Crazy Train

Singleton now works out of his home, so he no longer has to worry about a commute. But he has stayed involved in the push for better mass transit in Kansas City because he believes that people are sick of commuting, and he worries about the depletion of the world's oil reserves. "We're not fucking around here," he says. "This is real. We are at the end."

Singleton traveled to Curitiba in 1998, a year after a proposal to build a light-rail line from the River Market to the Country Club Plaza fell apart before it could get on a ballot. The plan, put forward by the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, lacked the support of influential property owners. Then-Mayor Emanuel Cleaver famously dismissed the project as "touristy froufrou."

The mayor's remarks devastated transit advocates. "Cleaver just destroyed all the momentum that had been developed," Singleton says.

The defeat sent Singleton searching for a system that could do more for less money. Enter Curitiba.

A city of 1.8 million people, Curitiba is renowned for its buses. The system functions like an aboveground subway. Riders pay fares in advance and board from tube stations; the buses zip through traffic with the aid of dedicated lanes and priority at traffic signals. An estimated 70 percent of Curitiba's commuters use mass transit. A 2004 U.S. Department of Transportation report calls the system a "model" of bus rapid transit (BRT). A dozen U.S. cities have since started rapid bus lines.

On his visit, Singleton was impressed with the buses and how they seemed to promote activity. Escorted to a TV tower for a bird's-eye view of the city, he noticed that development was denser along the bus routes. "People who say rubber-tire technology does not spur economic development are full of shit," he says.

Smart Moves takes inspiration from Curitiba. Maps of the Smart Moves plan show an orange line joining the airport with Union Station. A blue line runs from Olathe to Independence. A yellow line connects Village West with Bannister Mall.

A regional transit plan has been in the works for 10 years. Mell Henderson, the transportation director at the Mid-America Regional Council, a sponsor of Smart Moves, says planners have tried to balance excitement with practicality or, as he puts it, "interest and tolerance." Proponents of the system seem sensitive to criticism that the plan is not ambitious enough. Promotional materials try to downplay the system's reliance on buses. In the literature, buses become "rapid riders," "local links" and "freeway flyers."

"A lot of people think, 'Oh, buses, hell. That's not very sexy," Singleton says. "Clay Chastain thinks buses are dumb and old-fashioned and not cool. I agree to an extent. But when you're talking about public money, you've got to do value. To me, there's good value because you're spending so much less capital and winding up with a result that's comparable."

The experiment with a Curitiba-style bus system has begun already.

Surrounded by shops, offices, nightclubs and tennis courts, Dick Jarrold is looking at a bolt that attaches a bus shelter to the sidewalk at J.C. Nichols Parkway and 47th Street. "There shouldn't be rust on that," he says.

Otherwise, it's hard for Jarrold, an engineer at the Area Transportation Authority, to find many faults with the Metro Area Express — the MAX. Jarrold worked on the MAX's design; the rapid-transit bus service started in 2005. For nearly 20 hours a day, MAX buses travel between the River Market and Waldo. The system aspires to make bus travel look as inviting as possible. The vehicles have curves and are decked out like spaceships. The shelters are modern-looking, well-lighted and, thanks to global-positioning satellites and computer models, able to tell riders when the next bus is coming with a fair degree of accuracy.

Jarrold and his colleagues were initially concerned with how MAX would be perceived. Would people see it as something new and interesting? Or would they think it was just a bus with a flashier paint scheme? "We felt confident that people who weren't normally riding the bus would jump on it and try it, but we weren't sure," Jarrold says.

Officials at the transit authority began to think about bus rapid transit after voters soundly defeated the agency's light-rail proposal in 2001. (Chastain had proposals on the ballot the previous and following years.) They looked at rapid buses as something that could invigorate transit without having to go to the voters.

The MAX project required $21 million in capital. The federal government provided 80 percent of the funding. Jarrold says the Federal Transit Administration offers more funding to rapid bus projects because they cost less than other options.

From the start of the MAX, people seemed to get it. Surveys conducted last fall indicated that the MAX was drawing "choice" riders — that is, people who weren't poor. Survey respondents also gave the MAX good grades for speed, value and quality.

In Kansas City, the MAX fills a few important holes. First, the maps and updated arrival times at the shelters make it a system that a semi-daring conventioneer could use. Second, the buses run often and late enough for residents to hit the town without worrying about their blood-alcohol level. Jarrold was recently on the Plaza with his wife when he ran into a friend who was using the MAX for what Jarrold calls "entertainment purposes."