Made possible by a $600 million bond program that was approved to repair streets in April 2017, the City worked with an Alta-led team to evaluate the condition of the sidewalk network and make a plan for investing in safety and connectivity improvements. The plan will also help the City get closer to its Vision Zero goal of no traffic fatalities or serious injuries by prioritizing sidewalk infill and maintenance projects across the City.
Through robust data collection and analysis paired with an innovative web-based prioritization tool, see how Kansas City is poised to strategically and effectively shape its capital improvement program for years to come.
As part of the plan, Alta conducted six types of analyses to identify opportunities throughout Kansas City to improve pedestrian infrastructure and address existing barriers. These included:
Access and Connectivity: An evaluation of pedestrians’ ability to navigate the City efficiently and comfortably, using data on sidewalk availability, pedestrian levels of traffic stress, and destination distance and route directness indices.
Sidewalk Condition: An assessment of the overall condition of the City’s existing sidewalks.
Equity: An assessment of demographics to identify concentrations of historically excluded communities.
Public Support: A summary of the community’s top needs, concerns, and aspirations as expressed during the public involvement period.
Pedestrian Demand: A model predicting pedestrian demand based on 2019 and 2022 pedestrian counts.
Safety: An assessment of current and future crash risks.
Finally, the team created relative suitability scores on a scale of 0 to 1 based on percentile ranking of sidewalk prioritization scores within each Council District. This helped to prioritize the best scoring projects within each Council District to ensure geographic balance and avoid all investments concentrating in the same district.
The results of the sidewalk prioritization analysis demonstrate significant opportunities throughout Kansas City to improve pedestrian infrastructure and address existing barriers. There are high priority areas located throughout the City, with the highest concentrations in Downtown Kansas City and in the densest residential areas. Investing in these areas will help the City to pursue its goals.
The team went one step further by incorporating the results of the six different analyses with the results of broad, extensive community input to create a Budgeted Prioritization Tool. The new, dynamic, and digital tool will allow City staff to assess priorities under different funding scenarios.
