This is Transit Unplugged.

I'm Paul Comfort.

Welcome to the second part of our series from Kansas City.

Last week we interviewed the KCATA CEO, or the Kansas City Area

Transportation Authority, Chief Executive Officer, Frank White III.

He told us all about the Transit Authority.

Today we speak with Tom Gerend who is Executive Director of the KC Streetcar.

It's a separate organization, but they run in concert with the

Transit Authority and their routes do intersect at a number of places.

The KC Streetcar is a great streetcar program that is in the middle of a major

expansion and Tom tells us all about it.

We start out at their fantastic Union Station.

If you ever go to Kansas City, you've got to visit their Union Station.

Not only is it got a fantastic infrastructure, I mean, they don't

build buildings like this anymore.

This big, grand hall that You know, reminds you of like a palace

of some type, but they've got all kinds of things going on there.

They've got a model train exhibit that is, amazing.

And they have a science museum, an IMAX theater, all kinds of things.

He tells us all about that and the history there.

Then we go outside and get on board his sleek, modern

streetcars, which are fantastic.

we take a ride on them.

He tells us all about the program and the program for expansion and

how the streetcar program works.

And then we get off for lunch at the Streetcar Cafe where he.

Tells us some about his background and his vision for the system going forward.

Hey, if you like what you hear and you want to see it, be sure to watch

our companion video on April's episode of Transit Unplugged TV on YouTube.

We show you behind the scenes of the streetcar and the transit authority.

Plus the blues music, the jazz music, some of the great barbecue at Gates Barbecue,

all the things you'd want to see about Kansas City and what ties it all together,

their public transportation program.

That's on our companion video, which is Transit Unplugged

TV this month on YouTube.

Now, jump on board the streetcar with me as we go inside Union

Station with Tom Gerend.

Alright I'm with Tom Gerend who is executive director of the Kansas

City Streetcar and Tom we're in your fantastic union station.

This place is amazing, isn't it?

It's beautiful.

Tell me about it.

Well, this building is over a hundred years old.

obviously it was formed really our third train station in Kansas City.

The two others were destroyed by fire and flood.

The railroads came together.

over a hundred years ago to form this amazing building.

It operated for decades, providing millions of people

trips across the country.

This was like a central terminus in the

middle of the country, right?

Yeah, one of the biggest train stations in the country, still one

of the biggest I mean, it is phenomenal!

Yeah.

And, hard to believe in the 80s this building went into complete disrepair.

It was vacated, almost demolished, until our regional leadership came

together To fund a bi state tax to preserve and restore this amazing place.

Well that's unusual, a bi state tax.

It's the first time ever in Kansas City.

We've not been able to replicate that model for anything else since that time.

And, it's, the results have been phenomenal.

This place is the front door for our city.

It's the living room.

It's where we celebrate.

it's obviously where we connect, with public transportation and other.

And your streetcars.

And our streetcar.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now we're just walking in this, what's this called, the Grand Hall?

This is the Grand Hall of Union Station.

Yeah, this was the former waiting room for passengers who would be traveling across

the country on dozens of rail lines that fed this station a hundred years ago.

And for our listeners, it's a long Grand Hall.

Picture something like, what is this, a football field long, something like that?

Yeah, it's over a football field.

And there's doors.

All the way down, each of these doors, Tom, you were telling me,

which, you would, that would be your train to go to Cucamonga, wherever.

That would access the platform underneath the station.

We have dozens of platforms under the station, so we could boarding

dozens of trains at a time.

Right underneath the station, each one of these doors would access that

train platform for that destination.

Amazing, and now it's like a big marble, auditorium

almost, and you said all kinds of

It's a cathedral, you know, we use it now to program concerts,

major activity centers, think of the NFL draft, think of parades for World

Series and Super Bowls, we celebrate all of those things right here.

You told me all the NFL players were in here

when you did the parade, this was kind of their waiting area?

Right, this was sort of a waiting area for players and staff,

but we use it in Christmas time, amazing decorations to bring the,

and lights to bring the community out, celebrate, the beautiful Union

Station and, some amazing attractions.

There's also a science center.

There's exhibits, rolling exhibits.

Disney's coming.

We're going to have a Disney exhibit here in a short period of time.

so just really amazing use of this facility that has made, really been, you

know, it's a postcard for Kansas City.

Almost every picture that you see now has this building, centered front

and center and it's for a reason.

So, in addition to an active train station with Amtrak and with your

streetcar, tell us about, like, we just walked through an amazing, trains, they're

not toy trains, what do you call them?

Well, yeah, model trains.

Model trains, yeah.

