Light Headed Rail
by Jack Cashill
On my first day of high school, I walked down to the corner of my block lugging a book bag the size of a steamer trunk and boarded the 22 Orange.
This bus took me about a mile to the Newark trolley/ subway, which I boarded and headed to Newark’s Penn Station. There I got off, hustled up a few flights of stairs to the PATH train, and boarded it.
Twenty minutes later, I got off in lower Manhattan, trudged up some more stairs, scurried along with my fellow lemmings for a few intense blocks of mass jaywalking, clambered down the stairs to the Lexington Avenue IRT, and boarded the Uptown Express—backwards.
Although I would occasionally get seats on the bus, the trolley, and even the PATH, in four years I never once got a seat on a rush hour IRT, not even close.
Twenty minutes after backing on to the subway, I climbed up the stairs at 86th Street, schlepped my bag a few more blocks, and arrived at school one hour and fifteen minutes after I had left home, this on a day when it did not rain or snow, and everything ran perfectly.
Such, as you can imagine, was not always the case.
Back then, I had an excuse for my daily pilgrimage: my mother more or less made me go to this school. But why, I wondered, did so many adults willingly commit their souls to the cold whimsy of public transportation. Did their mothers make them too?
More to the point, why do so many urban planners believe that this is the way adults should be traveling?
So burned out was I by the experience, that when my wife and I left graduate school, I ruled out New York, Chicago, Boston and any other city where I would have to travel in someone else’s vehicle on someone else’s time.
Kansas City made perfect sense. With its excellent roadways—arguably the best in the world—a person could live just about anywhere and get just about any place else easily by car.
And so people have happily homesteaded far flung
towns like Grandview and Gladstone and Peculiar. This amiable sprawl has taken the real estate pressure off pleasant central city neighborhoods like Brookside where I live and can afford to.
In the sundry offices I have worked in since moving to Brookside—Downtown, Fairway, and now Westport—my longest commute has been twelve minutes. My wife’s commute is two minutes. On occasion, we both walk to work. Our carbon footprint is about a size 3 narrow.
Better still, I have been able to time my commute to the nanosecond. Not once on my drive to any of those offices—Downtown especially—did I ever see anything resembling a traffic jam.
Even better, I could easily respond to those inevitable “can you” calls during the workdays. For some, like the “Can you pick up my mother at the airport” kind, I might have wished I had “no car” as an excuse.
But for others, like the “Can you come pick up your ailing child” kind, I’d be in the car before the teacher could put the phone down.
And so for these reasons and more, on August 7, 2001, I joined the great majority of my fellow citizens—60 percent—to vote “NO” on the city’s proposed $2 billion light rail system.
I had other, less personal reasons for opposing light rail like the fact that no one was quite sure where the rails should go.
The natural destination would seem to have been Downtown, and the natural path would seem to have been north from the Plaza. But with so relatively few jobs Downtown—1/10 as many as Downtown Chicago—and so little traffic through midtown, it was unclear exactly what problem light rail would solve.
Then, of course, there was the bottom line. As best as I could figure, for every one dollar a patron would pay to ride light rail, my fellow citizens and I would pay sixteen. Yes, some of that money would come from the state and Federal governments, but the last time I checked,
I pay taxes to them too.
By the way, the plan that the voters rejected was at least professionally done, and we rejected it in something of a landslide. You would have thought that our good thought thinkers would have moved on to other random boondoggles like, say, an aquarium or a “Science City.”
Come to think of it, last I heard, we’ve got a Science City, haven’t we?
No, public transport boosters will never give up. Locally, they are driven by the gnawing anxiety that Kansas City will be somehow unlike every other city in America. Nationally, they are driven by the belief that the internal combustion engine is about as good for the environment as anthrax.
So deep is the auto-phobia among this class writ large that they have fanned the flames of the increasingly dubious “man-made global warming” mania for no better reason than to guilt-trip folks out of their automobiles.
Yet it was not fear of global warming in November 2006 that led 53% of Kansas City voters to approve Clay Chastain’s adventurous gazillion dollar plan to re-imagine the metropolis, the one with the Zoo-to-KCI light rail and the aerial gondolas for Penn Valley Park.
“I think the people liked the specifics of the plan,” Chastain fantasized. “They liked the way it was environmentally friendly. And it had excitement to it. It takes people to places they want to go.”
In fact, most voters learned the “specifics” of the plan only when they went to vote. This being a national election, some portion of those voters had been rounded up for the polls with no civics education beyond a few key names to punch. They voted “YES” on the Chastain plan because no one told them not to.
Local nabobs, who have long indulged such voter round-ups, finally got to see what happens when herded voters are insufficiently programmed. Shocked by the results, they started scheming immediately to make the Chastain plan go away.
A February referendum seems likely—only the un-prodded vote then. Less certain is what Kansas Citians will be voting for and against. If the more determined collectivists on the city council have their way, voters will be forced to choose between the Chastain plan and a less fun one, like the kind that 60% of us rejected just six years ago.
Given my own biases, I don’t care what kind of light rail plans they put on the ballot as long as they leave space for “none of the above.” 
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.