Bus riders and drivers will start to feel the effects of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority’s severely reduced service on May 4, if the Kansas City Council’s budget passes as proposed.
The KCATA faces a funding gap of about $32 million. Without more money from the city to cover its $117 million in operational costs, the agency will cut 13 of its 29 weekday routes in the city and only run seven routes on the weekends.
The remaining routes will nearly all run less frequently, and the KCATA will stop service at 11 p.m. instead of 1 a.m.
The Main Max, Troost Max, Prospect Max and #24 — some of the KCATA’s busiest routes — will run less frequently during non-peak hours and on weekdays. Between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., the routes will arrive every 15-20 minutes. Outside of those times, most of the routes will run every 30 minutes.
Mundia Chinonge rides the #11 route nearly every day to his job at the University of Kansas Medical Center. He takes the bus to work so his girlfriend can use their car to take their daughter to day care on the way to her job. That route would be cut under the agency’s cost-saving plan.
Chinonge said his family hasn’t figured out what to do without the bus. It might mean carpooling with others at his work or buying a cheap, but unreliable, second car.
“It just feels like everybody's passing the buck, and at this point, it's us (riders) taking the brunt of what's going to happen,” Chinonge said. “I'm hearing all about the World Cup. I'm hearing about the streetcar, but we're cutting one of the most basic city services that regular people use every day. ”
The following routes will have their frequency reduced if the plan goes into effect:
- #12, one bus every hour
- #18, one bus every hour
- #31, one bus every 30 minutes
- #35, one bus every hour
Tyler Means, the Chief Strategy Officer for the KCATA, said that the changes would only happen if the agency does not get any more money from the city in its 2025-2026 budget.
“Anything that we can do to get additional funding really does allow us to bring more service back and to make this more robust,” Means said at a public meeting about the changes. “This is the worst-case scenario for this year.”
Means said the “real worst-case scenario” would be if Kansas City cut nearly all its funding to the agency and only gave it the money from a 3/8th-cent sales tax dedicated to the KCATA. That brings in about $43 a million a year.
Currently, Kansas City funds the agency through both the 3/8th-cent sales tax and a half-cent public mass transportation tax. The city has been decreasing the amount it gives the KCATA from the latter tax over the past decade. In this year’s budget, the city is giving the KCATA about two-thirds of that tax revenue.
The #11 runs from the Historic Northeast to the Westside and connects people to the hospital and jobs in the East Bottoms. In a letter to Mayor Quinton Lucas and city council, 13 neighborhood associations and businesses urged the city to increase its funding to the KCATA to avoid the cuts.
“If the proposed cuts are allowed to go through, they will devastate our neighbors and our neighborhoods,” the coalition wrote in the letter. “These routes are relied upon by our neighbors to get to their jobs, to access groceries, and reach medical care.”
KCATA leaders have stressed that the agency is working to get more regional funding. In the past few years, Independence, Blue Springs, Gladstone, Raytown, and Grandview have cut their funding to the agency and lost their routes.
Some routes that go into those cities from Kansas City have remained, which meant the city had to take on the entire cost of service.
Andre Johnson has been a bus driver with KCATA for 26 years. He drives the #24 route right now, which will not be cut. But if the nearby #9 and #11 routes are cut as proposed, his line will get a lot busier.
He expects to carry double or triple the loads he currently picks up on the city’s third-busiest route. Johnson said people already struggle to catch the #24 at its stop in Independence after that city stopped funding its other bus routes.
“A lot of them are riding the bikes to get to me, but the bus can only hold two bikes, so I got like four or five people with bikes and I can only allow two on,” Johnson said. “This cutting the route, there's going to be more riding bikes and it’s just going to be more people stranded.”
KCATA plans to up the #24’s frequency from every hour to every 15-20 minutes from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays to accommodate some of that extra traffic. Outside those times, it will run every hour.
Under KCATA’s plan, more than 170 employees will be laid off. Johnson said he’s concerned about drivers who are less senior than him who will lose their jobs. He said he and the other drivers are also concerned for their passengers who will lose access to the essential services they need.
“It's important to keep these routes,” Johnson said. “To have a healthy, growing city, you need a healthy transportation system.”
The Downtown Neighborhood Association has also sent a letter to the Kansas City Council and Jackson County, urging them to come up with a funding solution that doesn’t cut buses.
The association urged the Kansas City Council to accept a budget amendment introduced by councilmembers Eric Bunch and Crispin Rea that would take $2 million dedicated to LED streetlights and use it for KCATA instead.
“While we understand that these changes are budgetary in nature rather than punitive, we are hopeful that the impacts will be minimal,” the association wrote in the letter. “As it stands this would have significant impacts on the Kansas City area and how people move about and access daily needs.”
Climate activist organization Sunrise Movement KC — along with the Amalgamated Transit Union that represents bus drivers and low-wage worker union Stand Up KC — has been warning of the possibility of bus cuts for years. The groups have held rallies to encourage the city to provide the KCATA with more money for months.
Anthony Cunningham is a Sunrise Movement organizer who rides the bus. He said the cuts will be catastrophic, and will drastically hurt the city’s climate efforts since more people will be driving.
“The fact that there is a tangible plan for folks to grasp on to and, say, ‘Oh, crap, this is actually going to impact me,’ has lit a fire under the public,” Cunningham said. “My hope is that it also lights a fire under city council to do the right thing and step up to the plate and fully fund our buses.”
Sunrise Movement, Stand Up KC, and the ATU will rally outside of City Hall on March 20 at 1 p.m., shortly before city council considers the budget. They’re also coordinating calls to the city council in hopes of getting more funding for the KCATA.
Means says the KCATA hopes city council will increase funding for the agency.
“Through conversations with city staff, we're hoping to see additional funding to come our way so that we can continue to provide a great service to the community,” he said.
