KCRag Forum

Yep, the tolerances on time are so insanely tight. A single block without delays should take 7.5 seconds to clear.

Just a 1 second reduction in delay for every block increases speed by an entire minute round trip. 15% improvements are legitimately very hard. That it's such a hard problem to make these reductions stick is why adding trains is the chosen path. You have the classic catch 22. A successful downtown drives train trips which increases all modes of traffic and delays the train.

The path mentioned, to move to train only, is the only workable path. I'm not talking no car but true train only. No peds, no cars, no busses.

JBmidtown wrote:How hard could it be to throw up a few "no thru traffic" signs between Truman and 6th streets?

Wouldn't do anything. How does the city know who's through traffic or not?

What you do is set it up so that you put a controlled access point in the middle of each block by tearing out the concrete across the street and making a physical gap of some sort and car barriers where the train doesn't go. You pair this with making all cross streets two way. It effectively cuts the block in half so drivers would be local money. you expand sidewalks to take over parking and/or add bike lanes down the turn lane

Once a block has no parking entrances onto it you can demo the remaining concrete, add dedicated bike lanes in the turn lane or such

Not hard. Also not effective. Everyone is stuck to their gps

Was this studied during the original engineering and feasibility study? I mean in traffic street cars are largely despised for this very reason, well before KC started planning here.

WoodDraw wrote:Was this studied during the original engineering and feasibility study? I mean in traffic street cars are largely despised for this very reason, well before KC started planning here.

Take a wild guess why it became street running. If you guessed parking lot access, you guessed right.

flyingember wrote:

WoodDraw wrote:Was this studied during the original engineering and feasibility study? I mean in traffic street cars are largely despised for this very reason, well before KC started planning here.

Take a wild guess why it became street running. If you guessed parking lot access, you guessed right.

Yeah, I was going to say, but I was just wondering if there are any professional studies out there (all due respect to you all ). Getting political and local buy in would be near imopssible without the "but the parking and cars" brigade coming out in force.

there was no formal study of providing the downtown streetcar dedicated right-of-way. there were, of course, studies for light rail (1998 and 2008?) with dedicated ROW in the same corridor. note of caution: the number of at-grade crossings in those previous studies would also have been a challenge and they were focused on grand (although a CBD alignment was never officially advanced).

Any indication of how much property assessments jumped close to the line?

KCPowercat wrote:Any indication of how much property assessments jumped close to the line?

my 2017 market value went up $2,350.

Mine went up like 3%...didn't seem too much.

Mine still has no basis in reality, but I'm fine with that!

Apparently there was a guy threatening a streetcar full of people with a knife last night (First Friday)... it's gonna be stuff like that which will change perception in one fell swoop.

That's not a streetcar thing, that's a guy with a knife at First Friday thing.

Lol, hopefully everyone just laughed at him.

He's probably lucky if they just laughed and he didn't get the shit kicked out of him.

KCPowercat wrote:Lol, hopefully everyone just laughed at him.

This seems like a weird response given what just happened in Portland? WTF? (And now london)

may 2017 ridership exceeds may 2016. new single-day ridership record on 5/6/17.

http://yaelabouhalkah.com/2017/06/kc-st ... ns-surged/

There's a strange global transit etiquette brewing that chastises 'manspreading', spreading your legs that takes up another seat. Is officially banned is some cities.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/manspreading ... 19564.html



Some transit etiquette tips from NYC subway site to take note of when KC streetcar/buses are packed...
http://web.mta.info/nyct/service/CourtesyCounts.htm

I get that it's mostly men that do this, but I'm not very fond of the fairly recent phenomenon of lumping all men together as assholes who do this kind of shit, or "mansplaining" or whatever. I always try to take up the smallest amount of space possible on public transit because it always seemed like the polite thing to do, don't lump me in with some jerk. And don't blame all men when women are doing shit like putting large bags in unoccupied seats rather than their lap or under their seat. "Don't be an inconsiderate ass," should be adequate, we don't need special names for discourteous or unpleasant behaviors that call out particular groups of people, even if statistically those groups are more likely to engage in the behavior. I mean, come on. Rebranding panhandling as "blackasking" is obviously a non-starter, and this really shouldn't be any different. What happened to egalitarianism? Punching up is great in theory, but eventually you get punched back and Donald Trump becomes the fucking president. :/

Does anyone know the details of the 2 new streetcar buy? Does it include options if the riverfront and umkc expansion go through, or do we go back to step 1?

As annoying as these things are to get, it'd be nice to keep the line moving.

I could see including a riverfront line order option and that's about it. It's short enough you're talking maybe one more train. Option cost likely relative to total order size and moving from 2 to 3 trains would provide a similar profit and cost to CAF.

There's no way the authority could include options today on building more trains for UMKC. Why would CAF give a future fixed cost for something that may not be ordered for many years? They have no way of knowing what materials costs will look like then.

The local money aspect of the expansion won't be finalized for almost another year and the match source is unknown. The first chance to make a UMKC line order would be if the August rail item passes.

The city will have more negotiating power by having the money, not on a hypothetical.