MARC Transportation Planning — Little Change After Fifteen Years
by Ron McLinden

Fifteen years ago, Kansas City area environmentalists began to get involved in urban sprawl and regional transportation planning issues.

In 1990, the Mid-America Regional Council released an update of the street and highway element of the region’s transportation plan.The plan envisioned spending $1.2 billion for new highways over the next 20 years. Aware of the environmental consequences of urban sprawl, and concerned that updating the highway plan without also updating the transit plan would send the message that highways are more important than transit, environmental leaders spoke out.

Working together as the Environmental Leaders Forum, we expressed our concerns in a letter to MARC’s Total Transportation Policy Committee and the MARC Board. Here’s what we wrote:

Date: May 29, 1990
To:Total Transportation Policy Committee, MARC
From: Environmental Leaders Forum

Subject:MARC 2010 Long Range Transportation Plan (Highway Element)

We are writing to express our concerns about the MARC 2010 Long Range Transportation Plan (Highway Element). Kansas City’s major environmental organizations oppose the plan in its present form, and we ask that MARC not adopt a highway plan until a significantly different alternate plan is prepared for consideration.

In recent national polls as many as three out of four Americans identify themselves as environmentalists.The theme of the recent Earth Day celebration was “Think globally, act locally.”We believe it is time to begin asking that environmental impacts, and global factors as well, be considered as we make major local public decisions.

If we were writing to you only as concerned citizens and taxpayers, we might point out that our nation’s fiscal resources are not unlimited (witness our $3 trillion national debt); that building more roads might be less important than maintaining existing ones; that continued urban sprawl draws life out of the core of the city, reducing property values there and leaving underused infrastructure which must be maintained; that continued urban expansion further widens the physical and social gaps between rich and poor, white and minority.These are only some of the legitimate concerns which we believe many thinking citizens raise about this plan.

As environmentalists we have additional concerns.

• The draft plan assumes continued overwhelming reliance on the automobile for transportation and has the effect of reducing travel mode choices. Regardless of technological improvements in vehicle performance, air pollution and its public health consequences will be greater with an auto-dominant transportation system than with a more balanced system which has strong public transit and which supports non-motorized modes.
• The draft plan assumes continued urban sprawl. One of the consequences is underused or abandoned neighborhoods in the core city: the ultimate urban solid waste. Just as the national strategy for dealing with trash is “reduce, reuse, recycle,” our strategy for dealing with older neighborhoods must be “rebuild, renew, revitalize.”Transportation system policies must work in concert with other public policies toward that end.
• The draft plan calls for building roads over implementing less costly “non-build policy options,” even though its own forecasts anticipate significant traffic congestion in five major corridors in 2010. Preventing such congestion would appear to be a more prudent approach than spending $1 billion to postpone it.
• Transportation infrastructure helps to shape the future form of the city, and city form helps determine how efficient the city will be, both from the public operating budget standpoint, and from the private sector standpoint.The draft plan makes no effort to guide the city into a more efficient form.
• Continued urban sprawl in an automobile-oriented pattern results in loss of farmland, open space, and wildlife habitat. It increases storm runoff and downstream flooding, and degrades surface water quality due to non-point source pollution. It also increases trip distances, thereby reducing travel mode options and increasing vehicle miles and energy consumption.

We ask the Total Transportation Policy Committee to do the following:

• Defer adoption of the highway plan in its present form.
• Direct MARC staff to prepare a new alternate plan which places maximum emphasis on “non-build policy options,” and which makes specific recommendations for local and regional actions to serve person trips on the existing road network, rather than vehicle trips on an expanded network.
• Direct MARC staff to explicitly identify roads projected to have excess capacity in 2010, and to develop policies which could encourage better use of that capacity.
• Direct MARC staff to accelerate preparation of the transit element of the transportation plan.
• Direct MARC staff to prepare a new set of population and employment forecasts based on the assumption that a light rail transit system is built, that new development is attracted to the light rail corridors, and that other public policies to revitalize the core of the city are adopted and implemented.

MARC staff prepared this plan using population and employment forecasts based on continuation of past trends. Trend is not destiny. But a plan based on trend will help assure that past trends continue, and that we will never have a great city.The current “trend” plan can serve as a useful benchmark against which to compare alternate plans.

As a member of the Total Transportation Policy Committee, you hold a position of public trust. Kansas City looks to you for leadership.We ask you to consider the needs of future generations of Kansas Citians, and to ask the MARC staff to devise alternate transportation plans which serve our transportation needs while reducing the direct and indirect negative impacts on the environment of meeting those needs.

Debra Dolly,Thomas Hart Benton Group, Sierra Club
Craig Wolfe, Kanza Group, Sierra Club
Michael R. Miller,MD, Kansas City Chapter, Coalition for the Environment
Wayne Sangster, Greater Kansas City Greens

What has changed in fifteen years? Arguable, not all that much.The above letter could pretty much be written today.

This isn’t to say that MARC has just sat on its hands. On the contrary, MARC has taken some positive steps toward making the region better suited to modes other than the automobile. MARC’s “Urban Core Growth Strategy Report,” the “Perimeter Transportation Needs Assessment,” the “Creating Quality Places” initiative, and the current “Smart Moves” transit concept are all steps in the right direction.

Today, Kansas Citians can point with pride to a revitalizing central city—and perhaps that has resulted in part from the seed of the possibility of “urban core growth” that was planted over a decade ago. Still, the region continues to expand outward and regional population density continues to decline.The region’s transit system can’t keep up, and daily ridership has declined from nearly 65,000 in 1990 to about 45,000 today. Highway congestion, while still less than in most other American cities, is still part of the daily commute of hundreds of thousands of local motorists.

For all the things it has tried to do right, MARC is still little more than a project approval mechanism for street and highway projects. Virtually any highway “improvement” that a city or county or state highway agency wants to propose will be approved and put on the region’s five-year construction schedule, the TIP or Transportation Improvement Program.

And in spite of our plea fifteen years ago that MARC do two forecasts of population and employment as the basis for two alternate visions of a regional transportation future—and in spite of MARC’s own stated intentions to do so—this latest update is once again based on a forecast that has to be characterized as mostly a trend forecast.

This time around, the transit element is as large as the entire highway element was in 1990, and the total price tag is on the order of $15 billion or more.The catch is, the highway element is pretty much fully funded, while the transit element is contingent on approval of a regional transit tax that is still involved in a long and painful birthing process.

MARC is now accepting comments on the latest update of its long-range transportation plan.The plan is available for download on their website (www.marc.org). Comments will be accepted through late August, either by email or in writing, or at one of several public meetings to be held in August.

We encourage you to take a look at the plan, and to express your own thoughts and concerns.

There’s an added bonus this year. Every three years the US Department of Transportation reviews the work of each regional planning organization such as MARC in a process called a “recertification review.”This year’s review takes place in August, and a public meeting to take comments on MARC’s processes is tentatively scheduled for the evening of Thursday, August 25, at MARC’s offices at 600 Broadway in downtown Kansas City.

As the date approaches, check our website for our comments from previous years and our current assessment.