Visiting Kansas City and Need Suggestions

[Floorist]

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

That's the biggest reason I didn't move back after college. The streetcar is a step in the right direction, but it's only a step. And Clay Chastain has given LRT like they have in St. Louis a bad name.

The buses are completely free to ride, but they don't run often enough and still don't cover many parts of the metropolitan area, or cover them only sketchily.

There are two statistics about traffic in KC that the pave-the-Earth crowd loves to trot out:

• According to the annual TomTom Traffic Index, Kansas City drivers spend less time in congested traffic than those in any other 2-million-plus urban area in North America. Of the 390 metro areas listed on the index, Kansas City ranks 383d. (The city center as TomTom defines it is more congested, though: where it takes only 8.5 minutes to travel 10 km in the metro, whose drivers spend 69 hours a year on average in congested traffic, it takes two minutes longer to do so in the city center, where drivers spend 84 hours a year on average in congested traffic [350th out of 390].)
  
• I believe that Kansas City still has more freeway lane-miles per capita (actually, per 1,000 inhabitants) than any other city in the United States. And sure enough, according to Federal Highway Administration data posted here, it still does: 1.262 freeway lane miles per 1,000 residents.

I maintain that the boulevard and arterial street network contributes more to the low congestion than the freeways do — when I commuted from my Oak Park (east side Kansas City, MO) home to The Kansas City Star in what's now the Crossroads, I drove on boulevards exclusively, and I don't think that the presence of Bruce Watkins Drive would have cut the time significantly — but the pave-the-Earth crowd would tell you the freeways matter.

But in any case, as I wrote in an article that has yet to appear on Phillymag.com, KC rather than LA should be trotted out as the capital of sprawl.

All the public transit runs at a huge deficit just like Chastain said it would.

[KC_Retiree]

Originally Posted by Floorist

All the public transit runs at a huge deficit just like Chastain said it would.

Well the street car is free. It was never intended to be a money maker but rather a service. But the funding mechanism is more than enough to cover its expenses so it's not running at a deficit at all.

Chastain was a charlatan. He proposed expansive, poorly thought through projects that were compromised by his own personal agendas with funding mechanisms that were hopelessly inadequate for the task.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by Floorist

All the public transit runs at a huge deficit just like Chastain said it would.

AFAIK, only one rail mass transit system anywhere on the planet turns a profit on its operations: Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway.

And one reason why is: The MTR is allowed to own and develop land atop its stations and yards. The rents it collects on these buildings help offest operating costs.

I think that Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit Railway may also turn an operating profit.

Anyone notice a couple of other things these two Asian cities have in common?

Put simply, as KC_Retiree says below, we should stop thinking about public transportation as a money-making enterprise and start thinking about it as a service or a public amenity. Actually, the City Council's vote to eliminate fares on RideKC buses is also a step in that direction.

Originally Posted by KC_Retiree

Well the street car is free. It was never intended to be a money maker but rather a service. But the funding mechanism is more than enough to cover its expenses so it's not running at a deficit at all.

Chastain was a charlatan. He proposed expansive, poorly thought through projects that were compromised by his own personal agendas with funding mechanisms that were hopelessly inadequate for the task.

So I've heard. Of the seven LRT proposals he put on the ballot, only one passed — the sixth one — and the City Council threw that one out because he included no mechanism for paying for it.

I thought Chastain had left the city, but when I bought my boyfriend back to see it in June of this year, our last night in town was the night of the city primary election, We were hanging out in a bar on the edge of KC's gayborhood (I plan on going there again when I'm in town to attend my cousin's funeral on Tuesday) as the results were announced.

"Quinton Lucas trounced Clay Chastain! Great!" I exclaimed.

"I see you're familiar with this place," the bartender said.

But I'd agree that his quixotic campaigns have set back any efforts to build a decent regional rail transit system for Greater Kansas City. And there's still the question of how many people would use it once it was completed, given the relative lack of traffic congestion. I was genuinely shocked to see how little human activity there was on the streets of Downtown KC while we were there. (I'm sure my Sunset Hill classmate friend who serves on the Downtown Council would be distressed to hear my assessment as well.)