Recently, Richard Jarrold hopped on a bus to get from his office in the east Crossroads to an auto shop in Overland Park. The trip took nearly two hours, four times longer than driving a car.
He had to wait for buses at 18th Street and Troost Avenue, at Grand Boulevard and 18th, and once more to catch a bus in Waldo.
“Almost 30 to 40 minutes was waiting for connections,” he said. “We can do better.”
Jarrold should know. He’s the deputy CEO at the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, regularly uses public transportation, and is hardly alone in concluding that the current transit system provides too few rides to too few places to be effective.
It can’t carry loads of people quickly and efficiently around at least five counties, and across a state line. It does not do enough to ease traffic congestion or fight climate change — let alone get people to work, to the store, or to the doctor.
To move people smoothly around the Kansas City area would take more money — probably hundreds of millions of dollars more a year than taxpayers currently contribute to public transportation.
Rounding up that money would mean creating a transit plan that appeals to Northlanders, Wyandotte County residents, outlying suburbanites and downtown-dwellers alike — a plan that gets our balkanized jurisdictions to agree on a uniform funding strategy.
“We can all talk about plans and procedures, but … it’s about investment in these systems,” said Tom Gerend, executive director of the Kansas City Streetcar Authority. “Right now we have a fragmented approach to funding our regional transit system.”
Trouble collaborating
As with other regional projects, public transportation must contend with the particular problems posed by the Missouri-Kansas state line — and the many counties and cities on both sides. Transit funding decisions get handled within each jurisdiction, with little or no coordination between them.
Meanwhile, the “authority” in KCATA does not include the power to levy taxes. Instead, it contracts with area counties and cities, which rely largely on property taxes that they can allocate however they wish. Bus lines in those communities can come or go from year to year depending on how flush their budgets are and whether their investment in public transportation waxes or wanes.
Lately it’s been waning.
The Missouri-side suburbs Gladstone, Raytown, Blue Springs and Grandview all ended their bus contracts in the last 18 months over costs. Their share of running the buses went up as Kansas City balked at what it saw as subsidizing the suburbs too much.
Earlier this year, the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, proposed a budget that cut two bus lines. Independence will slash all but one of the seven bus routes it operates next year and attempt to replace them (as other cities have) with an on-demand service called IRIS.
In 2022, Johnson County ended its contract with KCATA to run transit services on its own. County Commissioner Janee Hanzlick said KCATA provided no strategic approach for the transit system in Johnson County.
“Bringing the operations back under our umbrella,” she said, “allowed us to direct the way that we want to see a transit system work.”
Among these cities and counties, Kansas City is the only one funding its services with sales taxes, which allows it to build a reasonably effective system, compared to its neighbors. But the city is not an island. Its residents may need to get to Gladstone or Overland Park for work. If you live in Bonner Springs and work downtown, good luck. No bus for you.
“The problem,” said David Johnson, immediate past chair of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance, “is that the level of service between KCMO and everything that surrounds it is so starkly different.”
Cost of doing nothing
As the region prepares for World Cup fans in 2026, leaders are scrambling to shore up our transit system, especially for trips to and from the Kansas City International Airport. But more importantly, they’re asking how to build a lasting, robust system so they won’t have to build one on the fly the next time a World Cup-like opportunity comes calling.
Our economy, they say, depends on it.
“We’re competing with cities across the country and the world,” Jarrold said. “(They) have a much higher level of transit.”
We’ve demonstrated before that we can improve the system. In 2001, planners hatched what became the Max, rapid-transit bus lines that run every 15 minutes in high-traffic corridors. They also laid the foundation for the Kansas City Streetcar, which is nearly finished with the $352 million Main Street extension project funded partially with federal dollars and with taxes collected through a transportation development district.
Both of those improvements stemmed from the Mid-America Regional Council’s Smart Moves planning process. The most recent version of that plan, completed in 2017, called for adding eight “fast and frequent” transit lines within five years — routes that provide service at least every 15 minutes. To date, just two of those have been completed. One is slated to be added next year.
