That certainly is the number Fox4KC reported. And that number does come from the Streetcar Authority itself.

At over $100 million per mile, Kansas City may have just built the most expensive streetcar system in the country. A quick search online seems to support this (see table below). While this places the KC streetcar extension as the most expensive of 2025, we will only hold that title for a short while. California’s Orange Country streetcar—dubbed the Trolley to Nowhere by our friends at the California Policy Center)—will blow past our cost-per-mile when it opens in 2026.

Randal O’Toole, who authored a Show-Me Institute policy study on various streetcar proposals in Kansas City, told me “the average for streetcars is about $91 million a mile.” Although he added, “Seattle wants to connect two streetcar lines together at a cost of $220 million a mile.” So maybe Orange County’s record will itself be short-lived.

Recall that the streetcar system has done nothing to drive up assessed market value of the properties along the route above that of the county as a whole. It has had no measurable economic impact—despite the continuing and unsubstantiated claims made by streetcar supporters.

At best, we in Kansas City can—for a short while—lay claim to the most expensive system in the country. Yay!

The post “It cost what?” —KC Streetcar Announces Opening of New Extension appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Phase 1: Build the Kansas City Streetcar and make it free to ride.

Phase 2: Spend $25,000 to wrap a streetcar in a Barbie theme:

Kansas City, Missouri, unveiled a Barbie-themed streetcar, dubbed the “Dream Streetcar” earlier this month. The streetcar is decked out in familiar bubblegum-pink wrapping and even rewrites the city’s name as “Kensas City.” A lucky passenger can even choose a seat decked out to resemble characters from the recent Barbie film, like “Stereotypical Barbie, President Barbie, Cowboy Ken, and even Allan.”

Oh, and the whole thing cost taxpayers $25,000.

According to records obtained by KCUR, Kansas City’s NPR affiliate, the hefty public spending is due to the fact that the Dream Streetcar is not actually a sponsored ad for the blockbuster Barbie movie that premiered in July. Instead, it’s a project by the Kansas City Streetcar Authority (KCSA) to increase ridership, even though the streetcar is free to ride.

Phase 3: . . . Profit?

I’m of course kidding about “profit” even being a consideration here—this is government after all—but it is off-putting to see precious taxpayer resources being spent so frivolously. Ridership numbers on the streetcar have no bearing on anything except maybe the egos of city officials. Hit the link, too, for quotes from yours truly and Show-Me Institute alumnus Patrick Tuohey, now at the Better Cities Project.

The post Welcome to “Kensas City”: Barbie-Themed Streetcar Wrap Costs Taxpayers $25,000 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The question: how much over the $34.9 million budgeted for the project could 0.7 miles of rail cost taxpayers? The answer: another $10 million, and possibly more:

“We determined that both of the (contractors) were qualified, the technical proposals were sound, but their costs were above the estimate, and both of their costs were above the budget, significantly so,” KCATA Deputy CEO Dick Jarrold said during a Tuesday presentation to the agency’s Finance Committee. The KCATA is one of four groups heading the riverfront streetcar project, alongside Kansas City, the Kansas City Streetcar Authority and Port Authority of Kansas City. . . .

The Mid-America Regional Council (MARC) has authorized about $9.6 million in additional federal dollars for the riverfront streetcar through the Surface Transportation Block Grant program, and a MARC committee has recommended an additional $1 million in federal Carbon Reduction program grant funds. The programs require local matching funds, which Jarrold said are anticipated from Port KC and the Streetcar Authority in an as-yet undetermined amount. [emphasis mine]

Keep in mind that the estimate for the original plan to extend the streetcar to the riverfront was $22.2 million, meaning the apparent final (?) cost of the line is on course to double that estimate, with or without the local match considered.

Yet, that’s been the track record for this toy train for over a decade now. I wrote here in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and for Forbes in 2014 that the Kansas City streetcar was a profligate and bad idea. And yet, despite the many opportunities to prove naysayers wrong, the streetcar remains a remarkably poor fiscal and policy decision to this day.