So there's, like I said, part of the education, there's In the Science Center,

but also up here is just different aspects of our railroading history as a

city and as a region and the role that we played and served in connecting the

country from East to West to really at a point right and now North to South.

right in the middle of the country, so it's cool, the kids love it, but

there's also a lot of things to do, and importantly, it's the jumping off

point really symbolizes how our city was connected to the country, and now it's

a centerpiece into how we're connecting ourselves with streetcar expansion

and transit service within the region.

And you got an IMAX theater here?

We've got an IMAX theater, a planetarium, all sorts of fun stuff for people to do.

So if you come

to Kansas City, you gotta come visit

the Union Station.

First stop.

All right.

So we're at Union Station, which is the terminus, the ending

terminus of your, streetcar, right?

That's correct.

the current location is, the southern terminus of our 2.

2 mile streetcar.

It's also going to be the jumping off point.

For our three and a half mile extension south to the University of Missouri

Kansas City in the Country Club Plaza.

Is that what you just had a groundbreaking on?

No, that's a different project.

Okay, tell me about that.

That's the northern extension which is really taking off from

the River Market on the North End down to Berkeley Riverfront Park.

And amazing things that are happening there with a new women's soccer stadium,

thousands of new residential developments activating along our riverfront.

We had turned our river, our backs to the river for a long time.

We're here at the station talking about the impacts of railroads.

We're also right on the Missouri River.

It's Lewis and Clark.

It's where our city was founded for years.

It was a dumping ground, a literal dumping ground.

We're now activating it with development with beautiful park and trail systems.

And pretty soon in two short years, we're going to have a streetcar

connection right to the riverfront.

and all those great things that are happening on the Northern side.

So together, those projects really bookend each other, extending our

current system north and south.

We'll be growing our system from 2.

2 miles to 6.

5 miles long, and it really will be through the densest, residential

neighborhoods, connecting the largest employment centers in our city, and

really will serve as a spine for a regional transit system that's

multi modal, not just streetcar connecting, bus, paratransit service,

regional services, and obviously Amtrak here right at the station.

All right, Tom, we're outside the amazing Union

Station, and you've got some construction going on right here.

What's happening?

Yes, we do.

So we're at our southern terminus of the downtown starter line,

and we're looking south at our Main Street Extension project.

We're getting ready to actually construct a, crossover here in

the middle of the intersection.

this will be where, the three and a half mile southern extension will be.

connects with our existing 2.

2 mile project over the course of the next number of months.

So this is where we're marching south and this is right where that connection

of the new and the old will be happening right here in front of Union Station.

All right, and so this is where your construction is going on.

Now what's all the rail that's already there?

So this is old streetcar rail that we're pulling out of

the ground as we're building new.

The three and a half mile southern extension is connecting to the old and the

symbolism really is not lost on anybody.

The construction guys in particular, our city was built around streetcar system.

We had over 300 miles of streetcars connecting

development, leading development.

Our city was really built around transportation and transit

and streetcar infrastructure.

And so the fact that we're pulling out infrastructure that's 100 plus

years old, laying new infrastructure that's going to be here for decades

and generations to come, reconnecting ourselves in that very same way, with

the same kind of power is again, not lost on anybody who's been involved.

Really a symbolic and meaningful physical reconnection for our

city and it's happening right here in front of Union Station.

So Tom, we just stopped by.

Stepped on your streetcar.

By the way, this is beautiful.

How old are these cars?

Well, these cars, we've been in operation just about 8 years now.

So these are 8 years old, we have, we started with 4, we now have 6.

We're buying 8 more cars, the same model, CAF Urbos 3, to support the

expansion of the system and really the maintenance and the shortening of our

headways on the existing alignments.

What's your current headways?

So we're running 10 to 12 minutes right now, 7 days a

week, pretty much all day long.

So.

Wow, that's awesome.

Frequency and coverage of hours is really important.

It's a lesson learned and when we started this system, it was

designed and intended to be a real transportation connector for downtown.

This wasn't a novelty, it wasn't nice to have, it was a fundamental

transportation and our ridership and the response from the community has

really demonstrated that to the truth.

So these three cars are, again, CAF Urbos 3.

they're 78 feet long.

they can hold About 220 people, AW3 are fully loaded and running every 10 minutes.

We can carry a lot of people downtown.

We're averaging over 5, 000 passenger trips a day, right now, post COVID

and, continuing to grow year over year.

So some days down here, depending on what's happening downtown, we're

carrying 15 or 18, 000 trips in a single day on a two mile system.

So you can see why we needed more than four cars when we started.

We didn't have sufficient capacity, and now we're extending

the route in both directions.

