1. Frank Weatherford noted that any discussion of effective transportation systems must focus on the need to integrate their elements. | 2. David Warm drove home the need to increase population density along key corridors.



The Return of Light Rail

Kite Singleton, the chair of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance, shed some light on Kansas City’s transport history. “Why did we give it up?” Singleton asked of the city’s trolley lines, which remained viable into the 1950s. “We gave it up, I think, in great part because we were becoming enamored with the car.” The car, he argued, has since become a whole lot less convenient as traffic congestion has increased, and people, especially young people, are thus less enamored of it.

“When you think about public transit, the important thing isn’t to look backwards, it’s to look forward,” said David Warm. He noted that there are two potential reasons to implement a modern transit system, one of which is to alleviate congestion. The other is to permit denser forms of activity along key identified corridors that are part of a development strategy.

In this region, congestion is not the issue, for the most part, but there are indicators it’s increasing. The bigger goal here is “to implement a high-speed, high-capacity modern public transit that is tied to very clear strategies to increase density along particular corridors.” Warm sees this as a way of getting ahead of demographic trends. He pointed to Denver, Houston, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and Sacramento as models of how to use transit as an organizing principle for a different kind of land use and economic development.

“It’s an integrated system,” said Frank Weatherford. “When you talk about transit in KC, it’s not streetcar, it’s not light rail, it’s not commuter rail, it’s not buses, it’s not BRT. It’s the integrated system that we’re trying to do.”

Kitty McCoy agreed. McCoy, the executive director of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance, observed that the public tends to think that light rail would replace buses. “That’s not what the plan looks like at all,” she said. “We’re not giving up one for the other. They’re not mutually exclusive. They have to work together.”

Jim Harpool, director of development with MD Management, acknowledged that one of the hard parts about selling a transportation system is convincing people that density will come with that system. Harpool has spent time in Portland and Dallas and other cities and has had the opportunity to see how predictably density does indeed follow implementation of a modern transit system. In fact, he does not know an American city where it hasn’t occurred.