Search Results for: kansas city streetcar

Transit Trouble in Kansas City

By | | Transportation
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Kansas City is one of the few urban areas to see ridership recover from the pandemic. Recent transit data shows that the region’s transit carried 99 percent as many riders in the first half of 2024 as the same months in 2019, albeit mainly because it has reduced fares to zero. However, all is not well with transit in the self-described Paris of the Plains.

The Kansas City streetcar is a great success if you ignore the fact that it has never earned a single penny in fare revenues. Similarly, KC’s bus system’s recovery from the pandemic is less impressive considering it isn’t earning any fares either. Photo by Jazz Guy.

Earlier this week, the Blue Springs city council voted to end support to the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (KCATA). The suburb of about 58,000 residents had paid the transit agency $73,000 for transit services in 2022-2023, but the agency had increased its requirement to nearly $123,000 for 2024-2025 “without much justification for the increase,” the city said. Continue reading →

The Streetcar Intelligence Test

By | | Policy brief
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The first electric streetcars and the first internal-combustion engine automobiles were first developed just over 130 years ago. Initially, each went about 8 to 10 miles per hour. Today, people routinely drive automobiles at 70 to 80 miles per hour, and some supercars can go well over 200 miles per hour. Meanwhile, according to the American Public Transportation Association, the average speed of streetcars is a whopping 6.9 miles per hour.

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

Streetcars were rendered obsolete in 1927 with the introduction of the Twin Coach bus, the first bus that was both cheaper to buy and cheaper to operate than streetcars. Within a decade, half of America’s streetcar systems had converted to buses. The infamous General Motors streetcar conspiracy, which began in 1937, was actually a conspiracy to take business away from Twin Coach buses, not to destroy streetcars which were already rapidly disappearing. By 1974, only six cities still had streetcars, usually because they went through tunnels or used a dedicated right of way not open to buses. Continue reading →

Streetcar Roundup

By | | Transportation
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Milwaukee and Oklahoma City are both planning to open new streetcar lines later this year, so it is worth taking a look at how the dumbest form of transit is working in other cities. The table below shows all of the streetcar lines reported in the July, 2018 National Transit Database spreadsheet. Ridership numbers are shown for January and July and annual growth compares the last full year (August 2017-July 2018) with the year before that.

CityRail
Miles		1-18
Riders		7-18
Riders		Annual
Growth
Atlanta2.617,41643,915-16%
Charlotte1.630,16320,291-21%
Cincinnati3.617,22054,625-21%
Dallas-Oak3.611,09816,402-1%
Dallas-McK.4.531,76051,582-9%
Detroit3.384,456116,086
Kansas City2.297,194262,593-1%
Kenosha2.059310,293-5%
Little Rock3.51,5803,413-6%
Memphis10.545,457
New Orleans21.4497,771722,566-6%
Philadelphia217.32,139,2781,819,919-6%
Portland14.8400,370406,9574%
San Francisco21.7517,180863,3907%
Seattle7.9121,995148,2287%
Tacoma2.778,64462,810-3%
Tampa3.525,22126,112-1%
Tucson3.980,34343,4100%
Washington5.687,81688,56613%

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St. Louis Streetcar Broke Before It Begins

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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St. Louis has spent $51 million building a 2.1-mile streetcar line that may never run because the company hired to operate it is almost out of money. In 2015, St. Louis County gave $3 million to the Loop Trolley Company, which the company used to hire managers, drivers, and other employees to run the trolleys that were supposed to begin operation in spring, 2016.

However, the start of operations has been repeatedly delayed, most recently to mid-winter, 2018. Now the trolley company says it will be out of money before it can start, and it is demanding another $500,000 before a single streetcar turns a wheel in revenue service.

At the other end of the state, the Kansas City streetcar was supposed to have been a great success, carrying an average of Kamagra oral jelly sildenafil cheapest also gives side issues. If you check the market today, you’ll find hundreds of herbal enhancement pills boasting good performance level. cheap viagra canada Symptoms may vary and are largely dependent on your vardenafil generic emotional state. This theme came from working with so many managers who bought our training programs or hired our consultants to implement wholesale sildenafil such things as customer-service programs, quality-improvement processes, and culture changes. >5,843 trips per day, but that’s because it is free. The Loop Trolley Company expects to charge $2 per two-hour period. That’s in the range of the Little Rock streetcar, which carried 153 trips per weekday in 2016, or the Tampa streetcar, which carried 645 trips per weekday. These two lines each cost taxpayers more than a million dollars a year to operate. Continue reading →

How Does Kansas City Measure Success?

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The $102 million Kansas City streetcar is supposed to be a great success. Projected to carry 2,900 people per weekday in its first year, it actually attracted 6,800 people per weekday in its first few months of operation. In fact, the cars are supposedly so crowded that the city is ordering two more cars.

On the other hand, the city so far hasn’t dared to charge fares. When Atlanta began charging fares, ridership fell more than 50 percent. It is hard to claim success with a straight face when you are giving something away. In addition, the ridership projections did not count event-related riders, while actual ridership numbers include a “large event-related market.”

