Milwaukee transit vs Kansas City transit (living, state, compared, population)
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These numbers may be a bit old, but I'm sure they are still close. I wanted to look at how KC's bus transit system compared to a city of similar size.
Milwaukee and Kansas City are nearly the same size as far as urbanized areas, although Milwaukee is more dense in the core, the KC area is larger overall.
Kansas City Metro
MSA of 2.1 million
continuous urban area of 1.5 million
Milwaukee Metro
MSA of 1.6 million
continuous urban area of 1.4 million
But this part is sad.
Let's compare transit systems.
Kansas City KCATA
286 buses, of which 170 of them are 40' buses.
Daily ridership 53,000
Milwaukee
483 buses, of which 450 are 40' buses.
Daily ridership 170,000
Neither city has any sort of light rail transit.
What's going on KC? Time to improve transit there.
Milwaukee gets the edge because of the amount of money getting put into the line between Milwaukee and Chicago. Hopefully it happens. Either way, they are both in bad shape, they do not have light rail, and plans for them don't seem to be going much farther than the drawing tables.
Neither will probably have light rail anytime soon, but I think Milwaukee would get it before KC. As of today, I would have to say Milwaukee by a long shot. The fact that Milwaukee is closely connected to Chicago also helps. I also think that Kansas City will have problems, because Missouri doesn't give money to public transit agencies. Wisconsin is a more progressive state and would likely help Milwaukee if they ever got their local act together. St. Louis had to fight tooth and nail to get Metrolink, but having a good portion of the metro area in Illinois helped. Kansas City, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis are probably the most car dependent metro areas in the Midwest.
You forgot to take population density into consideration. And that's part of the problem facing people in low-density cities who wish their cities had more extensive mass transit: the easier it is to drive around, the less demand there is for mass transit and the harder it is to justify pouring money into it. Dense cities have more comprehensive mass transit out of sheer necessity, not because we enjoy being stuffed onto trains that take 35 minutes to get us to work 6 miles away while sharing intimate space with 400 other people possessing widely varying hygiene habits.
Honestly, I wouldn't dream of living in either city without a car. Milwaukee may have more comprehensive bus service, but it would still suck to have to rely on mass transit as your sole source of transportation there when a car could cut your travel time by 75%.
Last edited by Drover; 04-22-2010 at 12:01 AM..
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