KCMO Downtown Streetcar

[KCPowercat]

Has publishing the data been finalized yet?

[KCPowercat]

It seems that every piece of technology on this project isn't working right and it's getting frustrating (I think I've said that before) but.....

- Realtime signs not displaying an arrival time consistently
- Realtime signs not accurate (saw one go from 16 minutes to 4 minutes right before my eyes but not before one lady had looked up and just started walking to her destination)
- No consistent way to track where streetcars are (itsab.us is the most consistent but never seems to show every train on the route)
- Smart traffic signals stopping streetcar for ghost traffic
- Pedestrian signals not working consistently, leaving pedestrians confused why they didn't get a walk signal
- Smart kiosks dark
- When smart kiosks are on, they aren't providing anything of value at this point
- Inside streetcar, stop requests not displaying visual/audio feedback (audio maybe fixed now, seems more consistent)

Sorry for the rant just frustrating to see all this technology not working how it was presented...I know it's still early but still GGGRRRRRRRRRRR

[flyingember]

Now take your concerns and realize that much of this tech went in by January and was being tested then.

6 months in some things like the kiosks are further behind so should get more time but anything around timing, status and traffic should have been fixed before the system went operational. There was plenty of time to do this. Several of the street light timing issues have been in play for a decade and were easily identified as a problem area

One example is the realtime sign issues were reported on day one of the trains appearing on the site using a system that is admitted to not work properly. So how does it come as a surprise that work to make it accurate was needed? It took until after operations began to call the vendor on something that was going to be a known issue well before testing began. Basic project management says if you have a known issue to involve your support team early on, not to wait until after you go live hoping it works.

[kboish]

Has anyone seen any information on how Max ridership has been affected by streetcar service?

[hartliss]

For those needing some leisure reading, this was a nice write up about the trams in Paris:

http://transitcenter.org/2016/07/07/par ... yper-cool/

[pash]

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[Eon Blue]

Delaware is the only "good" one-way street in Downtown.

Others, like 11th or 12th would be fine if they incorporated a protected bike lane and bus-only lanes.

The rest lack the traffic and are too wide in their current states to be anything other than high-speed car sewers in their one-way configurations.

[grovester]

Why was it half the cost?

[DaveKCMO]

Why was it half the cost?

funny thing when you do something a lot: you figure out ways to do it faster and cheaper.

it also probably didn't include vehicle acquisition. just a hunch on that one, though.

[grovester]

I would expect better competition, particularly without the "MADE IN AMERICA" requirement. The whole infrastructure is built for that kind of expenditure.

[DaveKCMO]

I would expect better competition, particularly without the "MADE IN AMERICA" requirement. The whole infrastructure is built for that kind of expenditure.

"buy america" definitely drives up a lot of the costs.

[pash]

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[flyingember]

If you convert for currency and Inflation you will notice they may have paid more per train than KC did.

The monthly average of euros to dollars in June 2010 when they picked CAF is close to 0.8
So 1.8 million euros = 2.25 million dollars that year. (We would need to have $2.25 million to get 1.8 million euros) Adjusted for inflation that's $2.44 million in 2014

KC spent $4.5 million per train, give or take. So it's a little under half the cost. 1.8x

With the penalty involved the deal was likely a little better than 1.8x the cost, even if not in pure dollars

[pash]

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[kcjak]

I lived in Besancon for a year (pre-tram) while going to school and just to put things into perspective, the city had one of the most comprehensive bus systems I've ever seen, and this for a city with a population similar to Topeka. Nearly every bus had signal prioritization and at major intersections the buses were removed from the street into dedicated lanes that allowed boarding away from traffic; in many ways the part that is now the tramway performed like a tram or even light rail.

EVERY stop had a covered shelter, route map and timetables - I never waited more than a few minutes on a late-running bus. I haven't seen how they navigate the narrow streets downtown, but am going in October and will take some pics. The pedestrian bridge was never heavy on traffic, already used mostly by pedestrians, and traffic in the center of town was never very bad since the public car parks were on the periphery. I agree with pash - their system was the next step forward for a system that was already utilized heavily both to get residents from the edge of town to downtown and beyond, and to take noisy and pollution-spewing buses out of the heavily populated town center.

[flyingember]

So how did you get from KC paying 1.8 times as much, or equivalently from Besançon paying 55% of what we did, to "they may have paid more per train than KC did"?

I was fixing math as I went and forgot to change one line.

Intriguingly, the changing exchange rate makes a difference. it's at 0.9 Euros to Dollars ordering trains in the US today is closer to the cost of a train purchased in Europe.

If any city in the US buys the stock configuration it would be possible to adjust for inflation and assume 1:1 currency conversion and really see what buy American does to price. I doubt it's really 2x the cost for all companies. Probably has more to do with a lack of companies making a modern tram in the US. There's several companies that have setup shop in recent years.

[phuqueue]

Transportation infrastructure costs in the US are out of control in general. This is a few years old and focused mainly on bigger cities and intercity rail, but still a good article https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... nsit-costs

American taxpayers will shell out many times what their counterparts in developed cities in Europe and Asia would pay. In the case of the Second Avenue line and other new rail infrastructure in New York City, they may have to pay five times as much.

...

The French rail operator SNCF told the California High-Speed Rail Authority that it could cut $30 billion off the project’s $68 billion estimated price tag. San Francisco can barely build underground light rail for the price that Tokyo pays for high-capacity subways. Los Angeles’s planned subway to the sea will be a bit cheaper, but is still very expensive considering the area’s lack of density.

...

Comparing American transit-construction practices with those abroad yields a number of lessons. Spain has the most dynamic tunneling industry in the world and the lowest costs. In 2003, Metro de Madrid Chief Executive Officer Manuel Melis Maynar wrote a list describing the practices he used to design the system’s latest expansion. The don’t-do list, unfortunately, reads like a winning U.S. transit-construction bingo card.

A lot of the problems described here that affect, say, the NYC subway or CA HSR probably don't affect KC's streetcar as badly or at all, but still, that a French city built a system with the same technology as KC's for half the cost is maybe the least surprising thing I've heard.

[pash]

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[flyingember]

I was wrong about one thing. I expected summer heat to slow down use.

Last week's 7k daily average is 2.7x expected number

[DaveKCMO]

real-time arrivals are now displaying on the smart city kiosks: http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/n ... -maps.html