Johnson County’s beleaguered transit system may finally get new life

Robin Young is the mother of two children in a one-car household. When her husband drives off to work at the Great Wolf Lodge, in western Wyandotte County, the rest of the family depends on public transportation.

If the Youngs lived in Kansas City, Missouri, getting around would be a little more practical, owing to its sprawling bus network. But they live in Johnson County, where per-capita car ownership is higher — and where public transportation has long underserved residents.

Over the years, however, Robin Young’s two kids have relied on Johnson County’s public-transit system (the Jo).

When Cody Martin, the younger son, attended Johnson County Community College last year, he needed to travel about 11 miles to get there from the family’s house, near Pflumm and Shawnee Mission Parkway. If he’d had access to a car, the commute would have been a 15-minute drive on Interstate 435. Instead, he relied on one of the Jo’s longstanding bus routes: At an IHOP parking lot, he got on a bus that went to downtown Kansas City, Missouri — where he hopped on another bus that took him to JCCC. The detour stretched his midafternoon commute to about two hours.

This is life on the Jo.

“If you’re in Johnson County, why go clear to Missouri to transfer to another bus to take them back to Johnson County?” Robin Young wonders.

The answer lies in the primary reason for the Jo’s existence: getting residents of the prosperous suburban county to and from downtown Kansas City, Missouri. For people who instead want to travel within Johnson County, the Jo is neither easy to navigate nor effective for reaching a workplace or a campus at punch-in times.

In 2014, 511,904 trips were taken on the system, down from years past. From its outset, the Jo has been a political hot potato and the butt of jokes. The Johnson County Museum in Shawnee preserves as part of county history a Johnson County Sun comic showing two passengers riding a bus, captioned: “The Jo doubles ridership!”

Ridership may be poised to grow, with one in 15 Johnson County residents now living below the federal poverty line and other parts of the Kansas City metro exploring mass-transit ideas to meet demand.

Over the past decade, a majority of JoCo’s Board of County Commissioners held a dim view of increasing funding and service in meaningful ways for the bus and paratransit (transportation for the elderly and the disabled) systems. To do so would have meant increasing taxes — a virtually unthinkable notion for a politician in Johnson County.

But earlier this year, a narrow 4-3 majority of the commission voted to increase the mill levy for the first time since 2006, tacking on almost $80 in property taxes for the average household. Some of the extra money, about $1.5 million, is earmarked for improving transit.

Of that $1.5 million, $500,000 was set aside to expand the Special Edition, a version of transit reserved for elderly, low-income or disabled riders. Another $350,000 was designated for a taxi voucher program to expand paratransit services to outlying areas of the county, such as De Soto and Spring Hill.

Johnson County’s decision to increase funding for transit also resulted in a $455,000 match from Kansas City to open paratransit services between Johnson County and Jackson County.

“Stakeholders want total access to the whole metro area,” says Steven Klika, a county commissioner from Overland Park and previously a Johnson County Transit board member. “Stakeholders want job access. Stakeholders want buses that fit those routes. We don’t need huge monsters riding around on routes that don’t fit.”

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Rather than trying to accomplish such improvements alone, Johnson County this year handed the keys to its transportation system to the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority. The county struck an agreement with the KCATA to manage its transit and integrate it with the metro’s other systems. The aim is to transform the Jo into a broader, more sophisticated network that connects major job and population centers.

The deal also means that Johnson County will save $500,000, which it is plowing back into its transit program. That brings the overall increase in transit funding for the current year to $2.5 million ($1.5 million from the mill levy increase, the $455,000 match from KCMO and the $500,000 in KCATA savings).

The swing vote on the mill levy increase came from commission chairman Ed Eilert, who in the past was openly skeptical of public transportation. As recently as last year, he needled Ed Peterson — a commissioner from northeast Johnson County, who ran for Eilert’s seat in 2014, and a consistent advocate for public transportation — for even discussing the idea of raising taxes for things like transit.

For a car-centric community such as Johnson County, arguing in favor of public transportation carries risk; leaders there have rarely praised the Jo. Now, at least, they won’t have to talk about the unpopular system by name. As part of the KCATA agreement, the old Jo branding will go away. Buses will instead carry the new Ride KC name and logo, sharing it with most of the bus fleets around the metro — paving the way for Eilert to sound almost like a public-transit believer. Still, he’s taking a wait-and-see approach.

“Fingers crossed — I hope it works as desired,” Eilert tells The Pitch. “It’s just that gaining ridership in Johnson County has always been a challenge. With some of the redevelopment that is occurring or on the drawing boards to occur in Johnson County, there’s an opportunity to make transit a more highly utilized system. And so we will have to wait and see.”

Eilert was once a bus user. He does not recall those days fondly.

