This Podcast Is... Uncalled For - Deepti M. Kannapan

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Our guest today is Deepti M. Kannapan, who is a public transit advocate from Los Angeles.  We talk about how to improve transit in communities that currently don't have good transit.

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Topics fresh. with every spin you won't guess what's coming in every week a new surprise minds away never lies conversations bold and free tuning now just wait and see this part Hello everyone uh welcome to this podcast is on call for I have a very special guest with me today Go ahead introduce yourself please

Hi I'm Diti I'm a writer engineer and climate activist and I recently wrote a fantasy novel called Fire's Alley. All right, great. And you're here today talk with me about transit, I believe, right? So let's talk about it. So we're both in North America, which is notoriously not, we don't have very good transit, except a couple of cities, am I correct? Yeah. Yeah, and I live in LA, which is, is especially notorious for being a car-centric city. Same with Kansas City where I am.

Yeah. And yeah, so a lot of the climate organizations that I'm involved with are very interested in increasing adoption of public transport. Because it has a lot of benefits, it decreases the amount of emissions because you've got fewer vehicles on the road. It's also good for accessibility, people who don't have cars and need other ways to get places. It tends to be inclusive for a variety of economic levels. And it's often a sign of, you know, kind of a nice city.

It's like the livable, walkable space where you don't spend all your time stuck in a car, stuck in traffic. Right. Right. And as we both, as we both established, we're in the cities that are not known for public transit. I'll let you describe L.A.'s transit situation first, then I can tell you about Kansas City's transit situation. Yeah, so L.A. is big and sprawling, and we have rail lines, and we do have bus lines. And they do work if you're in an area in LA County that's well connected. But as soon as you're trying to go a significant distance, which you often have to, the bus becomes like less and less of a favorable option. Because getting anywhere takes a while, you know, you're driving on the freeway for an hour

just to go 20 miles sometimes. and so buses are usually a little slower than cars because they make stops and they're not going exactly where you want to go. And so the traffic that would have affected you in the car is now also going to affect you on the bus. So it sometimes becomes a challenge to use the bus for anything practical. So I chose my first house. so that it would be on a bus line to my office. And that worked out really well. It was a short commute.

It was like 15 minutes and it was another additional 15 minute walk. And so for a while, I just, I didn't have a car. And I thought, this is great. This is working. And I could stop at the grocery store on the way back from work. But it increasingly became more challenging to do that. I couldn't go anywhere else. I had like a short radius of stuff I used to go to near my house and then the things that were along the bus line.

And so I moved a short distance away and now the bus line becomes more of a project and a commitment to say, okay, I need to budget an extra 40 minutes for every task. And it's hard to ask people to do that, I think. I still try to take the bus for the train just to keep my hand in, just to have the practice. But it's a hard thing to do. So I think there are good lines, but there isn't good connectivity. And so that's kind of the challenge in L.A. All right.

So here's Kansas City's transit situation. So there is Amtrak. Uni Station is an active Amtrak. station. I believe there's an Amtrak line out to LA. There are Amtrak stops in Independence and Least Summits, which are suburbs. We have the KC Streetcar line. Currently, it's just the starter line from Union Station, looping around to River Market. There are two extensions. One opens a little more than a month from now all the way to UMKC.

some sick three miles south of union station. They've been building that extension for a couple of years now. And there'll be a second extension, the riverfront extension, which is a much smaller extension. It took them about a year to build. But that won't open until sometime next year. I'm going to guess April at the earliest. beyond that, and the streetcar is outstanding.

It's actually quite popular around here. Outside of that, good luck getting the buses, if you're anywhere outside of the urban core of Kansas City. If you're out where I am in Oakland Park in Johnson County, good luck getting a bus anywhere other than anytime other than in Rush Hour. And it takes me, I had my car in the shop fairly recently, like all summer long, kind of get the engine completely replaced, not cheap, by the way. And it takes me about half hour to an hour to walk from my house to my shop.

