Not long after Kansas City's proposal to add street car lines along Independence Avenue and Linwood Boulevard went down to defeat in Tuesday’s election, Kansas City Mayor Sly James was in front of microphones expressing his disappointment.
The mayor reiterated those concerns the morning after the election. “Things are not going to get better unless we do something different,” he said in an interview with KCUR.
The mayor called the proposed expansion “big and bold.” Perhaps it was too big and bold. Ultimately, James said, it was “unpalatable to our citizenry.”
A recent Brookings Institution Report says the Kansas City Metro is among the ten worst in the country for getting low-income residents to places where the most new jobs are being created. In Kansas, those places are in the suburbs. Proponents of the streetcar expansion hoped that improved east-west transit would give commuters more options for connecting to jobs in Johnson County and north of the Missouri River.
James says busses can't do the work alone. “Putting more busses on the street simply means that busses are less full than they currently are. It doesn’t mean more people will ride them, they’ll just be more spread (out), which is inefficient and costly."
James called Tuesday's defeat a missed opportunity. "I firmly believe that until we expand these types of infrastructure issues to the East Side, the East Side is going to continue to struggle. I don't know how else to say it."
Today, Kansas City, Mo., Kansas City, Kan., Independence and Johnson County each operate their own systems. The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority says the area can not connect employees to jobs in the suburbs unless there is region-wide transit funding.
James agreed. “We have never embraced the concept of regionalism to the full extent we could and should," he said.
Opponents who had organized to defeat the expansion argued that taxes associated with a new "transportation district" were too high and fell disproportionately on the poor.
The starter line currently under construction downtown will continue to be built.
James said the city would come back with another proposal to expand the streetcar service, but he did not say when.