“Pretty bad service, from the standpoint that we had pretty old equipment,” Eilert says. This was well before he started his 24-year run as Overland Park’s mayor; back then, he rode the bus from his home, near 95th Street and Antioch, to the job he had in a Crown Center office. “You never knew whether you were going to make it to work or make it home.”

This was the late 1970s, when the KCATA managed the bus system in Johnson County. The KCATA itself had been formed by an act of Congress in 1965, giving it bistate authority to plan and operate public transportation in a seven-county region straddling the Missouri-Kansas state line. The idea was to create an entity like the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, but the congressional pact didn’t come with the right clout. The KCATA lacked taxing authority to raise money, which also kept the body from building political muscle.

Eilert’s experience on ramshackle buses was a common one, and the Johnson County commission in 1985 voted to abandon the KCATA and manage its own bus service.

County leaders at the time felt that the KCATA was stacked in favor of Jackson County interests, and that Johnson County received little from the transit organization.

“I think there was a lot of validity in their anger,” says longtime transit activist Kite Singleton. “They were not getting the kind of services they thought they needed, and the Kansas commissioners didn’t fight enough to get votes to make things happen there.”

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That piece of history, coupled with the major investments that Johnson County has made in vehicle-centric developments — endlessly widening Interstate 435 and U.S. Highway 69 — explains the county’s arm’s-length attitude about public transit.

And beyond Johnson County, the rest of the KC metro has never endured the type of traffic congestion that spurred mass-transit investments in Denver, Chicago and Houston, among other communities. Here, mass transit has always been a tough sell — people simply prefer to drive themselves from point to point, even over short distances.

“It’s a challenge for those of us used to getting into an automobile and driving three blocks to go to the grocery store,” Eilert says. “It’s a transportation style that’s convenient, and gasoline prices are down again. Many transportation proponents say when gas goes back to $4 or $5 a gallon, people will use transportation. But we’re not there.”

A time that gas remained above $4 a gallon for a sustained period coincided with the Great Recession. The dwindling global economy accelerated changes within the Johnson County transit system.

While tightening budgets necessitated cuts to the Jo (about a third of its service was cut), policymakers said the financial calamity presented an opportunity to re-evaluate how the Jo could serve the region.

“In order for transit to be much more viable, we needed to start attracting the discretionary riders: those who don’t have to take it but for various reasons would like to,” Klika says. “That revolves around jobs to a large extent.”

Especially jobs in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. But while the Jo does a reasonable job of getting Johnson Countians there, major employment centers within Johnson County have been left out of the loop. The Mission resident who works in Lenexa can’t easily get to and from her job along its current routes.

A proposed line extension in the Johnson County network would bring people into Lenexa’s employment cluster at 95th Street and Renner for the first time. Other proposed lines would take Johnson County residents all the way out to the old Bannister Mall site, where Cerner plans to add 16,000 workers, many of whom presumably will live in Johnson County.

Other upgrades include increasing the number of buses picking up riders at key stops on well-traveled lines.

An existing line that takes riders along Metcalf to the University of Missouri–Kansas City would be augmented to pick up riders from Johnson County Community College and the Prairiefire development at 135th Street and Metcalf.

Even routes that should be easy aren’t covered in the current system. The E. Allen Roth Mission Transit Center, a hub within the Jo system on Johnson Drive, can’t take anyone to the University of Kansas Medical Center and KU Hospital, both major employers.

Part of that is because KU Med is in Wyandotte County, exposing the insular nature of Johnson County’s transit outlay.

By January, a connection between Mission and southeast Wyandotte County will begin service. But cooperation between the Jo and other political entities is still recovering from some tensions following Johnson County’s break from the KCATA 30 years ago.

Johnson County has long kept its distance from the rest of the metro when it has come to major initiatives that crossed county and state lines. When Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders in 2008 proposed a wide-ranging commuter-rail plan that stretched into far reaches of the metro, Johnson County was conspicuously absent from the design.

But the tenor of regional transit has changed, with the KCATA deal setting the stage for an evolution. The Jo takeover, struck last January after 30 years of the bus line’s independence, is seen as crucial to linking existing KCATA services to the rest of the area. It’s part of a larger effort by the KCATA to flex its strength as a regional transit authority, rather than merely a bus service.

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The KCATA has already become more dynamic under Joe Reardon, who took over for longtime general manager Mark Huffer last year. Reardon, the former mayor of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas, arrived without significant transit experience, but his political background is a known quantity to other metro leaders.

“As mayor, I worked with Mayor Reardon on many different things,” Eilert says. “I have confidence in his ability to provide leadership, and it’s just a matter of putting all the pieces together.”

Since Reardon stepped in, the KCATA has folded Johnson County, Wyandotte County and Independence into its sphere.

