Kansas City Scout
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Kansas City Scout is one of the United States' largest electronic traffic management systems. It was created in 2000 as part of a bi-state initiative between the Missouri Department of Transportation and the Kansas Department of Transportation to provide this system for the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, which is in both Missouri and Kansas (the anchor city of Kansas City, Missouri is in Missouri). The project's cost was $43 million. Of that amount, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) contributed 80-90 percent of the project cost. KDOT and MoDOT shared the remaining cost. The system employs a system of electronic boards placed on major highways throughout the metropolitan area that display traffic information whenever information needs to be displayed (due to an accident, lane closure, highway closure ect), and the system also has cameras on those billboards to automatically detect traffic problems. While the system has extensive coverage of highways in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area it still has much more to cover. Since it would be to expensive to cover all the major highways in the Kansas City metro (which has more miles of highway per person than any other metropolitan area in the United States), studies were conducted to determine which highways or segments of highways have priority due to higher accident rates. Since the projects beginning, it has expanded greatly, and will continue to expand. Future plans are to extend coverage to I-635 and cover I-435 even more (especially in the northern areas of the metro) as well as other major city highways. It was named after the iconic Kansas City Scout Statue that exists in Penn Valley Park, overlooking Downtown Kansas City.