All right. And just a, just a bit of getting older, I guess. So that's the, and good luck getting a Air Bipe bus on weekends. Now, there's been clamoring for having some sort of a rail to the airports, which is, if you're driving there, it's about half an hour northwest of downtown. borderline on the edge of nowhere. And they just opened a new terminal building with the last couple of years, too, which from what I've seen is nice. But like Los Angeles, I can't see, very spread across two states

and five counties total. And hopefully we're on the right track. They're talking a couple more extensions to the streetcar system. Two that are currently in advance planning. One, they just started a study recently to the 18th and fine districts. And another one that would be part of a broader green corridor, which frankly should all be rail, in my opinion, but only a small portion of it's connecting downtown Kansas to downtown KC. Mo.

And how does that work for trip planning? Are you able to plan a multi-leg trip and have connections to the places you want to go typically, or is that only in the urban center? It really is just the urban core that we're talking about with connectivity. Yeah, I said, good luck, try and get anywhere in the suburbs without having to take a car or, worst case, scenario, Uber. And on that, so, so, yeah, I know there are some cities in the U.S., New York, most notably, that they have great transits compared to L.A. or K.C. I've been on San Luis's MetroLink light rail, which is pretty cool. And I understand there, try and gets a new line put in there as well.

What are some other good cities in the states that have pretty decent transit year, your observation? So I've found that, you know, on trips and stuff, I haven't tried to expand the whole city and see what it would be like. But I've had good experiences on the transit in New York, Boston, Chicago, a lot of the kind of east side cities. I think it's because things are a little more dense and there's more of a node. Like you can go here and there's a lot of interesting stuff as opposed to being this kind of space. sprawling kind of collection of cities almost. That's what L.A. is like. But I'm sure it's possible to design a good transit system for a sprawling city.

We haven't really tried yet. Right. Right. I agree. I don't think we've seriously tried yet. Some people have some good ideas, but they haven't quite tried yet. I've talked with the head of the KC Streetcar Authority, hey, could we get some lines potentially out here to Johnson County?

He said, yeah, that's part of the plan. And specifically, this was an open house for that riverfront extension I told you about before they got started. A lot of people there were saying, well, let's connect out to Gardner, which is even further out than what I'm talking about are, very, very much small town, America in Gardner.

So that's really the scope that's, we need to start thinking about, you know, how do we build transit systems that, yeah, we'll cut down on car use, make it more, uh,

may more convenient for people who might not necessarily be able to afford cars to get to and from work and everything and go and see the sites as well. I think part of it certainly in the case of KC, you know, they have identified certain transit corridors I think rail would definitely work good on. But even though it takes, what we're talking about is takes years, almost a decades to really fully implement. I'm learning the hard way with one of these plans that they are, it's an east-west line. the current streetcar just runs north-south for in most part. So we're talking east-west, and they started in 22,

and they're trying 32 and be fully implemented, fully built and everything. What's your take on that? Why does it take so long for these plans to come to fruition, if you will? Yeah, I think. there's probably layers and layers of bureaucracy. There's approvals and permissions and things that you have to get. And I think also sometimes there are objections, right? You have to get public comments.

And then, you know, there's been cases where things have been stopped because people didn't want the station near them or they didn't want the bike lanes near them. more. So it's kind of like NIMBYism sometimes that gets in the way. It's a complicated world via kind of the city planning and government and all of it. That I, you know, I'm only getting exposure to through the organizations I work with as they try to lobby these different organizations and get things passed through. Yeah.

And just for the benefit of our audience, NIMBYism, not in my backyard. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I think there's a hint of that, too, around here. South of UMKC, that there's another potential route for the streetcar, would take into the neighborhoods of Brookside and Waldo. Brookside, a little more upper class and everything. Waldo, very middle class, I think, could definitely use transit,

especially along Warnold Road. which in Waldo is a battle zone. That's the best way to describe that stretch of road. I think streetcar would definitely work down there. It has in the past. So the current streetcar system, yeah, that only opened in 2016. So it's still a fairly new thing. but the history of street cars in Kansas City.

