Building Community Connections in Kansas City’s Sidewalk Strategy
Contact: David Wasserman and Mike Sellinger, Alta
By balancing budgets with community aspirations, Kansas City is incorporating sidewalk gap construction in their capital improvement program and has identified the top sidewalk infill and maintenance projects across the City.
Safe and accessible sidewalks are a crucial part of having an active, socially connected, and vibrant community. However, most places have sidewalk gaps and existing sidewalks that need to be reconstructed, which takes money and time to fix. Prioritizing where to start and creating an effective investment plan for build out in capital budgets requires an understanding of tradeoffs and metrics for different community goals. With an existing sidewalk network of over 4,000 miles, the City of Kansas City chose Alta’s Civic Analytics team to develop a data-driven approach to help them answer the question “If we have a certain amount to spend, where should we spend it to achieve our goals?”
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.
Alongside this robust existing conditions analysis, Alta developed a web-based Budgeted Prioritization tool that enables Kansas City to understand how available budgets can be used to meet multifaceted goals and to allow the City to develop schedules for sidewalk build out within their capital improvement program. The tool is designed to be used with databases with similar schemas so it could support other types of multimodal improvements in the future. See the example above.
Data Collection and Analysis
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. High priority areas are 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 pursue its goals.
Learn more about the Kansas City Sidewalk Prioritization Analysis.
What Is the Budgeted Prioritization Tool?
To take it one step further, the team incorporated the results of the six different analyses related to Kansas City’s existing sidewalk network and desired community outcomes with the results of broad, extensive community input to create a Budgeted Prioritization Tool. This new, dynamic, and digital tool will allow City staff to assess priorities under different funding scenarios.
The tool also makes it possible for Public Works staff to produce lists of sidewalk capital improvement projects that reflect the priorities of Kansas City and residents in each Council District, while meeting the specific requirements and timelines of funding programs that vary in purpose. This helps Public Works staff decide where to build sidewalks in the city based on critical real-world variables that shape capital improvement programs, including the following:
- Budget and Timeline: How much funding is available, and when is it available?
- Improvement Types: Is the project sidewalk infill (new construction where a gap exists), maintenance, or both?
- Community Priorities: Which of the priority outcomes already established for Kansas City (such as access, equity, or safety) should be weighted highest based on the funding source?
- Council District: Which sidewalk improvements are most important to creating a safe and connected network within a specific Council District?
The tool exists as an easy-to-use web form where users enter parameters and adjust digital sliders to set each of the key variables. The sliders change the tool’s output with a heat map that shows which projects are most important based on the specific criteria provided.
How Will We Use the Budgeted Prioritization Tool?
The tool answers the question of, “If we have a certain amount to spend, where should we spend it to achieve our goals?” with a map and related charts or graphs that update in real-time to illustrate how preferred projects are selected, generating a list of projects to be completed in one year, five years, or 10 years, based on a given yearly budget. This data can be downloaded for easy review and analysis, and the tool can create an embeddable map of scenarios to share with the public.
“It’s a game changer for planners, engineers, and others to see how needed improvements, desired community outcomes, and project budgets interact,” said Alta Civic Analytics Leader David Wasserman. “By setting budget and timeline information, users can see what they can afford, ranging from large, impactful projects to smaller, quick wins.”
Learn more about the Kansas City Budgeted Prioritization Tool.
See other examples of Alta’s Civic Analytics team at work and contact David Wasserman at davidwasserman@altago.com if you’re curious to learn more about how our team can support communities across North America.
