Officials to present plan to unify KC area’s splintered transit system

Sheila Styron and her guide dog, Gretch, get around town by bus. That can be a challenge for anyone, disabled or not.

“I currently plan my life around what public transit exists in Kansas City,” she said, “and it’s limited.”

Getting from her home in Brookside to her job in Midtown on The Metro — hey, that’s a snap, says Styron, public policy specialist with The Whole Person, a disability rights organization.

But when her doctor moved his office to Johnson County, she had to change physicians. Because The Metro doesn’t run in Johnson County and The Jo is primarily a commuter service with few midday runs, a doctor’s appointment could have eaten up an entire day.

You can understand then why Styron and many other transit users long for a seamless, convenient, areawide system of buses or some combination of buses and rail.

That in fact was the idea behind forming the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority nearly a half century ago. The goal, according to a 1969 editorial in The Star, was to create “a single, cohesive public transportation system with coordinated routes and one basic fare structure.”

Yet not only did that fail to happen, the patchwork system has grown ever more frayed.

Today, no fewer than five transit agencies operate in the Kansas City area: the recently created Kansas City streetcar authority and four bus systems run by Independence, Johnson County and both Kansas Citys.

They don’t necessarily coordinate at all times, and their fare structures may differ. It’s a frustrating, inefficient mess that needs to change, says ATA chairman Robbie Makinen.

“The ATA needs to be the regional transit authority it was meant to be,” he said.

On Wednesday, he and another member of the ATA board, Johnson County Commissioner Steve Klika, will present their plan for making that happen at an event put on by the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance.

It will be a coming-out party of sorts for an idea that Klika and Makinen have been pushing behind the scenes for more than a year in meetings with elected officials and staffers.

Some were wary at first. After all, Independence, Kansas City, Kan., and Johnson County all broke away from the ATA over the years.

But Makinen says the private discussions became cordial when he explained that the point is not for the ATA to take over those other agencies. Instead, the ATA would serve as a coordinating agency, saving everybody money with economies of scale while making the transit system more user friendly.

Still, it’s all very preliminary, and if it happens, it’s not going to happen overnight.

The toughest nut: reworking the bistate compact to change the composition of the ATA’s board and possibly allow a metrowide transit tax. That could take years, as it would involve actions by the Kansas and Missouri legislatures and an act of Congress.

But some coordination could begin even without any of that legal action.

“If they can expand what they do,” said Janet Rogers at the Transit Action Network, “it should make them a bigger, better organization for the region.”

In 1969, with aid from the federal government, the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority bought the private bus companies serving seven area counties.

But high hopes for a unified transit system were doomed from the start.

Although the bistate compact gives the ATA broad authority to provide public transit services, it’s missing a key component: a source of funds.

Federal and state funding pay part of the cost. Fares do too. But it’s up to the various jurisdictions in the seven counties to come up with the rest.

Yet Kansas City alone has a dedicated source of funds to run The Metro bus system: two transit sales taxes approved by voters. Everyone else must draw the money from general revenue, which explains why there are now four bus systems and no regular bus service in some cities.

Some cooperative efforts do exist. The ATA runs the metrowide call center. When ordering new buses, Johnson County and the ATA combine their orders to get a better deal.

But Klika, the ATA board member representing Johnson County, says greater savings might be achieved by combining some administrative functions and making joint purchases on fuel, for instance.

Long term, he said, the effort could lead to the unified transit system envisioned in the 1960s.

Ideally, Klika said, that would be achieved by modifying the bistate compact so there is at least the possibility for a metrowide transit tax to replace the hodgepodge of funding sources now.

But until then, cost savings, better service and improved public perception could be achieved, he said.

“Maybe we ought to think about remaking the ATA,” Klika and Makinen concluded last year, and so that’s what they’re out to do.

“ATA’s role,” Klika said, “is supposed to be regional.”

Now comes the tough job of selling that idea to the region it’s supposed to serve.