The post To Nobody’s Surprise, Riverfront Extension of Kansas City Streetcar Going over Budget appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The proposed route received some tweaks earlier this month, and now is set to run from Natural Bridge Road at Grand Boulevard in north city down Jefferson Avenue past the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) headquarters and the site of the new MLS stadium. This new plan has an estimated price tag of between $600 and $800 million and would be financed primarily through federal funds. However, like the ill-advised KC Streetcar expansion, expanding MetroLink would be a waste.

The first and most obvious problem with the proposal is ridership. The project is touting the ability to connect impoverished areas of North Saint Louis with centers of commerce in places such as downtown and the Central West End. However, project leaders have yet to put out research supporting this claim. Considering that fewer and fewer people are commuting downtown for work, there are reasons to be skeptical of this assertion.

As a longtime Saint Louis sports fan, I understand that MetroLink can be a convenient way to get downtown and avoid the stress and costs of parking. However, building an additional stop and line to service the new MLS stadium is completely unnecessary, considering its proximity to Union Station­­­–it is only 0.2 miles away, or a five-minute walk. Instead of changing lines to access the dedicated stadium stop, soccer fans taking the train downtown would be better off exiting at Union Station and making the short walk over.

As with the KC Streetcar expansion I wrote about in a recent blog post, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a questionable MetroLink expansion comes at the expense of bus systems.  Saint Louis Metro has been forced to cut lines amid staffing shortages, an issue which is predicted to persist into next year. Metro Bus is the primary means of transportation for roughly 22,000 St. Louis commuters, compared to only 4,000 commuters who primarily use MetroLink.

If St. Louis wishes to use federal money to improve public transit, it should improve the bus system and invest in more efficient types of public transportation, like Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Unfortunately, policymakers’ tendency to chase shiny objects will likely leave Saint Louis with a defunct trolley, an oversized light rail system, and thousands of unhappy bus riders.

The post Even with an Updated Route, MetroLink Expansion is a Waste appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Meanwhile, the KC Streetcar Authority has broken ground on a 351 million-dollar expansion, financed by $171 million in federal funds, with the rest coming from a new transportation development district (TDD). This special taxing district will levy a 1% sales tax on areas around Main Street, generating millions in revenue to maintain the streetcar’s “free” admission status.

As Show-Me Institute analysts have argued in the past, the KC Streetcar has failed to generate economic growth and raise property values and does not improve Kansas City’s transit system as a whole. Throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at expanding the streetcar not only continues to grow a poor transit system but also neglects the more valuable bus system. Between 2016 and 2020, buses were the primary form of transportation for about 8,500 commuters in the Kansas City metro area. In contrast, there were only about 250 commuters in the entire metro area who got to work using the streetcar. In addition, the KCATA has an annual operating budget of $57.6 million, which is only about a fifth of what is being spent to expand the streetcar.

Kansas City’s MAX bus system is supposed to be a form of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), but with buses only coming every half hour on two of the three MAX routes, it fails in this respect. These routes need more frequent service, which means more buses and more drivers. Instead of continuing to pour money into an overpriced, ineffective streetcar system, Kansas City should consider diverting funds to its buses, which could be improved at only a fraction of the cost of current streetcar spending.

Politicians like grandiose plans, shiny new objects, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and spending exorbitant amounts of other people’s money. What their constituents need is a bus system that runs effectively so that they can schedule their day properly. Politicians seek the former at the expense of the latter, and it ends up hurting the very people they most often claim to be helping.

The post As Kansas City’s Streetcar Expands, Its Buses Suffer appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

These additional streetcars will be added to the current fleet of four that travels the two-mile loop from Union Station to the River Market. While the fleet currently has four streetcars, only three are usually in use; the remaining streetcar is brought out only during busy occasions. The two streetcars that were just ordered would increase the normal number in use from three to four.

Mike Hurd, the marketing director for the Downtown Council of Kansas City, explained the purchase:

We have so many times of the year that we have big events going and the current rotation of streetcars really is not enough to handle the demand. So being able to add streetcars and still being able to keep the service free is just fantastic.