“We are looking at it on a regional basis,” says Dick Jarrold, vice president of regional planning and development for the KCATA. “You don’t see the state line or county line boundaries. We’re looking at where the needs are.”

“When I became mayor 10 years ago, there were a lot of conversations about, ‘Wouldn’t this be great?’ ” Reardon says. “But there wasn’t a lot of intentionality about how to make it work. We’re seeing that today.”

Not everyone wants to spend money on public transit in Johnson County.

A survey commissioned by the county this year shows that 69 percent of residents there want the county to do a better job of coordinating transportation services with regional partners. But far fewer — 29 percent — indicate a willingness to pay for that kind of cooperation through increased taxes.

It’s an attitude reflected by the narrow passage of the mill levy increase for transit on the final vote for the fiscal 2016 Johnson County budget.

“I don’t want this to sound flippant, but I don’t think Johnson County really cares about transit — I don’t think the state of Kansas really cares about transit,” says Michael Ashcraft, a Johnson County commissioner from Olathe who voted against earmarking additional property taxes for transit. “If we did, why are we spending $500 million on the Johnson County Gateway Project when, if we spent a quarter of that, we could have a world-class bus system to take care of bus traffic?”

The Johnson County Gateway Project is a massive face-lift to the highway interchanges at Kansas Highway 10 and Interstates 35 and 435.

According to the same 2015 survey, just 13 percent of Johnson Countians name transit among the top four priorities for county-offered services. (Parks and recreation, ambulance, libraries and public safety fare far better.)

As policymakers are leaning toward improved access to job centers, though, more resources should be directed, Ashcraft says, toward disabled populations. “Gear a public-transit program that will address the needs of that population to be as vibrant and functional as humanly possible,” he says.

The KCATA is looking, however, to improve paratransit services — point-to-point transportation service for the disabled.

When transit programs were fragmented from city to city, someone wanting to use paratransit services had to coordinate his or her ride from one city to the next. For instance, a Roeland Park resident would have to call for paratransit services in Johnson County to find a ride to Independence, and then call the Independence transit authority to arrange a ride home. And previous paratransit guidelines meant that users could cross political boundaries only if they needed a ride for medical reasons.

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New standards allow rides for work or other nonmedical purposes. Johnson County is also testing a pilot program that would allow paratransit users to pay for a cab with county-issued vouchers. This would extend service to south Johnson County for the first time.

The county is also set to pass a new policy that will allow anyone qualifying for the Special Edition program to ride fixed routes for free.

The changes to Johnson County’s transit system are part of a slow play toward what transit activists hope will result in a much larger, multimodal transit network. Moving in that direction will require more money. That could come in the form of higher funding commitments from local counties.

“That’s part of the master plan, to get moving in that direction,” Klika says.

It could also mean a bistate tax. The first such tax, for Union Station, passed almost 20 years ago. But operating losses on the refurbished station blew through a $40 million endowment, and Science City didn’t draw promised crowds — outcomes that soured Johnson Countians on future big ideas. A second bistate initiative, for pro sports stadiums and arts, failed.

Eilert sees a third bistate initiative going the same way.

“Ain’t gonna happen,” Eilert says. “That’s my judgment.”

A public-transit system can reasonably be judged by how approachable it is to someone who is unfamiliar with it. The coming downtown streetcar line, for example, is sold in part by its utility for tourists.

With that thinking in mind, I decided to try using the Jo to get around Johnson County. While I had looked at system maps to research this story, I hadn’t committed the routes and times to memory. Living in Brookside, I have easy access to several bus lines within a short walk of my house. At each stop on those lines is a list of arrival times for the various routes that come and go. It’s a system that doesn’t require much thinking or planning. Maybe the Jo would be the same. I set aside the morning of October 1 to find out.

My wife and I drove to her office, near Highway 69 and 135th Street. From there, I walked a few minutes to the first bus stop that I could find, at 132nd Street and Metcalf. It was around 8:30 in the morning.

There were no signs indicating what routes passed by this stop or what time I could expect a bus.

I waited an hour and a half with no sign of a bus before I decided to look up the Jo’s routes on my phone. I discovered that the Jo’s Metcalf Connex line, the rough equivalent of Kansas City’s MAX line, doesn’t reach 132nd Street. Ever. In fact, the farthest south it goes to pick up downtown-bound commuters is Rosana Square, at 119th Street and Metcalf. The last northbound bus had left that stop at 7:46 a.m. I was stranded.

Before an acquaintance heading downtown spotted me and offered a ride, this was my primary thought: “I’m out here in the peak of rush hour in one of the fastest growing parts of the county, and there’s no bus to take me anywhere.”

Maybe the KCATA had the same thought. One of the line extensions that it is considering in 2016 is a Metcalf Connex line that would extend to 135th Street and Metcalf. Maybe next year, I’ll try the Jo again.