Nickeled- and-Dimed

As McDowell explained at the meeting and in a follow-up phone call, the Transit Alliance worked with business leaders on a plan to build a short route from Union Station to Bartle Hall. The best way to pay for it, they figured, was a TDD.

But the idea was scrapped. Why? McDowell says a TDD around Bartle Hall would have made Kansas City's already high taxes on food and lodging even more forbidding. "While we were trying to attract people with the streetcar project, we would be kind of pushing them off by the costs," McDowell told me.

So Kansas City stayed transit-poor.

But, hey, we get to play host to badge-wearing evangelicals when they're not meeting in Louisville.