Midwest Voices

Yael T. Abouhalkah

The Kansas City Star

Mayor Sly James, other city officials and streetcar enthusiasts are understandably ecstatic today about a judge’s order that upholds creation of the streetcar funding district.

Yes, it’s a potentially positive step for the city and its efforts to improve KC’s pathetic mass transit situation.

But even if voters uphold formation of the transportation funding district - with higher property and sales taxes - two more things still have to happen before streetcars have a remote chance of running down the streets.

• The single most important element would be federal approval for $25 million in U.S. funds to help build the line.

If KC does not get that - and competition is extremely stiff - the streetcar project goes back on the shelf.

• Even with the federal funding, the people of downtown KC would still have to approve higher taxes on themselves and on other downtown property owners. That’s because the local taxes, alone, won’t do the job.

Again, today’s decision is important.

But it’s only one more step toward the goal of getting a reasonable program set up to finance streetcars in KC.

The most essential steps are still to come.

Comments

1. 

   Kent Mueller

   1 year, 1 month ago

   I suspect the most sobering fact is one that I have not seen as yet. What is the estimated cost per rider? Not what the rider will pay in fare, but the cost per ride.

   The numbers should be available. Take the construction cost and amortize them over a reasonable number of years, add ongoing maintenance expence and then add operating expense. Then divide the estimated number of riders into that number.

   I think that number would be very sobering.

   Yael, have you seen that number? I’d like to know what it is.

2. 

   Tom Ryan

   Crossroads, Kansas City

   1 year, 1 month ago

   Here’s a link to the Cincinnati Ohio Streetcar page :-) http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/noncms/projects/streetcar/

3. 

   George Hunsucker

   Northland

   1 year, 1 month ago

   You libs are truly a friggin’ hoot….

   You have a sewage system dumping raw sewage, streets that are a mess, a murder rate that is climbing and all you can think of is a streetcar boondoggle. That is if you can get $25Million of my money to help build it.

   Do libs ever do anything practical???????

4. 

   Jason Bridges

   1 year, 1 month ago

   People are moving back into the cities as the great “American Dream” of a suburban home (with .25 acres of fescue crop that you have to fertilize, water, harvest with a mower twice a week and send the harvest to the landfill) is losing its appeal to the next generation of Americans.

   Kansas City can either adapt to the future or resist it kicking and screaming. We can set policies and priorities that push people further and further out into Johnson County and E Jackson or Clay, or we can embrace change that makes it possible and exciting to move back into the city.

   For all the negative comments towards the Street Car proposal, where are the constructive ideas of how to get people back into the city? How to raise property values so that the tax base goes up, that attendance in the schools goes up, and so that we have the long-term finances to rebuild and maintain the city at a fundamental level? Kay, Kent, George?

   The streetcar project is a drop in the bucket compared to the expenses of maintaining and expanding I-70 and I-435 and I-35 and 71 HWY and etc…. that allow people to live in the suburbs but move into and out of the city each day, making a living from what KC has to offer, but taking the money home to a suburb with a much lower public burden.

   Perhaps as a person living in the city, I should make a clamor about all my federal dollars that go to subsidizing the interstate highway system so that people in the burbs can spend only 30 minutes a day instead of an hour driving into the city for work and back out again…

   But I don’t, because I realize that everybody, “Libs” or conservatives, people who live in the city or the burbs, all pay in and all receive out of our federal, state, and local dollars for transportation. Apparently, George has never gotten any city person’s tax money to pay for the bridge he uses to travel from the northland into the city. Perhaps he’s using a private ferry…

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