Regional Transit Coordination

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GRID
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by GRID »

Karambit25 wrote: Tue Feb 08, 2022 8:42 pm
The north loop is more embarrassing than anything else about downtown. I still don't understand the infatuation with covering 670 over eliminating the north loop. The difference in land savings and connectivity is infinitely better.
No way and it's not even close. By far the most embarrassing thing about downtown kc is just about everything east of Grand and much of the land just south of the North loop. Blocks and blocks of surface parking lots or just empty lots or underutilized buildings.

If you want to play the "if we are going to spend x money" game, I would always say. "Develop the northern and eastern thirds of the loop first". I support the north loop removal, but not sure downtown KC needs more developable land.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by AlkaliAxel »

GRID wrote: Tue Feb 08, 2022 9:32 pm
Why is everything "not if it cost us the north loop project" with you? They literally have nothing in common
Because I don't believe the city would do a massive light rail & north loop project at once even if the funding was different.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by AlkaliAxel »

Karambit25 wrote: Tue Feb 08, 2022 9:07 pm There's no real payoff for capping 670.
I disagree with that. Capping 670 should lead to alot more investment in the Crossroads, especially towards Truman.

And to your earlier point, I think people are harping for 670 cap before north loop simply because I think it's alot more attainable right now, whereas we know state of MO is gonna drag its heels for any big funding.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by Cratedigger »

AlkaliAxel wrote: Tue Feb 08, 2022 10:24 pm
Karambit25 wrote: Tue Feb 08, 2022 9:07 pm There's no real payoff for capping 670.
I disagree with that. Capping 670 should lead to alot more investment in the Crossroads, especially towards Truman.

And to your earlier point, I think people are harping for 670 cap before north loop simply because I think it's alot more attainable right now, whereas we know state of MO is gonna drag its heels for any big funding.
Agreed. There seems to be more momentum in the area and the private investment needed is allegedly there already for a south loop cap
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by alejandro46 »

Gosh, I don't even know where to start here. First, the loop cap is not related to RideKC regional transit. Loop cap funding is still completely up in the air. It would be privately funded. North Loop is also another matter. We are taking specifically the 3/8 transit sales tax renewal, and RideKC's proposal to create a more efficient dedicated funding source from the entireity of the service area.

KC regional transit is not equivilent to Denver. Just as a baseline, in 2019 RTD's OpEx was $755M, KCATA was $114M.

RTD Service Area: 3.08 million people. 2,342 square mile
KCATA: . "Urbanized service area" 678 square miles. Population of 1,519,417 (2019 stats)/

Major issues from RTD are that "transit doesn't go anywhere." "The fare system is too expensive/confusing/rideshare is less." "The train takes too long (aka too many stops)."

https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/3 ... ated-fares

Two of those are mutually exclusive, plus there are funding obligations RTD has to meet. Herein lies the problem. Transit cannot go everywhere you want to go but also have fewer stops.

Fares are too expensive - difficult since RTS is more heavily dependent on fares than KCMO. They built/are building out their network based on a 2004 tax and promised certain things to certain regions and now a few of those areas are pissed bc of lack of service. But, without their funding, the RTD would have trouble making the expansion that it did.
COVID came and wrecked ridership for all. We should study what happend in Denver, SLC and other places with more robust transit to avoid making their mistakes.

Imho, since this thread is about regional transit, if we do want to put a regional vote forward, we need to make sure to not overpromise and underdeliver. We can avoid RTD's mistakes but still have a regional transit system. Accessablity, free and simple. Edit- also, I still think we should build on the streetcar's success and have dedicated center-running streetcar to all counties vote's being requested and helped paid for by their funds. It's popular and successful development tool and I think it'll get votes too.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by AlkaliAxel »

alejandro46 wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 12:25 am Herein lies the problem. Transit cannot go everywhere you want to go but also have fewer stops.
I think the only way it could succeed in KC is to make the train faster or more convenient than the car. Otherwise everyone is just gonna drive.

Part of that is making it get quickly from Point A to Point B. The other half is making it easy in the sense that you don't have to go hunting for a parking spot downtown, you don't have to pay a parking fee, and therefore the train is easier because you just climb on and then walk wherever you want to go, without worrying about car.

So in order for that^ to be achieved, I think you have to go with fewer stops, faster service.

If that can't be done, then I just genuinely don't think there's a need for regional rail and we should just focus all in on urban streetcars.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by kas1 »

The thing about "it's too easy to drive in KC" is that that statement depends entirely on current traffic volume... while KC has tons of highway miles, it doesn't really have an excessive number of lanes leading to downtown, and if you start adding in more jobs downtown then you could quickly reach a point where that capacity is exceeded, and once transportation systems (including highways) reach their breaking point the problems can quickly snowball. Any plan for the future which envisions adding a lot of office space downtown must account for how those extra workers will get there, and local transit service isn't going to make much of a dent in that problem when there are still some 2 million residents who live outside of the core. Once the highways clog up then drivers will switch to surface streets and then those will quickly clog up as well (because the city's street grid is pretty poor leading into downtown) and then it will start to seem really dumb to have spent half a billion dollars on a transit system that's not immune to traffic congestion. By the time you reach that point you at least want to have a project that's shovel-ready.

