Today’s entry in the April Fool’s week of transit follies is a sad story of a light-rail project that threatens to destroy a transit system in spite of the wishes of the transit agency and other urban leaders. In 2006, against the recommendations of the entire Kansas City political establishment, voters approved a measure to build a light-rail line.
In 2005, Kansas City did a wonderful thing: It started a bus-rapid transit system the way bus-rapid transit ought to be done. The transit agency didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars building exclusive bus lanes. It didn’t buy million-dollar buses just to have a semi-futuristic look.
