KC Light Rail

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Seattle mayor leading by example

Local leaders went on a much-publicized trip to Seattle a few months ago and brought back lots of cool ideas about what it's like to be a Big City (light rail!. Another of these great ideas appeared in today's Post-Intelligencer: Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has proposed giving all city employees free bus passes by 2009. But wait… isn't KC's bus system "anemic"? Well, yeah, if you live in Olathe and work in Blue Springs — downtown workers are the best served in the entire metro. Even though the schedules aren't that flexible in the far-flung areas, just about anyone in the entire metro can catch a single-seat ride to the Loop. KCMO is the only city that could seriously offer this with the current system… and wouldn't it be a great step towards leading by example? It's worth noting that Jackson County employees already enjoy this amenity.

The City could also make immediate improvements to the existing MAX line by reversing previous administration (not ATA) policy that prevents MAX buses from always getting traffic signal priority at intersections, especially now that almost all of the signals on Main have been replaced. We're guessing you could cut at least 5 minutes from a Plaza to downtown run.

If improved transit is really the highest priority, shouldn't we be thinking about improving what we already have while the consultants and the Feds do the light rail dance for the next decade? In short, transit leadership is not just about light rail.

3 Comments so far

  1. matt December 6th, 2007 6:00 pm

    while i agree that transit leadership should be comprehensive, i disagree that, at this point, “we” should put a tremendous amount of effort into improving what we already have. i would prefer that energy go towards expediting a potentially superior system that presents the opportunity to create real urban density. transit can do a good deal more for a healthy society than simply moving people.

  2. enough December 7th, 2007 12:14 am

    ^ oooooohhh — i disagree. whatever we get in the future, we’ll always have a bus system to supplement / feed it. there are lots of ways to improve the current system — more than i want to enumerate here. we don’t have to wait until 2015 or so for major improvement in transit — 2013 is the currently anticipated start-construction date for light rail. my concern is that the ata is putting so much of its effort into studying light rail now that they aren’t getting around to improvements they know are needed in the bus system.

    as for max buses not getting priority, that’s the fault of the traffic engineers, not of the previous administration. get the traffic engineers to ease up on their “traffic uber alles” attitude and they can give max real priority. (currently, i think max only gets priority if it’s running two or more minutes late, and if the particular intersection hasn’t given priority to any other max bus in the past seven minutes.)

    and as for free transit for city employees, why not? even if they can’t get a single-seat ride to city hall, they can drive to a park-and-ride lot.

    transit leadership is, indeed, about more than just light rail.

  3. Dave December 7th, 2007 1:47 pm

    i obviously disagree, too. we have at least a 5-10 year wait until light rail service begins anywhere in the metro. unless urban congestion (unlikely) or gas prices jump suddenly (versus rising over time) in that time, i don’t see transit use rising dramatically unless we adress the “low-hanging fruit” that keep people away from buses.

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