Vote ‘no’ on Clay Chastain’s latest fantasy light-rail plan
This fall, Kansas City voters are being asked again to pay for Clay Chastain’s fantasy light-rail plan. The cost to implement this plan will certainly exceed the revenue generated by the plan’s three new sales taxes. Worse still, this plan purposely robs $26 million per year from our underfunded bus system that thousands depend on daily.
Such is the folly of Clay Chastain.
Building light rail through low-density areas on the way to Kansas City International Airport, the Truman Sports Complex and the new Cerner campus sounds great on paper. However, this plan fails to improve access to jobs via regional transit, a serious fault.
Every transit professional in the region will tell you the most acute jobs-access problem is in southern Johnson County. This is a significant omission in Chastain’s repeated attempts at pursuing his Kansas City-only light-rail fantasy.
We have a regional transportation plan called Smart Moves that we’ve been investing in route by route, albeit slowly. Chastain continues to ignore the objectives of that adopted regional plan.
We must focus on connecting people to job centers and building greater population density in our urban core. The streetcar, for example, was specifically focused on the latter and by all measures is succeeding.
Aside from ignoring the region’s top job-access gap, Chastain’s fantasy plan contains flaws that make implementation impossible.
His plan assumes construction costs of $45 million per mile, yet we know the streetcar cost $50 million per mile. Light rail is more costly than streetcar to construct — often approaching $100 million or more, not including river crossings.
To help fund construction, Chastain assumes $1 billion in federal dollars, which would be one of the largest single project awards ever. It is unlikely the city would get such an award for a light-rail line that runs through low-density areas to the north and south, a lesson we learned in 2008.
The local match would come entirely from sales tax revenues. A portion of those would be captured by redirecting a tax that supports our bus system.
Other assumptions that would compound the difficulty with implementation:
▪ Assuming the parks department would allow use of parks for light rail right-of-way.
▪ Assuming light rail would run on the Trolley Track Trail. A citizen work group already weighed in on this in 2014, preferring a mixed alignment for rail going south through Brookside.
▪ Assuming North Kansas City and the Missouri Department of Transportation would agree to not only allow the light rail to use the Heart of America Bridge, but also to restrict car traffic when light rail vehicles are passing.
▪ Assuming a zone-based pricing system that increases the cost of the trip based on the number of zones traveled. This is contrary to the current RideKC fare policy.
Chastain’s latest light-rail fantasy plan is riddled with problems. It’s unlikely any entity would execute the plan, and certainly not for this price tag. The voters of Kansas City should send Chastain a clear message with another resounding defeat. He’s promised once again that this is the end, right?
Matt Kauffman is a practicing architect and advocate for the built environment and transportation issues. He currently serves as the chairman of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance.
This story was originally published October 25, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Vote ‘no’ on Clay Chastain’s latest fantasy light-rail plan."