If KC does tackle regional rail I think it needs to follow the model of the DC Metro where it functions like commuter rail outside of the core and like a subway downtown. KC's downtown is much smaller than DC's and ridership will be lower, so all you really need is one short tunnel with maybe three stations (18th St, 12th St, Independence Ave) which is shared by all of the services. This will drive up cost a bit, but it's important to actually get people to their final destination. Jobs downtown are not centered around Union Station, so dumping all the passengers there is not convenient and it just kills your ridership potential and also drives up costs elsewhere by forcing you to operate more streetcar service to accommodate all the people who need to transfer.

The other important thing is to use electric vehicles. Diesel trains can't compete with electric trains in acceleration/deceleration, and that really bloats travel times for anything other than long-distance travel. I know that battery technology is good enough now that battery-powered trains are a thing which exist, but I've paid no attention to them and don't know if they're a good enough option here in their current state, but that would save a ton of money on electrifying all of the routes. If you install the third rail or catenary just at the station locations then you can charge the vehicles briefly at every stop and also provide most of the power for accelerating out of the station.

There's still the issue of being able to run trains reasonably frequently along all of the existing (privately-owned) rail lines, but I'm assuming that can be resolved one way or another.

If you do your system that way then you have a one-seat service to most downtown jobs with a pretty reasonable total travel time and reasonable cost. It's also a system which can be expanded or upgraded as needed in a piecemeal manner with no constraints on its maximum potential.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by alejandro46 »

We have to be realistic here. A new "subway," isn't the most efficient use of money (unless we're restoring the 8th street tunnel, then you have my attention LOL). We need to expand the streetcar and make the bus more rapid along certain fixed routes or hone it's focus as a safety net system. Again, we should not switch to any kind of commuter rail with a focus on pure point A to point B movement, as it's just not going to win against ease of auto transit and cheap/free parking. Instead, we need to use it to connect neighborhoods for free and drive dense development along select corridors throughout the RideKC metro area. However, when the opportunity cost is a few extra minutes of time and $0 cost, I think the equation really shifts. I think that in order to best service the KC Metro area, we should at least propose streetcar based transit to outlying counties in combination with bus to a votes for regional transit funding. Center running streetcar with synced stoplights out to some suburbs is the solution imo if we want their vote to make the bus usable. We need to make numerous stops to improve connectivity along the line. Will take you where you need to go at a reasonable 50-55mph speed. A train isn't going to need to go much faster anyways and won't have as good potential for development as a streetcar that connects more areas.

This post brought to you by the #KCInterurbangang

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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by normalthings »

The only subway I see making sense is one through the north loop as its decommissioned. Tunnels proposed in Nashville and Austin are $1 billion+ cap ex
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

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alejandro46 wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 11:11 am We have to be realistic here. A new "subway," isn't the most efficient use of money (unless we're restoring the 8th street tunnel...

This post brought to you by the #KCInterurbangang

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Your picture is the also cool but different 9th Street Incline.

Here's the 8th Street Tunnel:
https://kchistory.org/image/8th-street- ... ffset%5D=6
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by alejandro46 »

normalthings wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 11:31 am The only subway I see making sense is one through the north loop as its decommissioned. Tunnels proposed in Nashville and Austin are $1 billion+ cap ex
Even then, it would make more sent to just run BRT/Streetcar along the newly contiguous Independence Avenue ? There is no need to burry rail underground when there would be plenty of space to use our existing rail system in a dedicated lane at a fraction of the cost.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by alejandro46 »

Eon Blue wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 11:45 am
alejandro46 wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 11:11 am We have to be realistic here. A new "subway," isn't the most efficient use of money (unless we're restoring the 8th street tunnel...

This post brought to you by the #KCInterurbangang

Image
Your picture is the also cool but different 9th Street Incline.

Here's the 8th Street Tunnel:
https://kchistory.org/image/8th-street- ... ffset%5D=6
Thanks - I wasn't indicating that was the Tunnel in the picture, I just referneced the tunnel since tunnels were mentiond. I just thought it was a cool picture and worth noting that incline/tunnel was re-construted twice because the grade was too steep. So cool that they named a street after Mr. GIlam, a true mavrick/visionary who arrived at age 24 and convined people to design/construct the incline. Would have been wild to see back in the day.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by kas1 »

normalthings wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 11:31 am The only subway I see making sense is one through the north loop as its decommissioned. Tunnels proposed in Nashville and Austin are $1 billion+ cap ex
The cost for the barebones commuter rail system proposed 10+ years ago was already a billion dollars just for slow one-way rush hour service. Once you're spending that type of money you need to go ahead and spend enough additional money to do the project right. The extra ridership you generate should be enough to lower the total cost per rider.

A tunnel through the north loop trench is a bit better than just going to Union Station but still not ideal. My thinking was that one of the stations on a north-south alignment would be located in the decommissioned trench. Stations cost a lot more to build than the tunnels, and that would really simplify the construction of one of the stations. Utility relocation is another driver of subway construction costs, but that should also be minimized here because of the work done for the streetcar I think? Not sure about that part.

