KCRag Forum

We don't want signal priority, we want OGL enabled downtown so the whole area can be managed as one

We need to speed up leaving Main and slow down turning onto it.

Who cares if it gets a green light at 7th if it has to wait at 14th because the cars turning left onto Truman back up into the through lane because the lights aren't being triggered at Walnut, Grand, Oak quick enough

This is the city market problem. The system needs to not turn a light green at 6th and Walnut/Grand or Indep and Wyandotte heading into the market if there's a crazy long backup on 5th. It needs to dynamically control the light cycles on the circle to clear traffic out and delay the train just a touch until it can flow through better. Adding 10 seconds per stop feels a lot better than adding 5 minutes stuck in traffic.

This must be coordinated with controlling lot ingress and egress. If this means putting lot gates that block exits if the train is close that could help.

So.... what you're saying is this smart city thing could be beneficial after all. /s

Riverite wrote:So.... what you're saying is this smart city thing could be beneficial after all. /s

Not sarcastically, yes, if we think big enough.

One street of changes won't help as we've seen. We need traffic control on 200+ blocks downtown all at once.

This isn't hard to picture. Take a map of downtown, take 200 tiny cars, 30 busses and three trains. Come up with 233 different paths, 233 different sources and 233 destinations and try to move them around the map, all crossing Main, and not block the train when you can't control how cars move on anything except Main.

flyingember wrote:We don't want signal priority, we want OGL enabled downtown so the whole area can be managed as one

We need to speed up leaving Main and slow down turning onto it.

Who cares if it gets a green light at 7th if it has to wait at 14th because the cars turning left onto Truman back up into the through lane because the lights aren't being triggered at Walnut, Grand, Oak quick enough

This is the city market problem. The system needs to not turn a light green at 6th and Walnut/Grand or Indep and Wyandotte heading into the market if there's a crazy long backup on 5th. It needs to dynamically control the light cycles on the circle to clear traffic out and delay the train just a touch until it can flow through better. Adding 10 seconds per stop feels a lot better than adding 5 minutes stuck in traffic.

This must be coordinated with controlling lot ingress and egress. If this means putting lot gates that block exits if the train is close that could help.

This was far more intelligent than what I wrote.

I complain out of love. I just don't want to get to the point where we stop fighting for things to get better. Tons of respect to people like Dave though who work this everyday to make it better.

Honestly, if you live right by a streetcar stop WoodDraw you should be using itsab.us. I too live and work near a stop and I always use it to time my arrival to the station. Rarely wait more than a minute, two tops. But I feel you re: stopping at red lights--it's BS that we could easily solve from what I hear if the powers that be at KCMO were on board (so to speak).

It's hard, there's no doubt about it.
I figure there's several million possible paths across downtown and there's no possible way to manually tune downtown to handle any of them.

Our problems come from trying to do too much manually. The real smart city doesn't care about who someone is or if they're in a car, bus or train, it cares about getting people off the streets. It should be able to see a group of pedestrians well before the intersection and be cycling signals 30 seconds before they get there. It should learn based on schedules and events, like if 100 cars turn into a garage near the Sprint Center on an event night that it needs to be tuning things to have them all cross the street soon

Oh, this is very, very hard, but if the city isn't aiming for this it's not becoming a smart city.

smh wrote:Honestly, if you live right by a streetcar stop WoodDraw you should be using itsab.us. I too live and work near a stop and I always use it to time my arrival to the station. Rarely wait more than a minute, two tops. But I feel you re: stopping at red lights--it's BS that we could easily solve from what I hear if the powers that be at KCMO were on board (so to speak).

This is true and a fair criticism.

I often complain here as a devil's advocate.

WoodDraw wrote:

smh wrote:Honestly, if you live right by a streetcar stop WoodDraw you should be using itsab.us. I too live and work near a stop and I always use it to time my arrival to the station. Rarely wait more than a minute, two tops. But I feel you re: stopping at red lights--it's BS that we could easily solve from what I hear if the powers that be at KCMO were on board (so to speak).

This is true and a fair criticism.

I often complain here as a devil's advocate.

um, i'm gonna call bullshit and say this is a bit more than "devil's advocate":

It's also horribly unreliable.

Have to scratch my head on the "unreliable" comment. I ride the streetcar almost daily multiple times a day typically and live right along the streetcar line. It's been very reliable with very few exceptions. Especially compared to my experiences with other mass transit. I just need it to expand...

I have found the "app" pretty unreliable especially in the past few weeks, but the streetcar schedule has been very regular and frequent which is what really matters to me.

KCtonic wrote:I have found the "app" pretty unreliable especially in the past few weeks, but the streetcar schedule has been very regular and frequent which is what really matters to me.

there is a known issue with the android "KCityPost" app. iOS works fine. you can always track vehicles here: https://itsab.us/tracker/

DaveKCMO wrote:

KCtonic wrote:I have found the "app" pretty unreliable especially in the past few weeks, but the streetcar schedule has been very regular and frequent which is what really matters to me.

there is a known issue with the android "KCityPost" app. iOS works fine. you can always track vehicles here: https://itsab.us/tracker/

Thanks - definitely been using that android app. Forgot about that link and will start using it instead.

I also just need it to expand already. The Troost MAX and Main MAX work fine as commuting option but they're not spurring the kind of redevelopment and density the streetcar extension will bring.

DaveKCMO wrote:

WoodDraw wrote:

smh wrote:Honestly, if you live right by a streetcar stop WoodDraw you should be using itsab.us. I too live and work near a stop and I always use it to time my arrival to the station. Rarely wait more than a minute, two tops. But I feel you re: stopping at red lights--it's BS that we could easily solve from what I hear if the powers that be at KCMO were on board (so to speak).

This is true and a fair criticism.

I often complain here as a devil's advocate.

um, i'm gonna call bullshit and say this is a bit more than "devil's advocate":

It's also horribly unreliable.

That's fair, and I don't think I do a very good job expressing my problems with it. I should probably stop instinctively posting and do a better job of writing out actionable issues. It's a fair criticism.

803 should be back in service soon. have had quite a bit of two-car service lately. frustrating, i know, but the team is doing a great job getting the cars back into service when crashes happen. those two new cars can't get here soon enough!

Will we ever know the responsible party for the last two crashes? Seems that should be made public for the ratepayers to know what is costing us cash.

Not being pushy just wondering the process as we knew the teenage kids crash complete with video within the week.

KCPowercat wrote:Will we ever know the responsible party for the last two crashes? Seems that should be made public for the ratepayers to know what is costing us cash.

Not being pushy just wondering the process as we knew the teenage kids crash complete with video within the week.

make a sunshine act request. i don't even know the deets.

Is there a place to see the financials of the streetcar group

ldai_phs wrote:Is there a place to see the financials of the streetcar group

there's a streetcar section in the city's annual budget: https://data.kcmo.org/Budget/FY-2016-17 ... /jkcu-25gm

DaveKCMO wrote:

ldai_phs wrote:Is there a place to see the financials of the streetcar group

there's a streetcar section in the city's annual budget: https://data.kcmo.org/Budget/FY-2016-17 ... /jkcu-25gm

Spoilers:

four tax sources have have helped fund the streetcar
TDD taxes
Public Transit sales tax
Capital Improvements sales tax
General fund

The fourth one was a tiny percentage of one year and isn't currently being used.
What I didn't expect is two citywide taxes is/has been helping pay for the train

Streetcar released numbers for ridership in November. We can now compare May-Nov for 2016/2017. Basically it is holding steady with total ridership up in 2017 for the same time period compared to 2016.

http://kcstreetcar.org/ridership/