The streetcars go through downtown Kansas City, an area that was already gentrifying with $6 billion worth of new development before the decision was made to build the streetcar line. Despite claims that the streetcar stimulated this development, the reality is that the streetcar goes through the heart of an urban redevelopment area that has benefited from tax-increment financing. Continue reading →

Streetcars, Non-QWERTY Typewriters, & Zoopraxiscopes: Technological Equals

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Washington, DC opened its streetcar line last Saturday, and in a blog post elsewhere the Antiplanner compared it with a zoopraxiscope. That got the attention of another blogger. In case you missed it, I’m cross-posting my blog post here.

Washington, DC opened its long-delayed streetcar for business on Saturday. Actually, it’s a stretch to say it is open “for business,” as the city hasn’t figured out how to collect fares for it, so they won’t be charging any.

Exuberant but arithmetically challenged city officials bragged that the streetcar would traverse its 2.2-mile route at an average speed of 12 to 15 miles per hour, taking a half hour to get from one end to the other (which is 4.4 miles per hour). If there were no traffic and it didn’t have to stop for passengers or run in to any automobiles along the way, they admitted, it would still take 22 minutes (which is 6 miles per hour).

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Streetcar and Light-Rail Boondoggles

By | | Transportation
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Kansas City voters rejected a plan to build an extensive streetcar system. The city already has plans to build a short “starter” line, and the mayor wanted to build more. But voters agreed that buses were cheaper and more sensible. This is the ninth time Kansas City voters have rejected rail transit.

Meanwhile, the Antiplanner has given several presentations in the Twin Cities about rail transit and associated land-use planning. These presentations can be downloaded, with a summary of my narration in the “notes” section, as either Zip files that include several short videos or smaller PowerPoint files that leave out the videos.

  • Presentation to the SW Metro Tea Party: Zip file (111 MB) or PPT file (32 MB)
  • Presentation to Daytons Bluff neighborhood: Zip file (82 MB) or PPT file (39 MB)
  • Presentation to Metro North Chamber of Commerce: Zip file (98 MB) or PPT file (15 MB)

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No Streetcar for San Antonio

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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After being in office just one week, San Antonio’s new mayor, Ivy Taylor, proposed Monday that the city withdraw the $32 million it had promised to build a new $280 million, 5.9-mile streetcar line. Moreover, she persuaded Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, the region’s leading streetcar proponent, to join her in declaring the streetcar plan dead. Wolff has previously said that he is too busy waging a re-election campaign against a streetcar opponent to campaign in favor of the streetcar plan.


A planner’s fantasy of what a streetcar would look like near the Alamo in San Antonio.

The announcements come amid controversy over an initiative petition submitted by streetcar opponents asking that voters be allowed to approve or reject the plan in November. The city has tentatively rejected most of the signatures, saying they were improperly collected. The petitioners have a legal opinion saying the city is reading the law incorrectly. The new mayor may be hoping that, in announcing the plan is dead, the demand for a vote will go away. If the city rejects the petitions now and opponents go to court, the measure may have to go to voters in a later election.

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Kansas City Spared Light-Rail Vote

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Kansas City voters won’t get a chance to vote on light rail despite the fact that proponents gathered enough signatures to put it on the ballot. The court that rejected the measure said that the plan was unworkable because it didn’t provide enough money to build the mandated rail lines.

A light-rail fanatic named Clay Chastain had petitioned for light rail in Kansas City six times and lost. Then, in 2006, he put a crazy proposal on the ballot to built both light rail and an aerial tramway–this was right after Portland opened its aerial tramway–and managed to win, mainly because the people who normally opposed him figured the measure would lose and so they didn’t bother to campaign against it.

The 2006 measure didn’t include enough funding for the project because Chastain figured the federal government would pay for half. But the Federal Transit Administration looked at the numbers and realized that Kansas City would be forced to drastically cut its bus service if it built light rail, so it rejected the plan. Kansas City leaders put another measure on the ballot that voters mercifully rejected.

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If They Only Had a Streetcar

By | | City planning
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Kansas City sold $295 million worth of TIF bonds to revitalize a part of the city known as the Power & Light District. The developer who benefitted from this money says “the development was successful as part of a broader effort to re-energize the city’s downtown.” Unfortunately, tax revenues are less than a third of what was projected, with the result that city taxpayers are having to make up the difference (as if city taxpayers wouldn’t be paying for it anyway).

The city naturally blames the problems on the recession. But recessions happen. Here’s the difference between private developments and government-subsidized developments: If the private developer guesses wrong, only the investors lose. If the government planners guess wrong, every taxpayer in the city or region loses.
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The Wall Street Journal article about this boondoggle doesn’t mention it, but Kansas City wants to spend another $100 million on a two-mile-long streetcar line connecting Power & Light with other parts of downtown Kansas City. No doubt that will fix the problem. While they are at it, how about an aerial tramway, maybe a new sports stadium or two? Just what the city taxpayers need: more places to sink their money.