ShawneeDispatch.com

The passage in last week's election of a light rail proposal for Kansas City doesn't include any provisions for connections to Shawnee. Or, for that matter, anywhere outside a 28-mile route from Swope Park to Kansas City International Airport.

Nonetheless, the ambitious plan may provoke some to speculate: Could the system eventually connect to Shawnee, and how many people would use it if it did?

While the passage of Clay Chastain's light rail proposal --his seventh attempt at such a measure -- may have surprised many Kansas City-area residents, one might expect Mid-America Regional Council to fight the plan because it may delay or derail the implementation of its own, less sexier but cheaper "Smart Moves"transportation plan. The plan, which MARC has developed and promoted over the last few years, calls for a number of bus routes connecting towns and shopping centers throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area.

Tom Gerend, assistant director of transportation for MARC, said they were monitoring the Kansas City City Council's analyses and discussion of the lightrail plan.

"We're just kind of waiting to see what comes out of that," Gerend said.

John Segale, a Johnson County Commissioner and former Shawnee City Council member, said of a possible light rail system in Shawnee, "I don't know if people are willing to pay for something like that ... the Rapid Rider seems to me a cheap way of gaining similar service to what light rail would be."

Segale said he thought Johnson County was doing a good job of addressing the underlying causes of the need for transportation overhauls: unplanned, uncoordinated development.

"One critical thing is the development pattern," Segale said. "I think if you just operate buses and nobody changes the development pattern, it's not going to be relevant."

Segale said developments have grown independent of one another around intersections as cars fill up the road. Johnson County is trying to change that, he said.

Segale cited the Mission Shopping District as one area in which the county was working to ensure high-density, planned development near bus lines as a way to lessen reliance on cars.

"Buses have very little relevancy for people in Johnson County," he said, adding that as the county ages and gets more older people who are unable to drive, in proportion to those who do drive, the bus system will come to be valued and used more.

For now, Segale said, the area's transportation system is car-based.

"To some degree that's what people want," he said. "The whole movement in Johnson County is not to take away choices but to have others. Right now there's only one choice: You've got to have a car."

Chuck Ferguson, deputy transportation director of Johnson County, said light rail was not on his department's radar.

"At this point in time, there's no thought of that from our department's perspective," he said, because light rail is expensive. "We're supporting Smart Moves."

"Light rail is certainly sexier, but you still have to have a bus system to back it up," he added. "Every light rail system in the country has a backup bus system."

While light rail reaching Shawnee may seem a fond dream, it did happen before, nearly 100 years ago.

In 1908, the Hocker Line, an interurban railway begun in 1906, expanded to reach Shawnee. The idea for the railroad came from two men: William Lackman, a Lenexa farmer, and David B. Johnson, a Shawnee resident and treasurer for Johnson County. The line changed its name the following year to the Kansas City & Olathe Electric Railroad, and Lackman and Johnson plus hoped to build the railway as far as Topeka.

The line never reached past Mill Creek. After 1910, the advent of the automobile reduced the ridership on the rail line, and it changed ownership and organization. On April 1, 1934, almost five years after the stock market crash of 1929, the railway's stockholders shut the line down.