But if you want a high quality transit system then one way or another you need to resolve last-mile connectivity issues and you need to have dedicated ROW at least in the most sensitive areas (ie, downtown). A big streetcar network with no ability to avoid traffic congestion seems like a ticking timebomb.

I guess it's also worth pointing out here that the KC metro is the same size as Nashville and Austin. ~1.5 miles of tunnel is not an unusually large project for an area with 2.2 million people.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by AlkaliAxel »

I disgaree with the above statement though that Union Station wouldn’t work well as a center. You can go to the streetcar and move directions. Granted it would fill the streetcars, but still, we can get more of them. Getting more of them would also help speed up the non-rush hour times of the day too (like future downtown ballgames!)
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by kas1 »

Transfers kill ridership. It's empirically shown that an average person will often choose a one-seat ride over a two-seat ride even when the two-seat ride is a bit quicker, and in this case we're talking about a transfer which is guaranteed to be significantly slower. Taking transit is slow even in the best of circumstances. As you said yourself earlier, people aren't gonna use commuter rail if it takes an eternity to get to their destination. Someone with a car available might take a train that drops them off a block from their office, but you start adding in transfers between different transit modes and they'll lose interest in a hurry.

On the subject of baseball games... if you add tens of thousands of people in cars downtown for an event then your streetcar is going to get stuck in traffic pretty quickly. But if the stadium is at 18th & Vine then there's already grade-separated rail that's literally right there which can go everywhere in the metro. (And if you go with my proposal, then "everywhere" also includes the financial district which is full of people on weekdays immediately before game time who might not really want to walk that far.)
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by Anthony_Hugo98 »

AlkaliAxel wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 1:32 pm I disgaree with the above statement though that Union Station wouldn’t work well as a center. You can go to the streetcar and move directions. Granted it would fill the streetcars, but still, we can get more of them. Getting more of them would also help speed up the non-rush hour times of the day too (like future downtown ballgames!)
We can simply upgrade the vehicle type from CAF as well. I don’t think they’ll retrofit, but if demand creeps up further, I imagine the Authority can order Urbos 5’s instead of 3’s. I’m unsure if the platforms could be extended though…
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by AlkaliAxel »

Bottom line, I just don’t see the need or how it would not fail having rail right now in KC metro. I think the streetcars were the right play.

I think the real transit crisis in the KC metro is getting people from UMKC, Plaza to downtown, Midtown etc. without having to use a car. Make this a city you can get anywhere on foot. We don’t need to worry about people in Leawood who can drive downtown in 20 minutes.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by alejandro46 »

kas1 wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 2:02 pm Transfers kill ridership. It's empirically shown that an average person will often choose a one-seat ride over a two-seat ride even when the two-seat ride is a bit quicker, and in this case we're talking about a transfer which is guaranteed to be significantly slower. Taking transit is slow even in the best of circumstances. As you said yourself earlier, people aren't gonna use commuter rail if it takes an eternity to get to their destination. Someone with a car available might take a train that drops them off a block from their office, but you start adding in transfers between different transit modes and they'll lose interest in a hurry.

On the subject of baseball games... if you add tens of thousands of people in cars downtown for an event then your streetcar is going to get stuck in traffic pretty quickly. But if the stadium is at 18th & Vine then there's already grade-separated rail that's literally right there which can go everywhere in the metro. (And if you go with my proposal, then "everywhere" also includes the financial district which is full of people on weekdays immediately before game time who might not really want to walk that far.)
I really appreciate your comment and it highlights a few issues with our transit system.

Long transfers kill our bus system except those people who absolutely need to get there and have no other alternative.

However, if we have a streetcar transfer (if we ever get there) where the waiting period is near guaranteed to be sub-15 minutes and the cost is still $0, I think we are getting somewhere. Running either a short streetcar line to 18th &V (and making transit only for gamedays) a plan I am not supportive of, would be easier & cheaper than running along heavy rail tracks owned by the uncooperative railroads, the distance is very short. I think it would be better to pedestrianize 18th st. to any new stadium at a faction of the cost & avoid another "stub" line to nowhere. Same with East Village- easy enough to shut down a street for gamedays for pedestrians only to walk to Main streetcar line.

If there is a gameday or major event either at a DT ballpark or even Sprint Center, KCMO should make Main pedestrian & transit only N/S. There is plenty of alternative routes people can drive.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by AlkaliAxel »

I don’t really see what the big deal is with taking a train to Union Station, getting out, and taking the streetcar to a downtown office. Or doing that for a game either. Yet again, I don’t think there’s a need for it yet.
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Re: Regional Transit Coordination

Post by DaveKCMO »

KC doesn't need larger vehicles. It needs more coverage. Sprawling metro with a skeletal system. The trench is a massive investment for little gain. Transfers can work, but most agencies don't design them well or the connecting route isn't frequent enough (see NY subway, which has high frequency and LOTS of transfers on an antiquated jumble of routes). We see a lot of transfer activity in KC when two frequent routes connect (31st & Prospect is one example).
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