We're going back. I think it's the 50s when all the street car lines around the country were being bought out and paved over to make way for mass-produced cars. And when they're putting in these new roads, they're finding these old rails buried in the concrete where these old street cars used to run and everything. So, yeah, that's very interesting that this is a form of transit. It's been in the DNA of so far cities,

but long forgotten in a lot of cases. Yeah, and I think people do sort of measure the effectiveness of the transit based on how many people are using it. And I was just, just reading a study earlier that, you know, as the, as areas get gentrified, the use of the rail in those areas goes down. And so that kind of becomes more of a justification to get rid of it. Or, you know, it's not really producing revenue anymore. So it's kind of one of those things where you have to sort of think a little bit big picture and think, where can I put it where it will

get used? What else do I need to do to make sure it gets used? Because one of the things that happened kind of in South Bay, Los Angeles, was, you know, there were people who wanted bike lanes, which is very necessary. Riding a bike in the L.A. area is quite scary without bike lanes. But the thing is, I guess it wasn't thought true enough that there wasn't really anywhere to go to and from the bike lane. They put a bike lane in for a stretch, but you can't adopt it unless you can make a full route with your bike. and so you kind of have to think these things through like where will be the traffic for this or the usage for this leg of the public transport come from

how do they get there where do they go and you have to kind of do some additional work in the surrounding area to make sure that it actually does get used and so I think as activists we have to think bigger picture and not be like hey can you just put it in this one element of the system could you like close the loop on it?

Right. So that's something I'm very interested in. Yeah, I've noticed that too. A lot of roads diets, as they're called, around town. They're taking out lanes of traffic and then in their place. We're seeing bike lanes and all that. We're seeing a lot of bike paths. And so, so yeah.

So yeah, when we're, I guess, holistically, if we're talking about transit, We're not just talking about buses and rail and everything. We have to take any account bikes and all that and those scooters as well that I've seen around here and there. Yeah. And I think you almost have to think through like what are the different people who are going to be on this bus. Some people biked here so that you need to have the bike racks. And some people took their scooter here. So there needs to be a place where they can drop it off.

Some people walked here, some people drove to the stops. So there's like all these different, I think you have to assume that people are going to be doing a variety of different things, including driving. Like some people may have to drive either, you know, because of their circumstances or because they're carrying something heavy. So like I think there's you have to assume that there's going to be a diversity of people in situations and roots that I think people are doing on paper. I'm not sure if it's fully translating into the plans. Right. Right. I agree.

That's where these transit corridors I talked about earlier. There's where you need to start. You know, if you're going to complement. I think buses are good short-term solution, but long-term, it really does need to be real, because let's be honest, buses have a stigma to them. Yeah. like only poor people

take the bus and of course around here we still have a whole racism thing going on by which I mean let's

yeah talk about Truist Avenue here in KC that's long been considered the racial divine line to the east is very African American and a lot of poor people on that side to the west

that's all the all the white folks until you reach 435 and then yeah then all that's and then KCK

kind of the same thing pockets of poor people whether it be African American or more than Casey KCK or a big Hispanic community there too.

So how do we connect these people and get them access to better jobs and get over the fact that this was done in the past? Let's move forward to the future together. And all that.

So yeah, I do believe that's certainly in my area that racism and also plays a role in what we're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. And I think these are also kind of like reinforcing each other because, so on the bus lines that are really inconvenient, right, that take a super long time.

No one goes on them if they have any other choice. Like, I could drive or I could take the bus, but I'm not going to take the bus if it's like a really bad option. And so the only people on the bus are the people who have no other choice. So they, you know, maybe they can't afford a car or, you know, any other factors that prevent them from being able to do something that's more convenient to them. And so I guess for some people that does add a stigma because you kind of, you're around people you wouldn't normally be around or the, you know, it's a lower socioeconomic bracket. it. And so it becomes even more of a bad option. And it gets neglected, right? Like, the people who have no other choices, they're not activating about it. They don't have time to

call city council and complain or, you know, raise a stink about it. So it gets ignored and it just kind of gets worse and worse. And the lack of good transportation options makes it hard for for people to get a job and to improve their so it's like it's very like locked in place by all these different factors all making things worse um but also i mean i think it is possible to unravel like you fix one factor um it does sort of loosen the grip on all the other ones but yeah it's a it's a good point there is a racism uh aspect as well and a uh class aspect for sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

