What dementia has seized our fair city? Has an evil genius poured LSD into our drinking water? Have our fabled steaks been hewn from the flanks of mad cows? How else to explain our collective urge to lay useless track on city streets and string ugly wire overhead?

If Mayor Barnes, the City Council and The Kansas City Star have their way, Kansas City voters may very well approve an up front $793 million boondoggle of no discernible benefit to anyone but the people who build it. Over the next 25 years, light rail will soak taxpayers for nearly $2 billion only to increase the market share of public transit in the area by a pitiful 3/100 of 1%-and only then if projections are met? Is there a doctor in the house?

For the record, the system will run from 75th and Bruce Watkins in the South to I-29 and North Oak Trafficway in the North with little jogs across 47th street and 18th streets and a loop around downtown. It will cost Kansas Citians 1/2 cent on every dollar of purchases for the next 25 years, some bit of their income tax, the quality of the air they breathe, the aesthetics of the city they live in, and a few lives to boot. With the possible exception of the 15-year firefighter tax on the same ballot, we are
looking at the flat-out maddest proposal ever to appear on a Kansas City ballot.

Ignoring Assets
Where do I begin? Let's start with what most observers would think of as plusses:

• Kansas City has more freeway miles per capita than any metropolitan area in the world, a stunning 30% more than second place Houston.
• Of all metropolitan areas in America, only greater Buffalo-on its occasional, snowless day-has less road congestion than Kansas City.
• Kansas City is America's least crowded major metropolitan area. Metro Los Angeles, for instance, is 3.5 times more dense, and LA is only half as dense as Metro Paris and 1/10 as dense as Metro Seoul. In other words, Seoul can put 35 people at every rail stop for every one person in KC.
• Kansas Citians have little need of public transportation. Only 1 in 500 trips in the metro are on public transit, a percentage that has been, if anything, in slow decline. The average American urban resident is nine times more likely to take public transit than the average Kansas Citian.
• The fact that only 50,000 area jobs are located downtown eases congestion in an area that is usually a city's most vulnerable. Indeed, of the 2,000 or so trips to and fro downtown that I have taken in rush hour, I have never once been stuck in anything approaching a traffic jam.

Science City on Wheels
There are two prime factors that affect the sanity of rail decisions, population density and-most critically of all-urban core job concentration. Kansas City has neither. As noted, we are the least dense metro in the world, and we have only 1/5 as many jobs downtown as are needed to elevate light rail from debacle to a merely a bad idea. Chicago, for instance, has 500,000 jobs in its urban core. The debate should end right here, but it doesn't.

Despite the demographics, we are poised to build a slow, unseemly, inconvenient, immutable rail system that runs through neighborhoods with little demand for public transit and almost no existing traffic problems before heading to a downtown that is nearly irrelevant.

Why? Well, says The Kansas City Star, "Light rail is important for Kansas City for economic, moral and psychological reasons."

Gosh! Let's start with the economic. According to the city's Central Business Corridor Transit Plan (CBCTP), by year 25 light rail fare revenue will pay only 21% of operating cost-an optimistic estimate-and the system will run a $30 million deficit per annum. Someone has to pay for that-and the last time I checked I had to pay federal income tax as well.

Over the next 20 years, the CBCTP projects fewer than 7,000 new fares a day. To achieve this 14% increase, the city is prepared to nearly double the public transportation budget. Were a CEO to propose such a move in a for-profit environment, his board would fire him before the day was out.

Remember, too, that we will be spending a projected $793 million in capital costs to attract these new fares.

Let's presume that there are half as many people as there are fares. This represents about $230,000 per new rider before we factor in operation costs.

Operating costs, not subsidized by fares, are projected to run nearly $15 million a year to begin with. That equals about $4,350 per new rider per year. Were we to set up an account for each new rider, investing the $230,000 in an ordinary mutual fund and depositing the annual operating cost, we could lease each of them a new BMW 740 for the next 25 years, pay the insurance, and throw in a weekly tank of gas to boot.

In the process, we would actually save lives. The fatality rate per mile on light rail is 77% higher than for truck and auto traffic (and more than twice as high as it is for bus traffic).

Moral Congestion
The Star, in its infinite illogic, offers two "moral" arguments to support light rail. One is to "clean up the environment." The second, the morality of which derives more from Marx than from Moses, is that light rail would be "integrated into a mass transit system that moves people of all economic classes."

Let's start with air quality. (And let's ignore the fact that coal-burning plants must produce the electricity for light rail.) Despite the increase in auto traffic over the last decade, the number of potentially unhealthful air days per year has declined nationwide by 40% and in Kansas City by 22%-now down to 18 such days here per year.

A 14% increase in transit ridership, as projected, would mean that the market share of public transit in the metro would increase from .2% to .23%-a 3/100 of 1% increase-not exactly the "effective transit alternative to auto congestion" of which city planners dream.

But let's say, for instance, that the little TIF zones planned around the rail stops did succeed in building the "desirable densities" that the city plan calls for. Let's say that, in a wild best case scenario, Kansas City achieved the density of a Rome or a Paris. Would our air quality improve?

Hello! Anyone home? Has anyone ever tried to drive in those cities or even breathe? The presence of mass transit scarcely eases the stinking, honking miasma of snarled traffic that comes with increased urban density. Regardless of the transit systems, just about anyone with the option to drive prefers to drive, and the result in Europe is pure cauchemar.

The Devil in the Details
And why wouldn't we want to drive? Here are my choices. I can walk ten or so feet to my car, set the stereo to my music, set the temperature to my taste, set the seat to fit my body, and drive ten stress free minutes from my Brookside home to downtown on any of six different routes-sometimes, dropping my kids off at school on the way.

Or I can walk a block through the elements to Brookside Boulevard, lug my day's work with me, dash across four lanes of traffic, wait for the bus to show, climb on board with a group of people I do not know, and stop every other block on a journey downtown twice as long as a car trip.

Once there, I am trapped. I can not run an errand, stop by my kid's school, or respond to an emergency. In the winter, I get to walk home from the bus stop in the dark, as do the women getting off on Troost or Bruce Watkins Drive, and this variable is not even
factored in to the safety numbers.

But in the new age of light rail, my bus trip will be "integrated into a mass transit system." If this appears "moral" to some, remember the devil always lurks in the details. Does he ever. As the city's transit plan makes clear, "Bus routes would be tailored to facilitate transfers at rail stations to minimize parallel train service." In other words, the Brookside bus would no longer go downtown but would dump me at a light rail station on 47th Street or thereabouts, there to wait up to 12 minutes during peak hours to transfer downtown.

So please, readers, help snap our good citizen friends in the Southwest corridor out of their delirium. Remind them that should they ever choose to take public transit downtown-the idea of which they have always liked better than the reality-they will now have to transfer. You can bet the TV ads won't tell'em.

The views expressed in this column are the writer's own, and not necessarily those of Ingram's Magazine.