Star offers light rail plan

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The Star took a different approach. We went across the city to business executives, elected officials, political groups and various transit advocates to ask: What kind of light-rail system should Kansas City have? And how big of a system can we really afford?

The result was something of a community consensus on a set of six guiding principles for a light-rail starter route:

Start small. Twenty-five of the 27 metro areas larger than Kansas City have some type of rail transit. Many successful regional systems offer a compelling lesson because they started with shorter, urban routes and expanded from there.

Cross the river. "It’s got to get across the river," said City Councilman Bill Skaggs. "The people of the Northland would feel some ownership of it." Plus, crossing the river is a first step toward getting to Kansas City International Airport.

Serve high transit demands. The ATA bus lines with the highest daily ridership are along the Troost and Prospect avenue corridors, which The Star’s eastward branch along Linwood Boulevard would connect to.

Make it modern yet affordable. The latest trend in light rail is the modern streetcar system. This isn’t the slow-moving antique trolley. The newest modern streetcars look like a train, run on rails in city streets and speed up to 45 mph, while costing almost half as much as traditional light rail. These modern streetcar systems are being planned in more than a dozen cities, including Cincinnati and Omaha, Neb.

Pay for it locally. Kansas City’s prospects for federal transportation matching funds are iffy for many reasons, and the process takes half a decade. Many community leaders want to get going with something now. "We need to take things in our own hands and get it started," said downtown real estate executive Jon Copaken.

Seek less than a 1/2 -cent sales tax increase. The last decade is littered with light-rail proposals, including one from City Hall, that sought half-cent sales tax increases and were trounced. A recent public opinion poll found a ¼-cent tax increase for light rail had close to majority support. "That’s within striking distance" of victory, said longtime political consultant Pat Gray.

These guiding principles, along with additional research and interviews, steered The Star toward a consensus-oriented starter route that serves several different parts of town while costing a little more than the Sprint Center.

This starter plan borrows a few concepts from other light-rail concepts previously proposed for the city. For instance, the Urban Society of Kansas City, a group promoting urban-oriented planning, first suggested modern streetcar technology. Also, Clay Chastain once suggested light rail along Linwood Boulevard.

But this proposal is different in some important aspects.

For one thing, it represents a hybrid of modern streetcar light-rail systems, combining the sleekness of the Portland, Ore., streetcar with the Tacoma, Wash., dedicated, transit-only lanes -- an element the ATA’s light rail consultants strongly favor.

For another, it’s shorter than anything that’s been on an election ballot before -- all previous city and Chastain proposals exceeded 20 miles. As a result, this plan costs less than anything in the past.

The starter plan is basically a demonstration project, a way to serve some commuters, connect some attractions and show that light rail can work here so the suburbs will then become more serious about pursuing a regionwide rail system.

"There’ll be more of a push if we can just get that starter line in, because that’s what we’ve seen happen in so many other cities," said Councilman Ed Ford, a Northlander spearheading the city’s light-rail strategy as chairman of the council’s transportation committee.

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