To build the system back up, and improve it, the transit community is updating Smart Moves. Once completed, the plan will likely continue its call for more frequent service and more routes.
But there will be an increased emphasis on regional coordination — and an updated price tag. Whatever that cost, transit officials said the region’s current investment of nearly $175 million a year falls far short.
“We’ll have to at least double that,” Johnson said, “to have a meaningful impact.”
Lessons from elsewhere
MARC recently conducted a study comparing our transit system to peer cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Denver and Minneapolis.
Our region placed 12th among 15 in the amount of transit money spent per resident, and in the bottom third for state funding.
Some of those peers will see their investments increase even more: Voters across the country have approved 46 transit ballot measures this year. That includes Columbus, where voters agreed to a half-cent sales tax that will generate $6.25 billion over 25 years and increase service by 50%.
Although the Columbus region is roughly the same size as ours, it has a more uniform approach to funding transit. State law allows the region’s transit authority to put sales tax proposals before voters. It doesn’t have to contend with anything like coordinating our 14 counties, 119 cities and two states.
“We don’t have a centralized system,” Hanzlick said, “which makes it very difficult to have consistency and agreement on service and funding.”
A challenge? Yes. An intractable barrier? Gerend doesn’t think so.
“The state line is an obstacle that needs to be overcome,” he said. “But it’s not impossible. It requires coordination and a shared vision.”
A transit tax for everybody
A shared vision is emerging. In recent years, a number of transit officials have rallied around asking voters to approve a sales tax in at least five counties: Jackson, Clay, Platte, Wyandotte and Johnson.
Martin Rivarola, MARC’s assistant director of transportation and land use, said that the counties could put the question to voters on their own schedules, and not necessarily all at the same time. The new Smart Moves plan, he stressed, will make it possible to build a regional system in stages.
Flexibility aside, a sales tax could face challenges in Kansas, which, unlike Missouri, caps the amount of sales tax jurisdictions can impose. Johnson County, for example, has reached its limit. Although a sales tax for a new courthouse is scheduled to end in 2027, transit could face competition from other needs.
An even larger challenge could loom: winning support from the business community. Johnson believes that support is lacking.
“It’s shameful how the business community has turned its back on transit,” Johnson said. “They’re only paying lip service.”
Joe Reardon, president and CEO of the Greater Kansas City Area Chamber of Commerce, disagrees. He said that building a robust transit system is one of the organization’s top three strategic initiatives to address the challenges many workers have getting to their jobs.
“It’s a key factor in the growth of our region,” he said. “If you develop a compelling plan, then the ability to get it on the ballot is easier.”
Johnson said the community does have a plan: Smart Moves.
Divided and sprawled
The state line creates additional challenges. Hanzlick said the compact that launched the KCATA in 1965 created a board that includes representation from seven counties, including those like Leavenworth that do not invest in the system.
She also argues that the compact fails to address certain critical questions, including setting rules for how to spend money. Addressing them, she said, could help avoid fiascos like the one caused when Kansas City diverted transit funds to purchase new LED streetlights. But amending the compact would require approval from both state legislatures and Congress.
Some say it’s not worth it.
“The payoff just isn’t there,” Johnson said. “At the end of the day, you haven’t solved the funding problem.”
As much as the state line complicates that funding problem, it has little to do with another one the region faces: sprawl.
“The (transit) system was very robust 50-60 years ago,” Jarrold said. “When you think about where everything was, it was all built around downtown. Today, a lot of growth is in areas that never have needed transit … If your job is in Raymore, how do you get there?”
Voters there and in car-dependent suburbs — no matter which side of the state line — will need to be convinced that a strong transit system is key to building a strong community. That may seem like a tall order, but Hanzlick and others believe it’s possible.
A survey MARC conducted in May gives her and others hope. Asked if they “support” or “strongly support” a tax to “expand public transportation options across the region,” respondents in Clay, Cass, Jackson, Platte, Johnson and Wyandotte counties said they did — by margins that approached or exceeded 60%.
“We’re in a better place,” Hanzlick said, “than we’ve ever been.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
