Kansas City’s Streetcar Grows Up

The Kansas City Streetcar began service 10 years ago as a two-mile loop, primarily serving tourists visiting downtown attractions. But lately it’s begun to grow up, evolving into a useful piece of infrastructure for a bigger share of the city’s transportation needs. 

Last year the streetcar added 3.5 miles of track to extend service south to the University of Missouri - Kansas City and the Country Club Plaza, a historic shopping destination. This week it’s starting service on a new three-quarter-mile extension to the Missouri River waterfront, with a grand opening set for Monday. In all, it now runs 6.5 miles north to south. And it already carries a third of the region’s daily transit trips. 

“We’ve been planning this exact alignment, from downtown to the Plaza, for a generation,” says David Johnson, a transit advocate and consultant in the area who has served on the KC Streetcar Authority board. “Probably not long after they paved over the original streetcar tracks.” 

It’s taken a lot of money and effort to get there. The original loop cost $102 million to build and was supported in part by Obama-era federal grants for streetcar systems around the country. The 3.5-mile Main Street Extension cost roughly $350 million to build, about half of which was covered by a Capital Investment Grant from the Federal Transit Administration that was finalized at the end of President Donald Trump’s first term in 2021. Local funding for those sections comes from a special property assessment and sales tax levied within a certain radius around the route. 

The riverfront extension that’s opening this month cost about $62 million — almost double the original estimate, due partly to construction cost inflation over the last few years. Its local funding comes primarily from Kansas City’s Port Authority, which controls the section of waterfront land where the new extension is launching. Port KC put up $5 million toward a local match for federal grants for the extension, and has committed to funding its ongoing operations and maintenance using a 1 percent assessment on riverfront developments. 

Like the original downtown loop, the riverfront extension was conceived as a tool for economic development, focused on a segment of post-industrial waterfront that was barren and inaccessible. 

“How do we solve the connectivity problem, help to light a fire around development opportunities, re-face our river and lean into river access?” says Tom Gerend, executive director of the Kansas City Streetcar Authority. “It’s connecting to a district that had no activity as of a decade ago.” 

Jon Stephens, the president and CEO of Port KC, credits the announcement of the streetcar extension for sparking development on the waterfront. But it was part of a plan to re-envision the waterfront in a specific way. The area is now home to hundreds of apartments and commercial developments set among parks and open spaces. It’s also the site of CPKC Stadium, where the Kansas City Current, a National Women’s Soccer League team, play their games. (World Cup matches planned for this summer will take place at Arrowhead Stadium, where the Kansas City Chiefs play.) 

“It has gone from nothing to literal world-class development,” Stephens says. “We did not do, ‘Let’s just build a streetcar and see what happens.’ We really laid out a true vision of a dense, walkable, multimodal-oriented development.” 

In terms of ridership, the Main Street extension has been a major success. Streetcar ridership in March reached more than 371,000 people, up from less than 150,000 in March 2025. The Main Street extension mirrors a previous bus route operated by the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, but has already outpaced its average daily ridership just in the last few months. 

“It’s a whole new ballgame because we’ve become the spine of transit in the Kansas City region,” Gerend says. 

Public transit in Kansas City has languished for years. According to some reports, only 3 percent of city residents use public transit at all. Total ridership on KCATA’s bus services was 902,000 in April. The authority’s heralded experiment with fare-free buses is ending this summer. The streetcar, which remains fare-free, was initially met with skepticism because of its limited reach and role as a booster for the downtown image. Many other Obama-era streetcar projects around the country have proven to be of little use to city residents. 

Advocates are hoping that as the streetcar improves the perception of transit in Kansas City, it can spur more comprehensive upgrades. Officials are studying a potential east-west extension for the streetcar as well as connections to the historic 18th & Vine area, home to the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. More encouraging still is progress in yearslong discussions to create regional funding sources for public transit, says Johnson, who serves on the board of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group. The group is hoping to get local and county governments to commit to a variety of funding measures to improve transit services. 

“It’s really coming together in a way it hasn’t before,” Johnson says of those discussions. “And, 100 percent, the catalyst is the streetcar.”