Search Results for: kansas city streetcar

Should Kansas City Build Light Rail?

By | | Transportation
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I am in KC today helping the Show-Me Institute educate people about the benefits and costs of light rail. Long-time readers will recall that Kansas City voters approved a light-rail plan after having rejected such plans six times. The Show-Me Institute is releasing a report on the subject by the Antiplanner which you can no doubt find on their web site.

In a nutshell, the voter-approved plan is totally infeasible, as it calls for taking money from the bus system to build rail and presumes that the federal government will pay half the cost — which, the FTA says, it won’t if it means reducing bus service. Plus the current cost projections are 50 percent more than the costs initially projected by the line’s backers.

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The Biased FTA Won’t Give Portland Its Streetcar Subsidies

By | | Transportation
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Pity the poor city of Portland. It wants to build more streetcar lines, and its Godfather Earl created a special slush fund small starts program in the recent transportation bill for such new rail lines.

Only now the evil Federal Transit Administration (no doubt goaded by the evil Bush Administration) says that it will only give out small starts grants if cities can show that streetcars are more efficient than buses. Waahhh!

Portland’s streetcar passes through the Pearl District, which received hundreds of millions of dollars of federal and local subsidies thanks to Portland’s former godfather, Neil Goldschmidt.
Flickr photo by NeiTech.

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Trolley Follies

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner’s recent review of a proposed streetcar in Fort Lauderdale compared data for a dozen streetcar lines operating in 2015. Left out were streetcars in Cincinnati and Kansas City, which began operating during 2016. Now the early results for those two lines are in, and–not surprisingly–they aren’t good.

When it was planned, the Cincinnati streetcar was projected to carry 4,600 riders per weekday (see p. 16). By the time construction began, officials reduced this to 3,200 trips per weekday, and by the time it opened they dropped it further to 2,600. Actual ridership in May, its ninth month of operation, was just 1,713 trips per day. Since the city was counting on fares to help pay for operations, the streetcar is expected to have a $474,530 deficit this year and will need even more money from the city next year.

The Kansas City streetcar, meanwhile, was projected to carry nearly 3,200 weekday riders at fares of $1.50 a ride. So the city was elated when ridership in the first couple of months was more than 6,000 trips per weekday. What they didn’t mention was that the rides were free, not $1.50. Judging by Atlanta’s experience, raising the fares to $1 would reduce ridership by 58 percent; raising them to $1.50 would reduce it even more. Continue reading →

Cordelia Is Running Ramsey County

By | | Transportation
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“When I go shopping,” said Cordelia Chase, the vapid “mean girl” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “I have to have the most expensive thing, not because it’s expensive, but because it costs more.” That seems to be the rule guiding Ramsey County, home of St. Paul, Minnesota.

A streetcar in Kansas City heroically manages to block five lanes of traffic all at once. Photo by Jason Doss.

The county is considering two major alternatives for a transit line from St. Paul Union Depot (SPUD) to the Mall of America (MOA) via Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport (MSP): a modern streetcar, which can move less than 3,000 people per hour at about 16 miles per hour and would cost $2.1 billion; and a bus-rapid transit line that could move 10,000 to 20,000 people per hour supposedly at 18 miles per hour (but I bet it could run much faster) and is estimated to cost $121 million to build and half as much to operate as the streetcar line. Continue reading →

Why Bus-Rapid-Transit Has Become Popular

By | | Transportation
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Am I ahead of my time or simply out of step with the times? When I began studying light rail, I quickly realized that buses could do everything light rail could do except cost a lot of money. I was especially heartened when Kansas City, whose voters had rejected light rail in something like eight different elections, spent about $3 million a mile (about $4 million a mile in today’s money) installing two bus-rapid-transit (BRT) lines and got 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership, which is more than some light-rail lines get.

So I should be happy about recent reports favoring BRT.

  • As noted above, the World Bank reports that “Bus Rapid Transit takes cars off the road and moves people quickly, providing the benefits of metros at a fraction of the cost.”
  • An article in Research in Transportation Economics found that the values of homes within a 20-minute walk of a bus-rapid transit station increased by 5 to 7 percent and the total increase in property values was six times the cost of the BRT projects.
  • Jarrett Walker reports “good outcomes” from a new BRT line in Portland, specifically a 30 to 40 percent increase in ridership.

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Let’s Spend More Money on Something We Have to Give Away to Get People to Use It!

By | | Transportation
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Kansas City voters sensibly rejected spending money on light rail at least seven times. But that common sense apparently didn’t extent to streetcars, which are an even dumber idea than light rail as streetcars are slower than buses, far more expensive, and can’t get out of their own way if one breaks down.

Photo by Jason Doss.

Despite these disadvantages, Kansas City opened a 2.2-mile streetcar line in 2016 that it declared to be a great success. It carried almost 4,800 weekday riders in its first full year of operation, which is about as many as a mediocre bus route but more than streetcar lines in Atlanta, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Dallas, Little Rock, Seattle, Tucson, and Washington. Continue reading →

Making a Good Idea Bad

By | | Transportation
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Back when I first began studying light rail, one of my first questions was, “Why rail when buses can work just as well for a lot less money?” That question is becoming less valid today as transit agencies have done their usual job of making something affordable into something grossly expensive.

Proposed Charleston bus rapid transit line. Graphic by Low Country Rapid Transit.

A case in point is Charleston, South Carolina’s proposal for a bus rapid transit line. Local backers have the audacity to call it South Carolina’s first mass transit system, as if Columbia, Greenville, Charleston, and other South Carolina cities haven’t had bus systems for decades. But the real problem is that they want to spend $625 million on a 21-mile line, or about $30 million per mile. Continue reading →

Transit’s Zombie Future

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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March transit ridership pushed up above 60 percent of pre-pandemic numbers for the first time since the pandemic began, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Ridership was boosted by the fact that March 2022 had two more weekdays than March 2019. Since April 2022 has one fewer weekday than April 2019, ridership is likely to dip back down below 60 percent in April.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Transit is still lagging well behind other modes of travel. Amtrak carried 68 percent as many passenger-miles as in March 2019 while the airlines carried 88 percent. Domestic air travel was probably above 90 percent, but data sorting domestic from international travel won’t be available for a couple of months. Miles of driving in March will be available in about a week but are likely to be more than 100 percent of March 2019 miles.

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Old Technologies for New Starts

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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As part of the president’s proposed 2023 budget, the Federal Transit Administration plans to give out an unprecedented $4.45 billion on new transit capital projects, sometimes called New Starts and Small Starts. For comparison, in 2022 it gave away less than $2.5 billion. The difference, of course, is due to passage of the infrastructure law, which massively increased federal subsidies to transit.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

This increase in spending and the projects that the FTA proposes to fund demonstrate that neither the transit industry nor the legislators funding it are responding to changes resulting from the recent pandemic. Transit was already declining before the pandemic, and the pandemic led to a much larger decline, much of which is likely to be permanent. Transit’s response to the decentralization of downtowns and cities should be to rely on smaller vehicles. Yet the New Starts proposals all presume that downtown job numbers and transit ridership will rapidly grow and thus more spending and larger vehicles are needed to accommodate that growth. Continue reading →