Asia Dunmore had just begun to reestablish a relationship with her mom, Michelle, after more than a decade of estrangement. Michelle was connecting with her granddaughter and was excited to help Asia welcome her next child.
Then, on Oct. 14, 2023, Michelle was killed by a hit-and-run driver while trying to catch a bus to the grocery store. Dunmore had just spoken to her mom the day before.
“It felt wonderful to reconnect and start to get it (our relationship) back, just for this to happen,” Dunmore said. “Why did we begin to grow so strongly together within that year and a half leading up to it, just to have it ripped away from me?”
Michelle Dunmore was only 59 when she was killed, just a month shy of her birthday. She was one of 102 people in Kansas City who died in traffic crashes in 2023 — one of the city’s highest traffic fatality counts in years.
On that section of Troost Avenue, there was no sidewalk at the time, so Michelle was forced to walk on the shoulder to get to the bus stop. Troost is one of the city’s most dangerous roads — a fixture on the “high-injury network,” where the highest concentration of crashes with fatal or serious injuries occur.
Asia was one of a few dozen people who gathered outside Kansas City Hall on a Sunday this past November for a vigil honoring victims of traffic violence.
In 2025, 68 people died in car crashes in Kansas City. Almost half of them were walking or riding a bicycle. That’s a 30% drop from the year before, when car crashes killed 97 people. But more pedestrians and bicyclists were killed in those crashes than have been in any year since 2020.
Kansas City has been trying since 2021 to eliminate traffic fatalities through a program called Vision Zero. It’s been slowly making progress by redesigning roads and adding safety infrastructure, but advocates say the city needs to make Vision Zero a priority to achieve its goal of zero traffic deaths by 2030.
What Vision Zero has accomplished
Kansas City completed more than 40 projects in its Vision Zero program in 2025. Those include smaller additions like speed humps, flashing crosswalks, speed radar signs and new stoplights.
Larger undertakings included 13 “road diets,” where the city reduces the number of driving lanes or otherwise changes a street to slow drivers down — whether that means bigger sidewalks, adding medians and bike lanes, or restriping.
At 51st and Troost Avenue, Kansas City recorded seven crashes between 2018-2022, three of which were serious or fatal. The city added new stoplights there in May 2025.
Flashing yellow lights and pedestrian crossing signs were already installed in the years prior, butt the crossing signal was not enough to save Yuxi Wu, who was in her first semester studying piano at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory.
Wu tried to cross the four-lane road on Sept. 26, 2024, and several cars slowed to let her pass after seeing the pedestrian lights flash. But one driver sped around them and fatally struck Wu.
“She had only been in the U.S. for about a month,” said Yunfei Li, a mutual friend of Wu’s. “She was very excited about her new life and about studying here.”
The crash was heartbreaking for Wu’s community, which included other international students in the Conservatory. Li said the intersection was a known problem at the school, and friends told each other not to cross the street there.
In the spring of 2025, Li helped compose a musical about safety issues in Kansas City called “Go Outside: An Infrastructure Musical” as part of a fellowship with Heartland Arts KC. One of the scenes depicted a car striking and killing a pedestrian trying to cross the street — a scene that Li said was directly inspired by Wu’s death.
The musical called for the city’s road design to be made safer for all users, not just those in cars.
“As a composer, I feel the best thing I can do is use my art to speak out and raise awareness to this,” Li said. “The residents had complained about that intersection before, but no changes were made. I believe safety improvements should have been made earlier. It could have prevented her death.”
51st and Troost was one of five intersections that got either a new traffic signal or a hybrid beacon signal — a stoplight that turns red when pedestrians are crossing.
This past year, Kansas City saw fewer deaths from car crashes than it has since the beginning of Vision Zero in 2021.
Beyond fatal crashes, KCPD data shows more than 15,500 non-fatal crashes in Kansas City in 2025.
Kansas City Council also approved new traffic restrictions to keep kids safer on the way to school, after a driver hit and killed a 9-year-old child on her way to school in November. Between 2021-2024, more than 30 car crash victims were under the age of 19.
Jason Waldron, the transportation director for Kansas City, said the solutions to dangerous roads are not one-size-fits-all.
“We've spent over 100 years investing and building in our current roadway network,” Waldron said. “It's going to take some investment and some time to truly reverse some of these trends, but we are proud and glad it's trending the way it is. But we also understand that there is work left to be done.”
Signaling more change ahead
Kansas City has completed more than 400 projects through Vision Zero, but many of its most dangerous roads have yet to see significant changes. Troost, Independence Avenue, and Prospect Avenue are still waiting on corridor improvements.
Waldron said the city is working as fast as it can, but it has more than 6,000 miles of roads to tackle. Often, Vision Zero principles inform the city’s efforts in other projects, like regularly scheduled road resurfacing.
“There are these standalone, high-profile projects that we're very proud of,” Waldron said. “But then at the same time, we have other projects where Vision Zero issues and approaches are inherent in how we do things.”
Independence Avenue should get a change in the coming years thanks to a Bi-State Sustainable Reinvestment Corridor along a 24-mile stretch of the road between Kansas City, Kansas, and Independence, Missouri.
A nearly 2-mile stretch of Prospect between Linwood and Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevards should also get safety improvements soon thanks to a $10 million federal grant. And the city approved hiring a consultant to decide how to make Troost safer in January 2025.
BikeWalkKC has been long advocating to make roads safer for non-drivers. Outgoing policy director Michael Kelley said the city made a lot of good improvements in the past year, but more dedication is needed from city leaders.
“A lot of it really does come down to political will,” Kelley said. “If elected officials don't consider pedestrian safety to be a priority, if they only give lip service to it in front of Council, but then actively work to undermine or oppose it when the cameras are off, then that creates a challenge.”
Making roads safer also requires a lot of money. The city doubled the funding for Vision Zero, to $8 million, in its 2025-2026 budget. But the city’s budget season is about to restart for the next fiscal year, and Waldron said the city cannot plan its next projects until it knows how much funding Vision Zero will receive.
Kelley said people who want changes to their roads should connect with their neighborhood groups to get the attention of the city council. He also encouraged residents to show up to the city’s budget meetings to demand more money for Vision Zero and let leaders know they care about road safety.
“Traffic violence is not some issue that we haven't been able to solve, we know what sort of improvements can make our streets safer,” Kelleys said. “Far too often, we choose not to do it. Not because we're unable to, but because we don't want to. And that is really hard to explain to someone who is having to bury their loved one because of a dangerous street.”
Yunfei Li is still studying at the UMKC Conservatory. And even though the new traffic lights on Troost, where her colleague Wu was killed, are an improvement, she’s still too scared to cross the street.
There are also sidewalks now near where Asia Dunmore’s mom, Michelle, was killed in 2023. But she said no one in her family travels down that stretch of road anymore.
Dunmore said she understands that there’s a timeline for improvements across the city, but wants to see them done faster east of Troost — neighborhoods that Kansas City has historically underfunded.
“It feels like the east side is at the bottom of the timeline, or at the very bottom of those funds,” Dunmore said.
“There are racial dividing lines. We know about them, and we ignore it every time the budget comes around. No one who's in high enough power speaks up,” Dunmore continued. “I know I'm nowhere near powerful enough, but maybe my voice will be. We have to change the way that we view our city in order for our city to be better.”
