RIDE KC

The RideKC Development Corp., as the economic development agency within the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, works to create more sustainable economies by connecting public transportation and development. After a global retail company chose a new site to build a facility for 2,000+ jobs for local workers, RideKC DC was asked to assess how potential workers might access these jobs by transit.

RideKC DC needed to examine a few key questions: Where are workers available? Do they have access to vehicles? Where are existing transit lines available in relation to where residents live and work? Datasets like these are sparse and disparate, which makes compiling and analyzing very tedious for any agency; as RideKC DC has only three full-time employees with jurisdictional coverage spanning seven counties, obtaining data to support a project like this has historically been next to impossible.

Using workforce and resident data in Replica’s Places tool, RideKC DC quickly discovered that over 50% of the county’s population wasn’t in the labor force at all. These new jobs would need to source workers from farther away. A brief evaluation of existing transit routes in Places showed that the majority of potential workers would likely come from areas that aren’t sufficiently connected by public transportation.