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Light rail, meet heavy rail
By MICHAEL MANSUR and DEANN SMITHThe Kansas City Star
Subways, a revised Chastain plan — the city’s light-rail tangle just got more complex, and definitely more interesting.
As the city prepares to dive back this week into coming up with a light-rail proposal, the past week showed just how wide open the city’s transit future has become.
Light-rail activist Clay Chastain updated his compromise plan — and offered not to sue the city if the Kansas City Council places a compromise version of his plan before voters in April.
What’s more, an entirely new idea about building a rail transit system emerged last week: tunneling to create a subway system of fast heavy-rail cars.
Council members are expected to hold a special meeting Thursday to discuss the future of light rail, including the timing of a special election. Another meeting has been scheduled for Jan. 3 to talk with lobbyists about efforts to get federal funding.
Last month, the council repealed the Chastain plan and vowed to give voters another plan sometime next year. A citizens task force has produced a proposed starter line for Kansas City that recently was presented to the council.
On Friday, three council members were scheduled to meet with engineer Lloyd H. Frank about the subway idea, but inclement weather caused the city to postpone the meeting.
The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority is taking the idea seriously.
John Dobies, project manager of the ATA’s light-rail study team, said Friday that the subway idea will be explored by enlisting more engineering expertise on whether it would be feasible to tunnel in limestone layers beneath Kansas City.
Dobies said he thinks subway construction would prove too costly, but some engineers have proposed that such a system might be built in Kansas City for little more than what a new light-rail system operating on the surface might cost.
“The study team believes that there’s enough interest in this idea that it should be looked at,” Dobies said. “We’re obligated to … come up with a cost.”
Dobies said the analysis of the subway idea should begin in January.
The council, at the task force’s urging, voted last month to repeal Clay Chastain’s plan, which was approved by voters in November 2006. The council delayed placing an alternative before voters, but it has pledged to do so by November 2008.
Chastain said last week that he would give the council until Thursday to accept the new compromise he has offered. Otherwise, he’ll go to court to try to win back his plan.
Chastain’s new compromise includes these changes from the plan voters approved in 2006:
•Dropping his ideas for gondolas and no traffic in Penn Valley Park.
•Adding a streetcar line section connecting the East Side with the Country Club Plaza. The rest of the system would remain traditional light rail.
•The spine would still stretch from Swope Park to Kansas City International Airport, but city planners would determine the exact route, much of which had been specified in the original plan. The spine could be built in stages as funding becomes available.
•The city would work to develop a regional transportation system that connects Jackson County to Union Station and Lee’s Summit to Swope Park, and that offers “major transit service” that connects Johnson and Wyandotte counties to Union Station.
•The city would develop new financing for its bus system. Like the original plan, this one would use the 3/8 -cent sales tax that currently helps fund buses. With the economy sputtering, Chastain doubts voters would raise new taxes for light rail.
Chastain said he wants the council to ask voters in April to approve his new proposal. He also wants the council to guarantee that mortgage banker Jim Nutter Sr. will drop his efforts to overturn Chastain’s plan.
“I had to give up some of the soul of my plan in order to save the idea of light rail being implemented in the city,” Chastain, who now lives in Bedford, Va., said in a telephone interview. “My fear was if we didn’t make a compromise, we might never get light rail in Kansas City, and that was worth giving up my dream for gondolas and my dream for a pastoral park.”
Chastain said Kansas City residents need resolution when it comes to light rail.
“We tried to be as reasonable as possible to give the city a chance to do the right thing,” he said. “The public is getting worn out with the issue.”
Councilman Ed Ford, who is leading the council’s light-rail efforts, was not impressed.
Not renewing the 3/8 -cent sales tax for bus service “is a nonstarter,” Ford said. Also, Chastain’s initial spine is too long, he said.
Tunnel idea
City Councilman Russ Johnson said he doesn’t know if it’s feasible to build a subway system in Kansas City, but he feels obliged to find out.
Johnson wants engineers promoting the idea and those questioning it to “get into the same room, and we can debate it out.”
Indeed, Johnson and council members Ed Ford and Jan Marcason had been scheduled to meet with Frank on Friday morning before that meeting was postponed.
Frank produced a preliminary study of the subway idea in 2005, complete with renderings of a subway station near Union Station and Crown Center, as well as graphics of the Bethany Falls limestone layer that runs beneath Kansas City.
Frank’s study — produced at a time many considered light rail to be dead — argued that rail transit was necessary to address Kansas City’s problems, including social equity, community development and energy sustainability. Kansas City “lacks one of the main selling points of a metropolitan area — an efficient mass transit system,” he wrote with co-author Brody Weber.
A subway system offers greater speed and transit benefits than buses or light rail, Frank said. It would use faster, heavier rail cars like those in the Washington’s Metro or Atlanta’s MARTA.
“Riding the length of the system form 95th and Troost to the City Market would take less than 20 minutes, a speed difficult to achieve even by car!” he wrote.
His route of about 15 miles — running from the River Market area to Interstate 435, south of Bannister — would cost $780 million to $880 million to construct, he estimated.
Frank said he has presented his study to numerous city leaders, from former mayor Charles B. Wheeler to current mayor Mark Funkhouser and his chief of staff, Ed Wolf, an engineer. But so far, he’s not found any traction for the idea.
“We feel this idea is very viable, it’s correct,” said Frank, whose son is Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?
Frank, a Kansas City native, said he has spent countless hours and money researching his plan. He could have been making money doing engineering work for suburban developers who normally employ him. But Frank said he was compelled to keep pushing the subway concept.
“This city needs something,” he said.