By BRAD COOPER
The Kansas City Star
http://www.kansascity.com/2011/06/22/2968773/kcs-poorly-ranked-transit-system.html
A Washington think tank ranks Kansas City’s transit system among the worst in the country at getting people to jobs.
Part of the blame belongs to our spread-out growth pattern, which has pulled an ever-larger share of jobs to the suburbs — beyond the easy reach of buses.
“We don’t just have a transit problem, we have a job-sprawl problem,” said Ron McLinden, a public transportation advocate with the Transit Action Network in Kansas City.
The recent report by the Brookings Institution ranked the Kansas City area 90th among 100 metro areas based on how well its bus system serves the workforce.
Only 18 percent of jobs here can be reached by transit within 90 minutes, according to the report. The national average is 30 percent.
And only 47 percent of us live within three-quarters of a mile of a bus stop, compared with 69 percent nationwide.
“The challenge in Kansas City is that it is more decentralized than average,” said study co-author Elizabeth Kneebone, who came here last week to talk about the findings.
That challenge is likely to intensify as suburban Johnson County emerges as the area’s job epicenter and people continue moving to the suburbs.
In the Kansas City area, we have been reluctant to put limits on growth at the fringe in order to create the concentrations of people that transit needs to succeed. Although some suburbs are making efforts to concentrate development, many leaders believe it’s practically impossible to change growth patterns.
“As long as you’re going to let the marketplace work, you should let the marketplace work, rather than socially engineer growth boundaries,” said former Overland Park Mayor Ed Eilert, who now leads the Johnson County Commission.
Spread out
Across the metro area you’ll find plenty of far-flung employers that aren’t easily linked with buses: the airport, the Harley-Davidson plant in the Northland, the Corporate Woods office park in Overland Park or the new Environmental Protection Agency site in Lenexa.
About half the jobs here are more than 10 miles outside downtown Kansas City, where it gets tough — and costly — to run buses.
For job-seekers such as Genesha Rounds of Kansas City, the limited suburban service makes it hard to land and keep a job.
Rounds can wait 30 minutes to an hour to catch a bus to the suburbs. Miss a bus or one breaks down, and she’s bound to be late for a job interview.
Further complicating matters, she said, is that some employers have doubts about the reliability of the bus system.
“It’s not like they’ll tell you ‘no’ because you’re on the bus, but you can feel that they’re not as interested in you,” Rounds said.
Although the problem is more pronounced here, similar patterns have developed around the country.
Nearly 95 percent of central-city residents in the top 100 metro areas live in neighborhoods served by buses or rail, the Brookings study said.
But only 60 percent of suburban residents do, and it’s even worse in Kansas City, where 33 percent of suburbanites live close to a bus stop.
It’s a problem that local transit planners would like to solve, but they aren’t the ones planning our communities or giving incentives to businesses. And they don’t make decisions about transit funding. Politicians do.
“It’s clearly beyond the realm of transit agencies to solve,” said Mark Huffer, general manager of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.
“Some of the decisions that were made decades ago are adversely impacting transit today.
“The question is: If growth is going to continue to occur, what’s our policies going forward from here?”
Economic limitations
The answers are difficult, and perhaps politically unpalatable.
Mass transit performs the best in the western and northeastern United States, for several reasons.
Western cities are more likely to impose policies that contain growth at the edges. Natural barriers like mountains, oceans or deserts also help create compact cities.
In the Northeast, many neighborhoods were built with walking and transit in mind long before every family owned a car.
Here? It’s tough without a car.
“I don’t think any of us are sensitive enough to the challenge of low-income folks getting to work,” said Kansas City Councilman Ed Ford.
Last year, planners at the Mid-America Regional Council tried to promote more compact development. They pitched the idea of cities concentrating 40 percent of new development into existing areas.
But some cities resisted because the required policies — like not offering tax incentives on land that had never been developed — would restrict their ability to grow. Area leaders eventually settled on a redevelopment goal of 10 to 20 percent.
Huffer said the area needs to invest more in transit, but that idea also has run into trouble.
There was an effort five years ago to lay the groundwork for a regional tax election for an expanded transit system. Missouri passed the required legislation, but Kansas did not.
More recently, a Johnson County task force recommended raising property taxes or asking the Legislature to authorize a motor-vehicle registration fee to increase funding for mass transit.
The report didn’t get much traction partly because of skepticism about whether bus service is a community priority.
The community’s interest in using buses is “very low,” Eilert said. “All you have to do is look at the numbers.”
But some suburban officials say they can’t ignore public transportation when employers must attract workers from across the area.
“Communities that we compete against are moving in the direction of having more of these transit options,” said Johnson County Commissioner Ed Peterson.
Business recruiters say some large employers have indicated they want transit for workers.
“For the first time, there are questions about transit that have popped up over the last few years,” said Blake Schreck, president of the Lenexa Chamber of Commerce.
But Schreck predicted there would be no sea change until the lack of transit costs Johnson County a deal.
Nor do experts believe that large numbers of people will return to the central city. The answer might be in how suburbs cluster developments that mix retail, offices and housing.
At least a dozen area communities — including Lee’s Summit, Lenexa, Mission, Leawood and Overland Park — are pursuing or have developed those kinds of areas.
Overland Park, for instance, is working on plans to make Metcalf Avenue more conducive to bus service. But the economy has stifled some plans, including redevelopment of a razed mall site in Mission.
“We’re all kind of waiting for the market to come back,” Schreck said.
To reach Brad Cooper, call 816-234-7724 or send e-mail to bcooper@kcstar.com.
Posted on Wed, Jun. 22, 2011 10:53 PM
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