What's unique about these cars is they're 100 percent low floor.

I see that.

We're at level.

So we have level boarding of the platform.

So roll on, roll off with wheelchairs, bikes, and strollers,

and no steps on board the car.

It's really one of the only cars in North America that's 100 percent low floor.

We're seeing a lot of this technology in terms of the vehicle platforms in

Europe move to all low floor vehicles.

We've been a little bit slower to adapt in the United States, and we're seeing the

benefits, the accessibility benefits of this model and this design of the car, and

so we're all in on, on growing this fleet, we love not just the accessibility, but we

have four doors on each side of the car, so you'll notice some of our platforms are

outside, some are center boarding, so we have four doors on both sides of the car,

and it creates for great, accessibility.

And, great utilization of our space inside the car.

So many of the streetcars in the space are a little bit shorter.

Many of them only have doors in the middle because they have steps on the end.

And in those cases, those work too, but you don't have the same kind

of capacity to get large numbers of people on and off quickly.

like we have here with, with our contribution,

we recently interviewed, Congressman Earl Blumenau.

Yeah.

Who talked about streetcar in Portland.

Yeah.

Is the streetcar movement, is it a movement?

Should I call it that?

Well, I think so.

I think you've seen systems pick up, the lessons learned from Portland,

the importance of street cars, the role they can serve in the

broader transportation, framework.

It's not the solution for every transit problem.

You know, we're the first to say it works very well for what

we were trying to accomplish.

downtown with connectivity, mobility, economic development, it's not the mode

that you would take 30 miles on a commuter express trip, right, you know, or, you

know, a regional light rail line, might serve, or commuter line might serve, but

for urban core, connections and activation and development, we've seen great

benefits with this, and we're growing it, obviously we're tripling the size.

The other thing I would say is we're seeing more and more

of a blurring of the lines.

So what makes streetcars is their street running.

So we're running right now, getting ready to take off running in the middle

of Main Street with mixed traffic.

Yes, but as we plan on our Main Street extension, the vast majority

of that alignment is going to be exclusive lane to transit only.

We'll have access for some parking and for business access.

But it's so it's not fully dedicated like you would see a light rail line,

but it's a majority exclusive guideway.

And so some of the operational characteristics are starting to move more

towards light rail in many instances.

as we think about how do we spread the reach of the system?

How do we go faster?

How do we move more people?

And a lot of that isn't just vehicle technology, it's

the operating environment.

What are we doing in the street?

What are we doing with signal priority?

With shared lanes or dedicated lanes?

and how we're managing the system in the public private way is a big part of that.

Now I noticed when I came on I didn't have to pay anything.

What's the deal with that?

Yeah, so we are a no fare system.

We've been no fare since we opened in 2016.

And we're really, one of the reasons we can do that is we're funded through

a revenue capture district, the transportation development district.

And so we're really fortunate.

We have a long term dedicated revenue stream.

These businesses right outside the windows here are paying a property tax

and a sales tax on their properties and on their transactions that funds some

of our capital costs, but also a hundred percent of our operations and maintenance.

And so what does that mean from a fare standpoint?

It means the more people we push to those businesses, the more those people buy.

Buy from those businesses, and guess what?

The more we collect from sales tax, from those transactions, so it's, it

really is a symbiotic relationship where we remove the barrier to use, we

push people to the system, they go to businesses to support local businesses,

and we collect revenue on the back end.

I like to call it an indirect fare on the economic activity we're stimulating.

So we're charging a fare, but we're charging it through the sale

of goods at local businesses, and that's great for small business.

And it's great for us to make it really easy to ride, we think the fare policy in

our case, because our route is relatively short, right, the elasticity of the

utilization and ridership is great, so if we were to charge a fare we might lose

30 to 40 percent of the ridership because our trips are short, people have choices,

and by allowing people the easy ability to hop on and hop off, guess what, they

take more trips, they stay on longer, they explore downtown, less cars, and one

of the things that's great about this.

What happened is it connects four independent districts that

were all like Union Station.

We're here in the crossroads, but we're going to the downtown

loop and then the city market.

All of those were divided from the other by some sort of physical barrier.

Interstate, a railroad track.

They were independent.

authentic, very interesting districts in their own right, but

we'd be able to unify downtown by connecting those districts together.

So Union Station is connected to downtown, the Crossroads Art District is connected,

and the City Market . And so all of these things that are authentically Kansas City

are now part of the unified experience that people can explore and enjoy.

And it's one of the reasons why our system, we knew and thought we would.

have great utilization and it's been better than we ever anticipated.

What we didn't know is the psychological effect for how our

system would redefine downtown.

