Imagine KC Series to Focus on Sustainable Community Efforts in KC

Over a year ago, KCPT aired a program on what Kansas City would look like in the next couple of decades titled "Imagine KC". The show focused a lot on how our metro area would grow and the need for denser, sustainable communities complemented by mass transit. You can see a clip of that show on the right sidebar of this blog.

It was a lively program featuring an interesting discussion of government officials, community activists, and regular citizens and brought focus to a sorely underdiscussed topic in this community - how will we grow?

I am pleased to see KCPT will be covering the topic in a year-long series beginning this Thursday at 7:30.

Featured areas for the first episode will include looking at the revitalization of downtown Lee's Summit, the new Troost Bus Rapid Transit, and community involvement with projects like "Tulips on Troost." Throughout the series other possible topics could be trails and creating "walkable" communities, transportation in all its forms, using energy efficiency, conservation, urban design and ultimately what citizens can do to affect change in the region.

 KCPT has really done an outstanding job facilitating this discussion, and I hope more and more citizens get a chance to watch, discuss, and demand their elected officials give weight to developing sustainable communities as part of our future growth.

Lewis Diuguid of the Star Calls for More to Be Done for Bikes

Another bit of older news, but a nice column by Kansas City Star columnist Lewis Diuguid on the perils of riding your bike in Kansas City and the need for greater accommodations for bicyclists in our city.

This town and its drivers are not ready to share the road with anyone not wrapped in a ton of glass, plastic and steel. I took quiet Admiral Boulevard to the Paseo and then to Independence Avenue. I got off that busy and dangerous road at Benton Boulevard, taking it south past The Concourse Fountain, where pink water was shooting in the air for breast cancer awareness. St. John Avenue took me home. It was a nicer route for bicyclists.

One day, Kansas Citians will be ready to fully share the road with two-wheelers. But it may take gasoline going to $5 a gallon and more people parking their cars for the economical convenience of biking wherever they need to go.

Forbes Thinks KC is Dangerous Because it Drives Too Much?

Forbes comes out with a lot of lists as a way of bringing attention to its publication in the wake of sagging revenues. Their most recent list is the Most Dangerous Cities in America, and to the ire of the local chamber of commerce, Kansas City ranks high on the list at number three.

Of course, it comes with this caveat.

“There are zones in safe cities that are way off the chart for crime rates, but when you average it across all of the city, it doesn’t look so bad,” says Bruce McIndoe, president of Maryland-Based iJet Intelligent Risk Systems, a risk-assessment firm.

 Which is of course true. If you live in Brookside, I'd say you're probably as safe as if you lived in Plano, Texas (the safest city in America!). In fact, if you lived in the great majority of Kansas City, you're generally safe. Crime, particularly violent crime, is very concentrated in this area. Six percent of the population in the zip code 64130 make up 20 percent of the murders and voluntary manslaughters in the city.

Another interesting point raised by a professor of mine relates to the factors they used.

We used FBI data on the number of violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2009, and Department of Transportation data on the number of traffic fatalities per 100,000 residents in 2008 (the most recent available).

Notice anything about the list? They all tend to be car-centric metro areas. Sure Atlanta, St. Louis and Miami have light rail systems, but they are all still heavily dependent on automobiles. 

It is interesting that Forbes is telling us that what makes a city dangerous is not only the criminals that inhabit a city, but the careless drivers that populate a city, and I applaud them for including that as a criteria. Being a safer city is not just about reducing crime, its about reducing traffic fatalities as well.

Any new light rail campaign should make this part of the campaign - Make Kansas City Safer. Take these careless drivers off the road. Get fewer people driving.

Is High Density Required for Transit in KC?

Human Transit has an interesting post on the relationship between density and transit and pokes holes in some of the fallacies.

Transit does depend on density, but there are three problems with saying that “transit requires high density.”  

    * First, it offers no hope to places that are already built at low densities and unlikely to change.
    * Second, it gives public transit in low-density areas an excuse for descending into a cycle of underinvestment, official neglect, and lazy operations, because after all, nobody expects public transit in low density areas to be any good anyway. 
    * Third, it invites sweeping claims about transit’s viability based on the overall average density of a city, claims that, as we’ll see, make no sense at all.

Of course, we hear this argument all the time when transit is raised here in Kansas City. Transit can be a way to build up density. But since we already have low density, transit won't work here.

I think this is an astute point as well:

The emotions are inevitable: Whenever we talk about urban form, people hear us making judgments about their homes.  I can stand in front of a group of citizens and talk about how a certain kind of development pattern implies certain consequences for transit, and thus for sustainability, and thus for civilization.  As we talk, it may appear that we’re having a thoughtful and educational discussion about good and bad design.  But some people in the audience have chosen to make their homes in the very development pattern that I’m describing, and to those people, I’m saying that their home is good or bad.

