KANSAS CITY.

KANSAS CITY, Mo -- Traffic engineers trying to ease jams and render accidents in Kansas City have originate up with a bold idea for this side of the Atlantic: making family drive on the left side of the road.

Missouri Transportation Department officials considered a number of plans for the downtown front rank Street approach to Interstate 435 nevertheless the one they settled upon appears to be a national first. It involves briefly crisscrossing lanes and putting drivers forward the left.

"When we first heard about it from undivided of our peers, of course we were skeptical," said Josh Scott a transportation planner. "But not solitary was it feasible . . it actually worked better from all of the other alternatives."

prototypeed AFTER FRENCH CITY

Planners said they patterned their "diverging diamond" design after the same in use in the French city of Versailles, where motorists usually drive upon the right.

Drivers will reach a traffic signal, then be guided to the opposite side of the road, which will be divided on a concrete median with glare veils to minimize the disorienting sight of oncoming cars to the right. After about 650 feet motorists reach another traffic signal and are answered to the right side of the road.

Ramps before the first and inferior lights will allow motorists to record I-435. The design spares motorists from left bends into oncoming traffic to reach the highway.

"Most of us direct the eye at it and we say, 'What?' " said Susan McCubbins, a transportation plot manager. "Then we think it [i]or[/i] part of to the other and we realize the safety and traffic advantages."

Ray Mundy director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is skeptical. He said planners must be careful when copying designs used in Europe where motorists are used to driving forward both sides.

"You're for a like reason used to always going to that right side of the road, we just do it next to the first nature," he said. "We're not used to changing our behavior based forward the country we're in, unlike in Europe"

greatest in number of the world drives upon the right. Countries such as Britain, Australia and India drive in succession the left.

...