The other day I was driving to work. I was driving alone (already not very green but at least it was an American-made car) as is normal for 80 percent of my car travel.
I ended up following a metro bus making stops in older Independence. I followed them for three or four stops and noticed people got on and off at most of the bus stops. There were about 10 to 12 people on the bus, and all the bus riders were neighbors of mine in central Independence.
I enjoy watching the bus/mass transit debate around the metro area. I personally like Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders’s plan to use the existing rail lines and get more use out of our present infrastructure instead of building a new light rail system where we would need to build new track.
Some guy who lives in Tennessee or Virginia makes regular stops in Kansas City to tell them how to improve the mass-transit system. In effect he is also telling us in Eastern Jackson County what to do. The fact is that someday the whole region will get some sort of rail system and we are part of that region, we will use the system and we need to be part of the ongoing debate.
The folks on the bus last week did not need an out-of-town interloper to tell them it was more economical to use the bus. Why do we need Mr. Clay to tell us how to build a bus/train system?
The feds (that is short for the federal government so I can save space in my article) tell us that the KC metro area does not have enough “population density” to get lots of federal money to help pay for building a better transit system. Please do not tell my neighbors on the bus that there are too few of them to sustain the bus system. They seemed pretty smart to me. Saving money and better use of our tax money turned into transit dollars as buses mean less of the expensive roads built (and rebuilt every few years). It’s better for the environment. And 10 to 12 people on one bus seemed pretty “dense” to me. (Of course, I was all alone in my car so relatively speaking I was the dense one.)
There are some pretty smart people with Mid-America Regional Council and the area bus system, plus Mike Sanders and others (not including Clay what’s his name) who are working on this issue, but why is it that those 10 to 12 people have already figured it out and all the rest of us are driving alone and struggling to create a plan?
