You leave your house at 6:30. Drive to P&R, walk to train station, park and walk to the platform and wait for a train. (typically 5-10 minutes longer than driving to the bus P&R and waiting for a bus that will come almost to your car, less prep time to be in place for a bus). Then you take the train downtown to union station. Now this could be only 35 minutes if everything they do works out perfect. Freight trains and Amtrak are not in the way, they improve the tracks to keep the average speeds up to 40mph or so, have few stops and build a new connection through the eastside to connect to union station (very expensive, would be the first thing cut from budget) vs using the tracks through the east bottoms to the river front area. If any of that stuff is not the case, you are looking at more like 45-60 minutes. Then you have to exit the train and walk to where ever the max buses are be it up on the Main Street Viaduct or at some location near a station in the riverfront area. Then you take a slow and very full max bus that could get you to your final destination in anywhere between 10-20 minutes from the time you step off the train. If you go all the way to the midtown or plaza area, it could be much longer.mean wrote:
That said, I'm wondering why it would have to take an hour or more. That seems like an awful long time when all you're doing is stopping a few times for 30-60 seconds, then transferring to a MAX bus to go downtown.
So if things are perfect, I think you could reach the Federal Building in an hour once you left your Blue Springs home. If things are not perfect it gets longer. That's all. I'm just saying that it would be an hour trip minimum on most days. There are very few days when you will be delayed more than 10-15 minutes on 70 all the way into downtown. 8 years of driving downtown from BS. The stupid scout signs usually say 16 minutes east of little blue. That number rarely goes above 20, even during peak times.
It just seem like a billion dollars would be much better spent on building something that will give the city a true return on its investment. But just like the stadium issue. It just is not going to happen. People will not vote for it. So in the end, you will get a half ass commuter rail system that will be underfunded before it ever opens serving a city that is still one of the only cities left that has not built a central city fixed transit spine and serving a city with a bus system that is 1/4 the size that it should be and again, giving people a new reason to live in Lone Jack and one less reason to live Downtown.
But people will vote for this.
Because it goes to the airport. They will never use it to go to the airport, but damn doesn't that sound like fun to take the choo choo train to the airport.
Waste of money.
Light rail will never happen. So as it goes in KC.
Better than nothing...
They might reach 70mph for about 3 seconds. The rest of the line will be 20-50mph. Unless they build brand new rr corridors. Much of the existing tracks are loaded with curves, track crossing etc.dangerboy wrote: The trains would only average 30-40 mph, at most, in most of the metro area. In addition to freight congestion there are also many at-grade crossings and at-grade rail junctions. Current Amtrak journeys between Union Station and Lee's Summit are 50 minutes. Our existing rail system would need massive investments to allow commuter rail to get up to the theoretical speeds of 70 mph.
I take that back, once away from the metro, they could probably get up to that speed. Some of the lines, like the one that goes along the east side of KC to Grandview? Trains go about 15 in that corridor today and it would take a ton to improve that.
