Downtown Circulator: Streetcars? Yes. Light Rail? No!
| By Mark Forsythe The Kansas City Post On a warm Friday afternoon many weeks ago I met some transit activist friends at Willie's. The main topic of discussion was the TIGER grant application that had just been submitted to the Federal Government regarding a downtown streetcar circulator. I emphasize streetcar because the very first few sentences of the grant application brought back bad memories of the ill-fated Citizens Light Rail Advisory Committee that was in my opinion steered toward certain failure. "The streetcar is a shorter version of the light-rail vehicle, but streetcars use the same tracks and electrical power systems as light rail." Kind of... I falter a little on the "same tracks" statement. I would feel more comfortable with a slight modification: "The streetcar is a shorter, lighter version of the light-rail vehicle, and while streetcars use the same gauge tracks and can run on the same electrical power systems as light rail, the roadbed infrastructure requires far less load-bearing capacity." It seems we have some one-trick-ponies involved in every rail project and they're bound and determined that any track laid in Kansas City has to be light-rail ready. I'm all for planning for the future, but until we more than double the density of our urban core I just don't see the need for tunneling down six feet or more to lay concrete infrastructure to support the eventuality of light-rail which may never come. And how is that density going to double? By throwing up some more suburban style two-story entertainment districts? Light rail tracks require massive excavation to lay the foundation to support the heavy vehicles. If the proposed downtown streetcar circulator is planned as a light rail corridor that just happens to have streetcars running on it, we are dooming ourselves to yet another attempt that will inflate costs, cause months of delays, and most likely uncover unforeseen difficulties that lie beneath our city streets. When they ran the new storm sewer down Huntington Road in my neighborhood there was more than one occasion that had contractors scratching their heads over schematics that didn't show an uncovered pipe or tunnel that had been there for close to a century. Fact is, we're not sure what lies under our streets on any given block. Ask Minneapolis about what happens when you run light rail down a major downtown city street. The tangled mess of telecommunications and utility lines buried under their planned light-rail route turned into a multimillion-dollar relocation headache. It costs tens of millions of dollars to move or adjust some of those lines, and just who is expected to foot that bill? The utilities? In the Minnesota case the whole thing ended up in court, costing even more cash and delays. Kansas City probably has an even more complicated network under our streets. Sewer, water and even steam lines won't be cheap to move. I don't think any of these companies will be very enthusiastic if told to move their lines on their own dime. Kansas City's original streetcar routes ran just fine without having a "big dig". Modern streetcars can do the same, but the planners need to be given some constraints. Namely, plan a streetcar system and not a light-rail system. Also, we need to plan a 21st Century streetcar system and not a 19th Century one. And the one-trick light-rail ponies? They need to move aside or move on. |














