating a traffic snarl that often leaves vehicles turning left off the avenue on to Benton stranded in the middle of the intersection after the traffic signal changes. All this not a year after the new streetscape was dedicated. Now the area is a littered mess of bricks, orange cones and patches of sand and gravel all over the intersection creating an extremely unstable surface to navigate. Not a safe situation at all.

More construction on Lexington Avenue in Pendleton Heights has this ill-tempered dog searching for new alternate routes from the alternate route that avoided the Avenue snarls. This lil Doggie is hard-pressed to think of an urban core community that has a higher number of active construction sites as HNE.

While this less-than-patient pooch understands that progress comes at a cost, and that utility upgrades may be necessary from time to time, the amount of projects that have left streets in deplorable conditions and impossible to navigate is at an all-time high. Never before in our almost 30 years of residence in HNE can we remember this many simultaneous projects that negatively impact the ability to get from point A to point B. Please God, when will it end?