Literally, how people experience it, how they engage with it, where they visit.

And we've highlighted all of these uniquely authentic Kansas City items.

Such as a wrap with your football team on it.

Well, that's actually, that's our base, that's our, sorry.

Baseball, yeah.

Excuse me.

That's our soccer team, Sporting Kansas City, so we have, that's the men's team,

and we're wrapping a car as we speak for the women's team with KC Current.

Which is going to be, you're building a stadium, which is

the only women's stadium in America?

That's exactly right.

On the Berkeley Riverfront, KC Current is building the only women's stadium

in the country, purpose-built stadium.

And, We're going to be connecting that with our northern extension of the

riverfront extension project that we just broke ground ground a week ago.

Here's an interesting

question.

Do you let bikes on here?

We let bikes, strollers, wheelchairs, and that's the beauty of this vehicle

platform is it's roll on and roll off.

That's great, man.

And we can carry a lot of people, a lot of wheelchairs, a lot of bikes.

you know, having the capacity to move hundreds of people every few minutes,

depending on our frequency at the time is, has been a great people to move for.

this is the Power and Light District, so behind us is our arena here.

I see that's the T Mobile Center, in the Power and Light District, which

is a bar and restaurant district.

I'm now fully connected, obviously, to, to the downtown experience and everything

that we're doing on the existing project and, obviously on the expansion.

We're getting ready next week, to, actually later this week,

to launch the Big 12 basketball tournaments, the conference basketball

tournaments, which is the big deal.

Streetcar plays an important role connecting people to those venues.

We have teams from all over the country coming in, women's and men's, over the

course of the next two weeks, to enjoy all that Kansas City has to offer.

And, we, we become a big part of that.

Tom, it's amazing.

How long have you been doing streetcars?

Well, it's a good question.

I actually started doing the planning for this downtown route back in 2010 with

the MPO, Mid America Regional Council.

This project took off and I came over in 2014 to spark the launch

of the downtown starter line.

So I've been with the streetcar full time capacity almost 10 years, but

working on it even longer than that.

And, obviously we've got a lot of pieces moving.

The team has grown significantly beyond one, and that's exciting to see.

So you're a proud papa, this is your baby, huh?

It is a little bit, it is.

There's a lot of people, as you know, these things only happen if

everybody's growing in the same direction, and it takes a village, so.

The KCATA, friend Frank White III over there has been instrumental

partners, the City of Kansas City, Missouri has been partners.

And then obviously all of our downtown rate payers who are paying into our

district who voted to say we want a streetcar are the reason that

we're here riding the system today.

Now is the streetcar entirely in

Missouri?

It is, yeah.

Right now, it's all exclusively in Kansas City, Missouri.

south of the river.

We have studies, looking North, that would conceivably connect

into the City of North Kansas City.

We also have East West studies that we're looking at, in partnership with

the X Data that would conceivably look at connecting with KU Med Complex

in Kansas, across the state line.

So, obviously, regional travel patterns don't stop at the city line, state line,

or the county line, and so, connecting the regional opportunities is key.

And then, obviously, if we can't plan to grow All of the system, over

time, inevitably, many of our trips that, that our regional employees

and residents take are crossing those, jurisdiction lines, and so we

gotta be planning for that as well.

All right, Tom, we just stepped off.

Beautiful streetcar, man.

I got to tell you, it's state of the art.

Beautiful.

and I noticed you have catenary wires above.

is the whole thing electric that way?

Like, is it powered like that?

The whole thing is powered

overhead, with overhead catenary.

and OCS.

Car pantograph.

we looked at some options, you know, when we started 10 years ago,

technology on the battery side was still evolving and it wasn't to the point

where we had enough confidence in it.

we really haven't had any issues and frankly, the reliability, you know,

we've got a pretty hilly system.

People don't think of Kansas City necessarily as hilly.

It's hilly.

So we've got a lot of grades.

We also got cold temperatures.

Below zero and over 100 degrees.

So the HVACs, you know, heating, cooling, we put a lot of demands

on these cars and carrying a lot of heavy loads with a lot of passengers.

So, so the overhead power has really, frankly, served us well,

from a reliability standpoint.

And I think as we're forecasting out life cycle costs of these

vehicles, not, we do have some battery capacity there for, certain

circumstances, for short distances.

but they aren't off wire capable, so to speak.

but that saves us significantly in terms of life cycle costs on battery

replacements and maintenance over time.

So they've

worked well for us.

And how did like, how did it work getting your

power company to give you all this

power?

Well, we're paying for it.

Yeah.

So, you know, we're having enough capacity where they have to build

new generators or, you know, we have.

