SUPER DAVE RIDES AND REVIEWS THE DOWNTOWN KANSAS CITY STREETCAR!!!

Friend of the blog and all around good guy offered this no holds barred review of the Kansas City Downtown Streetcar. It's an honest look at the latest in local transit from an everyday rider, one of those coveted 24 MILLION tourists inside the loop this year . . . His words are important and we're happy he shared his insights with our community. Checkit:

Super Dave: KC Streetcar ... The unaffordable ride.

Since the first announcement of the Downtown Kansas City, MO streetcar, I felt it was a ludicrous project. I got that same ill gut feeling I get with a lot of the projects that I have seen taking place the past 30 years in Kansas City Metro Area, the feeling that it was going to be a huge letdown and only cost taxpayers millions of dollars in the end. To be honest, the only three things I have seen built in Kansas City that have really worked have been the football, baseball stadiums and KCI.

Once upon a time, not only did Johnson County have light rail transportation so did Kansas City. I am sure there are number of people who are reading this who might even remember that or had parents that utilize the system, I know I do. But times changed, families went from having one car only and became two car families. The downtown area as a whole was too small to meet the growing population and the new buildings that were needed to house all the new business coming to Kansas City. The empty space was out in the suburbs not downtown. Shopping centers and strip malls started appearing on the outside fringes of the city’s and no longer was there a real need for what was called public transportation to the downtown area for working or shopping areas - They were now located within your neighborhood. The inner-city light rail streetcar type transportation died in Kansas City solely from lack of use. They lost all their popularity; they were no longer seen as the cool thing to do, while the ground that they were utilizing became more important for cars, parking and whatnot.

There have been those who have been very supportive of the current Kansas City streetcar system as well as those that have been against the idea. I don’t see the need for the system only because I fail to see any justification for the costs the taxpayers are incurring for the services they are receiving. The fact that riding the streetcar is free to all makes it even a dumber idea. Kansas City does not have the tax base or the population to pay for these kinds of extravagances . They are pipe-dreams by politicians who only want to walk through the rest of their lives gloating about some ignorant/useless thing that they had built that somehow has their name attached to it forever.

The opening of the KC Streetcar was greeted as a new amusement park type event. In short, the carnival came to town, but it only brought one ride at a huge cost. This ride wasn’t brought here by a normal carnival operator - speak ill of carnies as much as you want, none of them are really that stupid to invest that kind of money on a one trick pony. People by the thousands flocked from the surrounding area to get their one time free ride on the streetcar. And some may have ridden it more than once I don’t know this to be fact; they may a rode it six times maybe even 10 times. But the fact remains, they only rode it to say they had taken a ride on it and it was free. Sadly the majority of the riders at that point in time while enjoying the ride were not being taken for a ride by their public officials.

If you've been to Kansas City in the past couple years, at one point you've seen hugely publicized charts, numbers, supposed accountings and other Ouija board predictions on just how many people really ride this thing. It’s a failure in my opinion and in my opinion the city will never honestly admit to that. So if one thinks they are going to see publicized numbers from the city proving it’s a failure you’re only kidding yourself and in the need of a huge dose of reality.

As a majority of us know, the mass media in Kansas City has a huge tendency to not always tell the story as it should be told. For whatever reason, I don’t know. I don’t understand but we need to get back to the Stan Kramer type days where the facts were presented and the truth was made known. Back to the days when the beat reporter scrounged the streets looking for the stories, looking for the truth, looking to tell the common man just what was really going on. That’s when the news was really the news.
I remember the days your local radio DJ could honestly talk about things happening in the Kansas City Metro Area. Even those days are gone; DJs today have more fear of being fired for telling the truth than they do for telling a dirty joke. Somewhere along the way the truth became irrelevant and fairytales became the fact.

So since I can’t trust the mass media to tell me truthfully what is going on, I elected myself to take a day go downtown and spend a good portion of my day riding the streetcar off and on and up and down the route. I hadn’t really been downtown for some time, so a day of just more or less bumming around checking things out was in order. This gave me a good excuse to do just that, to see with my own eyes what all the noise was about. Saw quite a few things I hadn’t seen for a while, saw some things I’d never seen, saw some new stuff and old stuff. But what I didn’t see was standing room only on the streetcars. What I didn’t see was getting on board a streetcar and searching for a seat. I never had a problem scooting over a few feet from any doorway to sit down; I never was felt to be crowded because to be honest, if you’re one of nine people which are the most I ever saw in the car with me during the whole day, how are you going to feel crowded. To say the least, I was shocked in fact I was dumbfounded. Where are all these numbers coming from that we’re seeing of all these people that are supposed to be riding the street car? I hate being in the downtown area come rush time, but I thought I would hang around 3 more hours to see if the numbers increased. That’s at the point in time that I shared the car with nine other people, the driver making it 11. I went home that night, my head filled of the thoughts of those liars, I knew it would be like this, this is terrible, this is so unjustifiable and the taxpayers are being raped for millions of dollars in taxes, with the city and those streetcar supporters jumping up and down wanting millions more to make it even longer and bigger and better in whose minds I have no idea.

