Kansas City’s “NextRail” advisory committee made a very smart move yesterday when it recommended cutting Brookside out of the next streetcar expansion area.
Personally, I would like to see the streetcar system extend through Brookside and at least as far south as 75th Street. And that might happen yet; it will just be well down the road.
As it is, Brookside opposition to extension along or near the beloved Trolley Trail is running extremely high, and that opposition easily could have skewered the overall expansion proposal.
Making 51st Street and Brookside Boulevard the southern terminus accomplishes another big thing: It keeps the expansion focused on utility, that is, moving the people who are most in need of transportation.
With Brookside dangling in the picture frame, the expansion had a — dare I say it? — touristy frou-frou dimension.
Brookside residents don’t need the streetcar like other parts of town need it. Even with colorful, state-of-the-art streetcars running along Main, Brookside and Wornall, most residents along those streets would continue to drive their cars north to the Plaza and Downtown.
It’s a different story, however, in northeast Kansas City and on the east and southeast sides of town. Many residents in those areas don’t have reliable transportation, and they need and deserve a good, convenient way to get to and from work, the Plaza, Crown Center, Union Station and Downtown.
Sure, they can catch the “Belching Blob” – the ATA – but, hell, the bus sucks!
The proposed streetcar “spokes” east along Independence Avenue and Linwood Boulevard will give northeast, east-side and southeast-side residents an opportunity to travel not only in comfort but also in style, at least for parts of their urban journeys.
And don’t those residents deserve that much at this point in American’s transportation evolution? I mean, we Brooksiders and Ward Parkway Corridorites travel first class in our nice cars, so isn’t it about time we provided improved transportation in our less-affluent areas?
Running attractive, efficient streetcars on the East Side would be a boon for the entire city.
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Of course, getting an extensive streetcar system is not as easy as it sounds. First, there’s that business of a one-cent sales tax within the streetcar district, which stretches from State Line Road to I-435, and property-tax increases for homeowners within a third of a mile of a streetcar line.
As many of you know, I helped lead the opposition last fall to the proposed half-cent-sales-tax for medical research, and I focused, among other things, on the regressive nature of the sales tax. By that, I mean that sales taxes take a bigger bite out of people with the lowest incomes.
Voters rejected that proposal by an astounding margin of 86 percent to 14 percent. It probably was the biggest margin of defeat ever for a tax proposal in Kansas City and Jackson County.
The “regressive-tax” argument still holds and will be difficult to overcome. Further complicating the matter is the proposed property-tax hike, which would hit people on either side of Main Street, Independence Avenue and Linwood Boulevard — hardly repositories of wealth and affluence.
On the plus side, the prospect of a modern streetcar system has a lot of inherent appeal, and the vast majority of people who live within a third of a mile would benefit tremendously — directly from improved transportation and indirectly from associated residential, retail and commercial development.
One of the major problems with the medical-research tax was that it was impossible to pitch the program as something that would directly benefit a wide swath of voters. That won’t be the case with a proposed streetcar-expansion tax. The consultants who run the campaign will be armed with a strong, credible sales pitch.