Four, four substations on the downtown alignment, and we had to do some work

to, upgrade their networks, obviously, to feed those, with the appropriate

level of power and reliability.

We wanted to make sure, obviously, if we needed to move, we gotta have

it all the time, and so, they've been a great partner, and again,

we're a big user of theirs now, and, You're a top ten customer!

Yeah, we're a big customer, we're buying a lot of power.

Yeah, better that than diesel fuel.

All right, Tom, so we're here at The Streetcar Grill.

Tell us about where we're at.

So we're at a restaurant called the Streetcar Grill.

It was a former service parking lot, right behind a streetcar stop.

And it's just one of many illustrations of the power of

transportation to To build communities.

So, we were a lot of skeptics around economic development

in streetcar when we started.

And up on the wall is a screen that's not working right

now, but we hope it will be soon.

And what does that screen show us and tell us about how you do that?

It's our streetcar arrival sign.

So, we have developed a third party application where we can

put a program on a fire stick.

And we can program a fire stick to a station stop up and down our route, give

them to businesses, and they can just plug them into TVs and it will automatically

feed real time arrival information for their stop right out their front door.

So their visitors can monitor the schedule, the upcoming, how much

time they have left to get to the station for the next arrival.

And it's worked out great.

And, you know, we've got a restaurant on a former service parking

lot that's doing pretty well.

Yeah, that tells a story, huh?

It's, I think it tells a story, but it's obviously, it's all about

bringing people in jobs back downtown.

It's a big part of why we chose streetcar as the mode, for solving

this transportation problem and to see the energy, the ridership.

the economic, investment, we have, oh, we've had, we've seen over 3 billion

dollars of active development, 40 percent increase in residential density within 3

blocks of the route over the last 8 years.

So, we are growing a neighborhood downtown that's now transit

accessible and connected.

Like, people can live car free or car light if they choose.

It's an option.

Yeah, you were telling me there's a hotel right across the street with no parking.

That's exactly right.

We, we removed parking restrictions down here.

We've got a hotel that was built without incentives.

Incentives, with no parking is part of it, right behind a streetcar

stop connected to everything.

People can come in, they can Uber from the, you know, airport coming down,

whatever, don't need a car to do to pretty much do anything down here.

you're fully connected.

It's part of their pitch now, and their competitive advantage of having

that location right on our route.

Yeah, so it's been the transformation and it's one of the compelling reasons why

the community has embraced growing it.

You know, there's a lot of skepticism and fear.

People wouldn't ride it.

It's too expensive.

Our city's too auto centric.

What we're carrying, some days we're carrying 15, 000 people downtown.

Over half of our city residents have ridden the streetcar in the last year.

People are using it in spades and now they're wanting us to grow the

impact and we get to try to manage that dynamic now of how do we grow

the system intelligently, where it makes sense, and how do we connect

ourselves to all of the other services that the region has to offer.

That's great.

So it's the power of placemaking, isn't it?

Where the streetcar is making a place, making downtown into a place.

It's a place.

It's redefined.

It's our linking of these four districts together.

River Market, Union Station, Downtown Loop, and Crossroads together has really

connected the most authentic, best of Kansas City for people and visitors

and residents to have easy access to.

So we've elevated the best of what our city has to offer.

offer and connected people to it and, it was really in the process of

redefining downtown in many respects.

And you told me that was really what got you into

transportation to start with, right?

That's exactly right.

I started with, on the regional planning front.

I really focused more on community development and, planning through

regional planning commissions and I got into transportation because

of the power of transportation.

I came to Mid America Regional Council here in Kansas City almost

20 years ago to lead the region's long range transportation plan.

And as part of that, I'll focus on transit and moving that forward.

What a great career story, Tom, moving from planning into

really placemaking here in Kansas City.

Yeah, it's not very often you get to plan a project, watch

it come to fruition, support its operation, support its expansion.

So I've been really blessed and humbled to be just a part of something that's

really changed the face of Kansas City and we like to say we're building

a system for future generations, so seeing young kids growing up now.

This is the norm in Kansas City.

That's pretty powerful Amazing opportunity.

So just excited to be here.

That's wonderful.

Well, it's an honor to speak with you today You're doing it

right here in Kansas City, baby.

Well, thanks for coming to Kansas City.

You're welcome back anytime

Hi, this is Tris Hussey editor of the transit unplugged podcast.

And thank you for listening to this episode of transit unplugged with our

guest Tom Gerend of KC Streetcar now coming up next week on the show, we

have something, a little different.

We have a mayor on the show.

In fact, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt.

And he tells us about their new BRT line, their new light rail line and how he's

engaging businesses to make it all happen.

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