Hurd’s comments need a correction. While the streetcar may not charge a fee to riders, it is not a free service—it is paid for by taxpayers. Instead of receiving funds from a small user fee, the Kansas City streetcar is funded by special taxing in an area called a transportation development district (TDD). Researchers at the Show-Me Institute have written frequently about these districts, and previously explained how a TDD is created.

The taxing rates within this TDD are not going up to pay for these new streetcars. Instead, the official position is that the KC Streetcar Authority will be using existing funds saved  from previously received TDD income. This raises a question: If the Authority is able to save more than $10 million dollars from this TDD, doesn’t that indicate that the district tax rate is higher than needed to fund normal operations?

Additionally, no data has been released to confirm wait times will be significantly reduced by adding two new streetcars to the fleet. If the goal is to add an extra streetcar to the daily rotation and hold two back for special events, why not test the idea by running the current fleet of four streetcars on a daily basis and measuring the results? It appears Kansas City officials are touting an untested solution to a potentially nonexistent problem, and using taxpayer dollars to bring it to life.

If there really are $10 million dollars in excess funds, maybe the Streetcar Authority should lower the tax rates in the TDD. Instead, residents are being asked to pay for expensive additions to an already expensive scheme. Is that really a good idea?

The post Should Taxpayers Pay $10 Million To Reduce Streetcar Waiting Times? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

What’s really fascinating, though, is that while the vote that created the district is rarely, if ever, criticized by streetcar supporters for the weakness of its mandate, many of those same supporters had already dismissed the larger and more recent vote just hours after the counts were completed. Local blogger Kevin Collison gave some voice to the frustrations of streetcar backers, tweeting that “#KC should do whatever it takes to challenge this anti-streetcar petition, pivotal moment for future of urban core.” He may be referring to the Council’s option to override the public vote’s results. Other supporters, like Jon Stephens of T-Bones handout fame, bemoaned turnout as a symptom of a broken petition system, even though the streetcar owes its existence to the calculatedly miniscule turnout in an election brought about . . . by a petition!

Streetcar supporters say they want Kansas City “left alone” by the state and others so that locals can control the city’s fate. But if that’s the case, I have a few questions for them:

1. Why were 460 votes enough to launch the streetcar project?
2. Why weren’t 30,000 votes enough to circumscribe it?
3. Why should the 13 votes of the Kansas City Council be enough to override those 30,000?

Streetcar supporters would do well for themselves to stop playing games with the public as they pursue this project.

The post Running the Numbers on the KC Streetcar appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Patrick Tuohey discusses KC Streetcar on KCPT’s Ruckus appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Patrick Tuohey discusses the KC Streetcar on KCPT’s Ruckus appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“Streetcars do more than simply improve mobility,” said Donna Mandelbaum, marketing officer for the KC Streetcar. “In Kansas City, the entire community is looking to the Downtown Streetcar to fuel economic growth by promoting development, raising property values, attracting businesses and residents, and helping to redefine our city, streetcars benefit everyone.”

Let’s examine these claims one by one:

• Streetcars do more than simply improve mobility—Actually, streetcars do not improve mobility at all; they certainly do not take cars off the street. They increase congestion and are many times the cost of bus rapid transit.
• In Kansas City, the entire community is looking to the Downtown Streetcar—Recall that the existing streetcar Transportation Development District was approved by a few hundred votes of people within the politically designed district through a mail-in election. Whenever the “entire community” votes on the streetcar, it is defeated.
• Fuel economic growth by promoting development—This is a canard that streetcar aficionados like to push, but there is no research to demonstrate this from anywhere in the world. What really happens, and even the folks in Portland admit this, is that cities lard all sorts of other economic incentives such as TIF and property tax abatements along the streetcar lines, which then drives property development. Even then the claims of economic development are unsupported.
• Raising property values—This is demonstrably untrue. In the streetcar TDD, not only is property value lower than it was in 2012, the recent increase in value is smaller than the increase in all of Jackson County.
• Attracting businesses and residents—As discussed above, claims of a renaissance are spurious. Businesses may move into the streetcar district, but research shows that often they either would have moved there anyway, or that the subsidy only moved the project a short distance from where they would have already developed. As for residents, recent research indicated that Kansas City’s downtown area has seen a 5.3% decline in millennials from 2009 to 2014.
• Helping redefine our city—This is so vague as to be impossible to evaluate. But certainly the high streetcar expenditure as well as subsidies downtown have helped to hollow out the city’s tax base. As a result the city must borrow money to provide basic services.

