Nearly 100 people died on Kansas City roads last year, mostly on streets known to be dangerous. Now, the city will pay half a million dollars to figure out how to make its most dangerous roads safer. Kansas City Council dedicated more money Thursday to the Vision Zero program, its effort to end traffic deaths by 2030, and started the process to redo one of its deadliest roads.
In 2022, the city found that drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists were most likely to be killed or maimed in a “high-injury network” of streets including Truman Road, Independence Avenue, Prospect Avenue, Troost Avenue and Ward Parkway.
Kansas City has been slowly improving the most dangerous intersections and stretches of road since city council passed the Vision Zero program in 2020.
But Councilmember Eric Bunch said Public Works doesn’t have enough staff or time to identify the best fixes — such as bump-outs, protected crosswalks, and major street redesigns — for the high-injury network. The new ordinance, he said, should help.
“It looks at the high-injury network, the top ten streets and top ten intersections and says, ‘All right, at a high level, here are the concepts that need to be implemented,’” he said in a committee meeting Tuesday.
Bunch sponsored an ordinance that passed 11-1 today which directs City Manager Brian Platt to hire a consultant who will identify the best solutions for those streets. Then, city staff will design and implement those changes.
Councilmember Kevin O’Neill voted against the ordinance because he thought it should come after Kansas City approves its budget for the next fiscal year in the summer, when Vision Zero’s budget is proposed to double to $8 million. Bunch said that if the process doesn’t start before councilmembers pass the budget, it could take years to fix the city's most dangerous streets.
The Vision Zero program has a $4 million budget for the current fiscal year, ending April 30. It completed nearly 250 projects in 2024 to add things like speed humps, flashing stop signs and other infrastructure to slow traffic on neighborhood roads.
It also redesigned Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard, one of the city’s worst streets, to reduce the number of driving lanes and add protected bike lanes and crosswalks.
Even with those efforts, 97 people died in car crashes in 2024. Bunch hopes this ordinance will speed up the Vision Zero process and make the city more efficient with its improvements during the next fiscal year.
The city council also passed a resolution directing the city to apply for a $21 million federal grant that would pay to redo Troost Avenue from Truman Road to Bannister Road — a corridor that touches the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th city council districts.
The grant is part of the “Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity” program. If accepted, the city will use the federal money to fund multiple projects along the long stretch of road to reduce crashes and make Troost friendlier to other forms of transportation besides a car.
In the past decade, 26 people have died along the corridor and there have been more than 3,600 crashes. The city has made some improvements, updating the crosswalks at 51st and Troost after a pedestrian death, and plans to add traffic signals along the corridor.
“There is a disproportionate number of individuals specifically living in the Third District that are experiencing preventable deaths because of traffic fatalities,” said 3rd District Councilmember Melissa Robinson. “This is a step in the right direction.”