After considerable thought, I felt to be fair I would waste another six hours of a day, three days later to check out the streetcar area again in the dark no less which is something I do not like to do in downtown Kansas City, and that is be on the streets after dark. I wanted to see for myself if the numbers I saw previously were really the number of riders, or just a fluke. It sure as Sam Hill wasn’t a fluke. I saw more people hanging around the stops, at the beginning and the end areas than I did riding. I don’t know if they were waiting for people, waiting for a bus, waiting for a ride, or just checking out who else was riding. The so-called stops/kiosks that are supposed to have all the information in them are okay I guess if you just didn’t feel creeped out by those standing around looking at you. It’s almost like they knew I didn’t belong there and were questioning why I was there.

A streetcar in Kansas City just can’t ever work, the one we have now in my honest opinion is useless and if they start charging the people to ride it, they’ll be nobody on it. Let’s say you go out to Worlds of Fun, you climb on a tram, you ride the tram over to the front gates of Worlds of Fun, you get off, and you walk through the gates and see nothing. The tram was the whole experience of going to Worlds of Fun.

That’s how I see the streetcar in Kansas City as nothing, it goes nowhere and it serves no purpose. The city market area that was a vibrant happening place back in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s is dead. Farmers don’t bring produce down anymore like to use to, produce isn’t able to be bought like it used to be. But all the surrounding communities have farmer markets that don’t have enough stalls for all those wishing to sell their goods. Kansas City government ruined the city market area and there is no way a streetcar going to it is going to bring it back to life, it’s over, turn off the lights, and close the doors.

The current bus system that Kansas City has in my opinion functions quite well, it also appears they keep the fleet up, modernize it as they can, work with surrounding communities to try to tie all the systems together and can be changed with minimal work to meet the needs of the riders. Once you have a streetcar in place, you don’t just pick up the tracks and move it over a few blocks, or stop going into an area after spending hundreds of millions of dollars because the rider count has fell off.

If Kansas City had kept their old streetcar system in operation still covering the areas that it used to and the Strang line ran from Olathe to downtown like it used to then adding on to those systems could make some sense. Clay Chastain’s dream of light rail here in Kansas City being incorporated with the streetcar is just plain ignorant. It is not a workable solution to solve public transportation problems in Kansas City, honestly the way Kansas City is laid out surrounded by all the independent communities that there are, it is very difficult to tie it all together and unless it can all be tied together it’s not going to work.

Having lived in this area all my life I have watched countless silly dreams and schemes along with developers who have come to Kansas City thinking they know more about us than we do and they have the perfect development idea or business. Stop and think about this for a minute, how many of all the big corporations that have come to Kansas City to set up and do business ended up failing in a few short years. These same companies still operate in other areas of the United States. A few companies that were here 20 or 30 years ago have ventured back into the area to try again, but it’s a known fact if you just pay attention, that what works everywhere else in the United States, does not always work in Kansas City.

Kansas City Metro Area needs to seek out its individuality, become their own area and develop it as the people of Kansas City want to see it. We don’t care what Portland’s doing, any more than we care what Houston is doing or New York. This is Kansas City/Kansas City Metro Area and we want what works best for us and to hell about what works for anybody else. We want our streets in good working order, we want good sanitation systems, we want good clean drinking water, we want top grade medical care, we want the best EMS system in the country along with fire and police protection. We want public schools systems that work and do educate. We went nice shopping areas, we want low crime, we want a good Kansas City building on the things that the Kansas City people want and not built on what everybody else is doing.

But most but not least we want politicians in office who care for what the people need to make life as enjoyable and safe as possible. Not politicians hell bent on taxing the residents to death with stupid, ignorant, projects that in the end don’t better the area at all. If they want to come here and build, let them build it. If it’s such a grand idea let the banks and developers build it. Our local cities need to get out of the developing business and get back into city business.
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