What Kansas City did was spend $51 million per mile to build a streetcar. It’s neat to ride, and ridership is higher than predicted for now. But then that was true elsewhere before ridership numbers tanked. Voters may decide that spending hundreds of millions more on an expansion is a good idea, but it certainly isn’t because the streetcar is driving development, improving transit, or attracting business and residents.

The post Kansas City Streetcar Failing by Its Own Standards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Crosby Kemper III discusses the KC Streetcar on Ruckus appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

How successful was its launch?

That’s tough to say. On its opening weekend there was at least one train (and communication) breakdown, which caused the police to empty not only that train but the one behind it.

As for ridership, each streetcar is equipped with an automatic passenger counter (APC), which is industry standard. Ridership numbers are knowable daily and by hour. Here is the daily ridership so far, as provided by Kansas City Area Transportation Authority and the Streetcar Authority:

·         Friday: 12,230

·         Saturday: 14,648

·         Sunday: 5,448

·         Monday: 3,945

How many riders should we expect? Well, that itself appears to be a moving target. The Streetcar Authority CEO recently said that the expected ridership is 2,700 per day. But back in late 2014, we were told ridership would be 3,500 per day. That’s a decrease of 25% before it even started running!

These numbers matter, because ridership will be an important consideration if voters are asked to expand the system.

As opening weekend recedes into the past, it is important to make information about the streetcar easily accessible to the public. We at the Show-Me Institute are thrilled that there is a standard method for counting ridership, and we look forward to collecting and reporting those ridership numbers often.

The post Kansas City Streetcar Ridership Numbers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One such claim is on page three, where the “Guide” suggests that the streetcar will:

Develop a transit spine around which existing transit can be more effectively organized.

What’s a transit spine? The term usually refers to bus rapid transit or rail corridors from which bus routes radiate. In a sense, the model works like highways and local streets. A driver takes a local road to the highway, which allows him/her to move quickly across the city, and then transfers to another local road to get to his/her destination. In transit, a resident would take a local bus to a light rail or BRT line, which moves him/her across the city quickly, then he/she would transfer to a local route for his/her destination. Of course, this concept only works if the transit spine: 1) spans a significant area of the city and 2) is significantly faster than local routes. The Downtown Streetcar is neither of those things. Using the streetcar as a transit spine would be like routing local roads to a highway that only went a couple miles and had a 30 mph speed limit and traffic lights.

There are many other examples of questionable claims in the “Guide,” but what perhaps goes unnoticed is the consistent use of unscientific, usually values-laden, urban planning concepts. These include:

• Livable communities. What, one might ask, is an unlivable community? Of course, planners have a definition that fits what they think a community should look like, but it is a subjective concept.
• Strong physical connection. A streetcar is supposed to create this between communities. It is a very soft concept that streetcars are simply defined as achieving. I know of no way this is testable.
• Expanding the cultural environment. Again, a strange concept that is only subject to highly dubious measurement.
• Authentic experience and authentic place. I find it hard to think of what an inauthentic experience or place is. Perhaps the Tokyo Dining Restaurant at Epcot Center? Or maybe the little Potemkin Villages that urban planners call transit-oriented development?

The “Guide” has little to be taken seriously, full of propaganda and values-charged language as it is. Unfortunately, this white noise is the basis of plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on streetcars and urban development subsidies.

The post An Authentic, Sustainable Blog Post That Creates A Strong Physical Connection Between Streetcars And Facts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.