Release Date: May 12, 2025

Proposal Due Date: June 6, 2025 3:00 p.m. CST

Budget: Not to exceed $500,000

Period of Performance: December 31, 2025

Contact: Lukas Yanni, Transportation Planner, Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) | lyanni@marc.org

The full RFQ can be found on the MARC website here: https://www.marc.org/about-marc/funding-and-rfps

Project Context

In 2017, The Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) and the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA) Boards both adopted Smart Moves 3.0, the region's 20- year plan for transit and mobility. The Plan development included MARC and its partners — KCATA, Unified Government Transit (UGT), Johnson County, and IndeBus. The Plan outlined goals, strategies, and a list of projects and improvements that local counties and the City of Kansas City Missouri (KCMO) could implement to meet these goals. MARC seeks consulting services to complete the Smart Moves 2025 Update.

The internal work conducted by MARC on the Smart Moves 2025 Update thus far focuses primarily on assessment of implementation to date, financial needs, revenue mechanisms, and funding constraints. The next phase of this work will focus more on assessment of projects and the analysis of the benefits of the Smart Moves plan to local jurisdictions.

This is to be an expedited project spanning between 5 and 6 months. To facilitate this, tasks should be done in parallel whenever possible. When the consultant begins work, MARC will have the following deliverables completed and ready to be incorporated into the work of the consultant team:

• Updated implementation and operation costs by jurisdiction
• Identification of priority routes and improvements by jurisdiction
• Revenue generation estimates and limits by jurisdiction
• Preliminary outreach to key regional stakeholders
• Outreach support from WAY TO GO Transit Voices Storytelling community data collection

Based on the results of the deliverables listed above, the following sections outline the tasks that will be needed for the Smart Moves update.

Scope of Services:

Task 1: Existing Conditions and Literature Review

To build familiarity with the project, the consultant team will conduct an existing conditions and literature review of work to date on Smart Moves, the Smart Moves 3.0 plan documents, and current transit planning efforts and studies in the MARC region.

Task 2: Priority Projects Assessment

In order to determine how best to allocate regional resources, an assessment of priority projects will be conducted. This assessment will include the following:

• Corridor level New/Small Starts Preliminary Scoring and assessment of strength/weakness of rapid transit corridors to secure Capital Investment Grant (CIG) or other discretionary federal funding
• BUILD Grant compliant Benefit Cost Analysis (BCA) for Rapid Transit Corridors. As not all BRT corridors would be a good fit for CIG, BUILD could be another potential avenue for capital funding. Completing the BCA from Task 4 will aid in analyzing which corridors could be most competitive in that program
• Development of a "Program of Projects" strategy to advance more than one rapid transit corridor at a time through the planning, design, construction, testing, and operations process
• Building on the assessment of different recommendations from work conducted by MARC, examine how likely each project is to be eligible for each grant type

Task 3: Outreach and Engagement Campaign (MARC Internal Task)

Task 3 will be undertaken by MARC and will focus on educating elected officials and the public as to the benefits of the Smart Moves system for their local jurisdictions as well as at a regional level. MARC will gather information and feedback from stakeholders and the public through interviews and focus groups. Task 3 will consist of the following elements:

• Summarize preferred routes from the work MARC conducted previously
• Preparation of educational materials (video/print/social media) and advertising plan implementation strategy.
  • This effort will take information gathered by the MARC team and create presentations, literature and pamphlets for distribution and education, package them for the public to explain our findings in short and longer form
• Conducting transit benefits education
• Cultivation and identification of regional champion(s) in either elected officials, non-profit staff and leaders, or those in other transit advocacy groups
• Stakeholder interviews
• Outreach for regional priorities

Task 4: Benefit/Cost Analysis

Using the updated costs from Smart Moves 3.0 prepared for MARC, this task will analyze the benefits and costs of the Smart Moves system at the regional, county, and city levels. This work will maintain continuity with the regions used in Smart Moves 3.0. This task will consist of the following primary components:

• Ridership estimates
  • Based on any anticipated service reductions, baseline services, partial (prioritized) build out and full build out
• Economic benefits
  • Consumer spending power based on less car usage
  • Examine similar areas served by transit and not served by transit and compare economic activity
  • Jobs creation
  • Congestion reduction and less time lost in traffic for drivers

• Development of a transit economic return on investment (ROI) tool
  • The APTA cites for every dollar invested in transit there is a $4 yield in economic return; This analysis needs to be able to make this case locally for the Kansas City region. This tool will assist in Task 4 Outreach to elected officials, various Chambers, etc. to help them understand the need for an expanded and improved regional transit service
  • This tool ideally would be able to determine ROI for local jurisdictions at the city and county level.

• Job access improvements (MARC Internal Subtask)
  • This will be based on GIS analysis and conducted in such a way that the data can be cross compared to previous and current MARC jobs access data. This will include three scenarios:
    • Full Smart Moves system implementation
    • Partial Smart Moves implementation
    • No Smart Moves implementation (using forecasted cuts to KCATA and other regional systems as applicable)
• Air quality/emissions benefits
• Access for transit dependent populations
  • Seniors
  • Low income
  • Those with disabilities (low vision, mobility impaired, etc.)
  • Other disadvantaged populations as relevant

Task 5: Documentation and Reporting

Task 5 will include creating presentations for stakeholders, MARC committees, and the MARC and KCATA Boards. It will also include compilation of the findings from Tasks 1-4 as well as the deliverables previously prepared by MARC in a final report.