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Kansas City experiences first ozone alert day of 2016

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The metro is under an ozone alert Wednesday - the first one of the year.      

This means that the air quality outside can be dangerous for people with breathing problems.

The alerts are issued because there are extreme high levels of smog. The biggest culprit is car emissions.

There's a push for people to take public transportation on ozone alert days.

The KCATA is helping out by lowering the fare on their system down to 75 cents. The only exception is the line that runs from Lawrence to Johnson County.

Typically during the winter, they provide warming busses at their transit hubs, but during the hot temperatures in the spring and summer, that's not the case.

"Those warming busses are typically in the early morning hours when there is nothing else open and it's coldest, so in the middle of the day people might have other options to keep cool, and we want to make sure all those buses are available to provide service,” Bridget Moss, a KCATA spokeswoman, said.

The Kansas City Streetcar doesn't expect the extreme heat will impact the overhead lines.

The reduced fare on the city's buses will happen every time there's an ozone alert through the end of September.

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Andres Gutierrez can be reached at andres.gutierrez@kshb.com

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