All right. So, of course, other countries have figured this out decades, if not centuries ago. Would you, I think it would agree with me there, right? Let's use London as an example. That's a great example of a city that has figured out transit. And they just opened a couple of years ago there. The Elizabeth Line, the cross-elisperp, which still took them 13 years to fully implement. We're talking about integrating older rail as well as digging brand new tunnels underneath London,

which already has plenty of tunnels to begin with for the other, for the underground. that so new tunnels for these new trains and yeah yeah so it's not just the U.S. that it takes a while for transit projects to get implemented just look across the pond. Yes. And I think there's I think less political reward for doing a good job from of maintaining something. It's kind of, so it's something that people,

I've read this in, you know, articles of, you know, describing the politics of various places. And it's, you need to be constantly maintaining and upgrading and, you know, making small incremental improvements

or else it kind of degrades. And that's not the thing that gets you, you know, re-elected or again you know that you put on your campaign platform and so i think we as you know citizens need to kind of be aware of that and maybe reward people who are doing a good job of the maintenance or ask them to right right and uh yeah it's yeah i i think elsewhere in the world is just seen as you know there's a basic necessity uh for city city living

London's a good example. Tokyo is a good example to the number of the amount of transit in that city. Well, it's kind of necessary when you have 37 million within your city's limits

there and not everyone can drive. You know? So, and I think one thing about the U.S., there seems to be, there seems to me to be this notion that things are only good if you can make a profit off of it. And the point of things like just basic stuff like getting around town,

there shouldn't be a profit motive to this. I think our American thinking is completely wrong. on this and uh but uh but yeah we need to find better ways to address and properly fund transit uh in this country and starting you know at the basic local level you know with your uh transit authorities and and stuff and the different agencies like the s street cars is different agency from our transit authority and so they're able to do things that the transit authority frankly can't right now

so so yeah so yeah completely agree with you I think there's some there's something in the

cultural atmosphere in the US that's kind of pro car and anti public transport and I don't think I think it's learned I think it's some you know artifact of the car lobby

having so much influence over city planning and yeah I mean I think alongside everything else we need to be thinking about how do we change the culture and how do we maybe glamorize taking public transport maybe tell different stories about it I've always found it super fun

like when I'm on a train I'm like it has some kind of romance to it like some historical people watching you know, I can write on the train. It has something. It has some storytelling for me that I kind of I wish would catch on. Yeah.

Yeah, storytelling in a way that flying can't. And while you can get a little bit with driving as well, but if you're the one doing the driving, you shouldn't be paying attention to everything around you. So, but I do agree with you on the rail aspect. There's a line that on Amtrak, the Missouri River Runner, runs between Kansas City and St. Louis, and you get fantastic views of the Missouri countryside going on that train.

So highly I recommend if you're ever in the area. And also the same note with the street car. You get the, it's a really cool view. the city that you otherwise wouldn't just driving you know yeah and yeah

and yeah it's fun and it's free to that's yeah they yeah they made the a taxi instructor for the street car

such that's you can just step on and it's free and I think that's a huge attraction associated with it too. Yeah.

And it's also kind of like it's even for people who do drive, I think it's nice to have a backup option if you're ever out of gas or out of phone charge or it's kind of a it's like a security

and resilience type of thing that you're not dependent on any one thing. We've got multiple options to get anywhere. And even if you're out of money, like how nice that it's free. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Well, I think we only have a couple more minutes left, unfortunately. So do you have any closing thoughts? Any closing thoughts? Um, no, I just encourage everyone to kind of look at what local organizations are working on public transport in your area, wherever you are. And they often give you easy ways to get involved, like the most low, low commitment ways to sign a petition or something. But it's interesting stuff. Like, go to meetings. It sounds strange, I guess, to most people.

But these are fun. Like, there's a very committed people. Some will take you on a bus tour for your city and, like, give you educational seminars and things like that. I don't know. I've found it interesting. There's frustrating aspects about like why things are so stuck. But also it's, you know, a good way to get involved in like, you know, civic activity, get involved in your community. And yeah, no reason not to it, in my opinion. All right. All right. I agree with that.

And we will go ahead and end with that. We'll stick around for a couple of minutes after I turned to your. recording off and talk a little bits but for the rest of you thank you for listening and we will talk next time this podcast is uncalled for is hosted

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