Prospect MAX: The East Side Corridor That Was Built, and the Kiosks That Report Their Own Failures
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means · The full record behind this page
✎ Updated 20 Aug 2026 Publication date recorded for 4 sources. What changed →
The instrumentation the cancelled tender was meant to bring to Kansas City's east side arrived instead on a transit grant. Prospect MAX opened on 9 December 2019, a bus rapid transit line running from downtown to the new 75th & Prospect Transit Center, at a cost of approximately $54 million funded through a mix of federal and local funds, including $29.98 million from the Federal Transit Administration Small Starts Program. The stations carry free public Wi-Fi and touchscreen wayfinding kiosks with interactive trip planning and real-time departure information, and a SmartLink management controller remotely monitors the performance of each device and sends outage alerts to KCATA when devices lose power or connectivity. The operator is not the city: KCATA is a bi-state authority serving both sides of the Missouri–Kansas line.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →🎓 Lesson
The useful part of a platform kiosk is not the screen but the alarm behind it. A device that tells the operator it has stopped working is the difference between infrastructure and street furniture five years later — and on this corridor that channel arrived with federal transit money, after the corporate partnership for the rest of the city was abandoned.
Sources
📅 How old is the evidence?
Two clocks, kept apart: when this entry’s sources were published, and what has happened to its record in the atlas. Documented span: since 2019. 3 of 4 sources carry a publication date, from 1 October 2018 to 24 October 2019.
When the sources were published
- Government Technology (e.Republic) · pressGovernment Technology — Bringing the Smart City Vision to Kansas City's Neglected East Side
- Mass Transit Magazine (Endeavor Business Media) · pressMass Transit — KCATA's new Prospect MAX BRT stations to add digital wayfinding and SmartLink remote management system
- Mass Transit Magazine (Endeavor Business Media) · pressMass Transit — KCATA to open Prospect MAX BRT on Dec. 9
What happened to this record
- Entered the record
- Sources last read
- Publication date recorded for 4 sources
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 4 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 4 addressable claims, 4 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 4
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-881f93b0cc9d89de
quantitative
Prospect MAX opened on 9 December 2019, a bus rapid transit line running from downtown to the new 75th & Prospect Transit Center
Sources carrying this claim
clm-c7edc9d128ae3629
quantitative
at a cost of approximately $54 million funded through a mix of federal and local funds, including $29.98 million from the Federal Transit Administration Small Starts Program
Sources carrying this claim
clm-5efcc604e0e268ae
descriptive
touchscreen wayfinding kiosks with interactive trip planning and real-time departure information, and a SmartLink management controller remotely monitors the performance of each device and sends outage alerts to KCATA when devices lose power or connectivity
Sources carrying this claim
clm-62495bc4b570547b
descriptive
KCATA is a bi-state authority serving both sides of the Missouri–Kansas line
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:36cd73a09ce13d728f3d8b7df17f06cbc61aa01a57089c9a11a3f5fcc07ee366
- 4
- of 4 claims mapped
- 4
- source dossiers
- 3
- publication dates recorded
- 0
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA), a bi-state authority
- Actor types
- regional-government, national-government
- Funding model
- grant
- Funding description
- Approximately $54 million, including $29.98 million from the Federal Transit Administration Small Starts Program, with local match
- Cost
- Not recorded
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
4 source dossiers
RideKC / KCATA — Prospect MAX
- Stable source ID
src-47ba5a068b19ce7c- Publisher
- Name not classified · ridekc.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-19
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- No locator recordedDescriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Mass Transit — KCATA to open Prospect MAX BRT on Dec. 9
- Stable source ID
src-97292f69d8318bc5- Publisher
- Name not classified · masstransitmag.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2019-10-24
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-19
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- No locator recordedDescriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
- Claims linked
Mass Transit — KCATA's new Prospect MAX BRT stations to add digital wayfinding and SmartLink remote management system
- Stable source ID
src-8646db2fd7e95df2- Publisher
- Name not classified · masstransitmag.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2019-09-12
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-19
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- No locator recordedDescriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
- Claims linked
Government Technology — Bringing the Smart City Vision to Kansas City's Neglected East Side
- Stable source ID
src-278902de949facd7- Publisher
- Name not classified · govtech.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2018-10-01
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-08-19
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- No locator recordedDescriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Prospect MAX: The East Side Corridor That Was Built, and the Kiosks That Report Their Own Failures” — Kansas City, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/kansas-city-prospect-max/ (last verified 2026-08-19). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.