If you talk about say a RCP light rail plan and the need for higher density, you will get resistance from Northlanders...even suburbanites for whom the the rail will not even affect. Some of that I'm sure is anti-tax sentiments, but I don't think we should overlook the defensiveness of suburbanites. No one likes being told they are making bad choices, particularly about big things like the choice of where and how to live. Implicit in the arguments for density and transit is a critique of suburban sprawl.

KCPT ran a program last year called "The Next American Dream" about the revitalization of downtown. They advocated for even greater density and urbanization of the metro area. But they were also smart not to criticize suburbanization. They emphasized greater "choice" - urban living for some, suburban living for others. This will be key for any discussion on light rail or higher density plans.

The last point I think is key:

Transit reacts mainly with the density right around its stations.  It is in the nature of transit to serve an area very unevenly, providing a concentrated value around its stops and stations and less value elsewhere.  So what matters for transit is the density right where the transit is, not the aggregate density of the whole urban area.

 What matters not is the density of the Kansas City metro area, or Kansas City proper, or even the imaginary boundaries of the River Market/Crown Center/Plaza corridor. What matters is the density around the transit nodes we select. If you put transit stops at the River Market, in the Financial District, at the Convention Center/Power and Light District/Sprint Center, at the Crossroads, at Crown Center/Union Station, at Westport at the Plaza, at Brookside/UMKC - will there be sufficient densities around those nodes?

Kansas City Seeks Input on Street and Traffic Plans

Just a reminder from Let's Go KC, that the city of Kansas City is seeking public input on its street and traffic plans.

Stop by one of these open houses to voice your opinion, all from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
North Community Center on Monday, Sept. 20.
Tony Aguirre Community Center on Tuesday, Sept. 21.
Gregg/Klice Community Center on Wednesday, Sept. 29.
Line Creek Community Center on Thursday, Sept 30.
Marlborough Community Center on Tuesday, Oct. 5.
Hillcrest Community Center on Thursday, Oct. 7.

The Pitch: KC's Bus Service is Pretty Lousy

The Pitch steps up this week with a pretty decent expose on how the city continues to raid the coffers of the Kansas City Area Transit Authority to the tune of $5.4 million, over one-sixth of the tax revenues generated by the 0.5 percent sales tax that is supposed to be dedicated to public transit.

By any name, it keeps growing. The city's 18.3-percent cut follows a pattern of steady increases. In the 2003-04 fiscal year, the city kept only 4.6 percent of the sales tax....

An accountant by training, Rogers has put together a spreadsheet indicating that the city has withheld $22 million from the ATA during the past eight years.

We keep hearing how Kansas City should not build a light rail because people don't even use the bus system. Well people aren't going to use the bus system if its perpetually underfunded, inconvenient, and doesn't go everywhere riders need it to go.

It also begs the question of whether the KCATA might be better of serving as its own political unit, raising its own funding through a sales tax where it can keep all of its revenues, and being the truly regional authority it needs to be for this to be a healthy metro area.

KC Strip Trolley Doing Okay

This weekend the Star gave an update on how the KC Strip Trolley is doing. This is the privately-run trolley service that runs past certain bars downtown late at night that was subsidized to the tune of $195,000 from public tax dollars, and another $200,000 in secured loans while at the same time the city was cutting ATA service due to lack of funding.

On the one hand, I am glad to get a few more drunk drivers off the road (although people responsible enough to pay $10 for a ride are people that were probably already responsible enough to get a cab or a designated driver). And hey, it is mass transit of sorts.

On the other hand, its public money being handed to a private business-owner to provide a service that is already being served by the private sector (taxi-cabs) at a time when legitimately needed transit services are being cut.

The two biggest benefits of public mass transit are (a) to provide transportation at reasonable costs for those that cannot afford private transportation; and (b) to foster development.

This accomplishes neither of those goals. The service is only late at night, rendering it useless for the majority of people. The fare is $10, not much different from what private transportation would cost. And with such limited ridership hours, there is zero chance of any development spin-off.

So what is being accomplished here?

Meanwhile, the conservative think-tank the Show-Me Institute seems ready to use either the success or failure of this venture as evidence that public transit funding should be cut.

The KC Strip trolley service should prove to be a fairly good market test for trolleys in Missouri’s cities. If it prospers, it will show that such mass transit options do not require lavish public subsidies to survive. However, if it fails to make money, it’s a good indication that people are not terribly interested in riding a trolley system, so we should save our public dollars for more pressing needs.

Now if Show-Me Institute is simply saying there is no need to publicly fund these late-night drunk trolleys for tourists and suburbanites, then they are quite right.

However, I fear some fiscal conservatives will use this argument to be applied to mass transit more generally. See, if it works, that means the private market can better run mass transit! And if it doesn't work, that means there is no market for mass transit! Which of course, is silly. If there were a way to make mass transit profitable, the free market would already be providing this service (as it is for late-night drunks!). It is the absence of a market solution that publicly funded mass transit is needed. Not to mention that this is a very limited service with very limited application and cannot possibly be used to illustrate whether or not mass transit on a wide scale should be publicly funded.