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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Kansas City Streetcar Extension Now Open!
We revisit Kansas City to mark the opening of the Main Street streetcar extension and map the next moves that could turn a single corridor into a connected, free-to-ride system. From mixed-traffic tradeoffs to dedicated lanes, riverfront housing, hospitals, and historic districts, we trace how rails can reshape daily life.
• original two-mile streetcar purpose and performance
• how free fares drive ridership and small business gains
• Main Street extension to UMKC, Plaza, and midtown
• operational upgrades with dedicated lanes and frequency
• riverfront link to new housing, park, and KC Current stadium
• East–West line goals, anchors, and MAX bus ties
• equity impacts for lower income neighborhoods
This week on Transit Tangents, we are revisiting a topic that we covered earlier this year in Kansas City. In case you haven't heard, the Main Street extension to the streetcar is now open. We'll discuss what it means for the city as well as the potential for two more streetcar lines to be added in the years to come. All of this and more coming up on Transit Tangents. The new Main Street extension to the Kansas City Streetcar Line officially opened on October 24th. This has been a long time coming. Earlier this year, we actually had the chance to go to Kansas City to ride the streetcar to see some of the progress of the construction that was going on on this line, as well as talk directly to the Kansas City streetcar team, to the folks who are directly kind of pulling the strings to actually make this extension happen. It was a really exciting trip at the time when we got to check it out.
SPEAKER_04:We're going to get into the details of that new mainstream extension, the soon to open Riverfront extension, which we also saw while we were visiting Kansas City, as well as something that we've heard a little less about online, but there's definitely some rumblings about uh some potential uh new streetcar lines, actually, two new streetcar lines. So some really exciting things in the works uh that will really help transform how folks in Kansas City uh move around.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And it would take this just kind of singular streetcar line and really start to turn it into like a full-on streetcar system in the city, which is really exciting. And I feel like, you know, uh that's not really happening that often in so many cities across the country, let alone Kansas City, which uh is kind of like it's a sleeper transit on the rise city. Uh I mean, they've got their challenges like a lot of places do, but uh pretty exciting to kind of see all of the developments going on there.
SPEAKER_04:I was excited when we did the Kansas City episode because it was one of those cities where no one really thinks about transit existing in a place like this. And we were pleasantly surprised by the the current streetcar and then also the fact that the buses were free. Uh there's it was a it was there were some cool things there that I weren't that I was not expecting.
SPEAKER_02:Totally. And uh yeah, if you haven't seen any of those, I mean we did a Kansas City in the day using only public transit. We did an interview with a group of advocates there from Urban Labs KC. Uh, we got a tour of the streetcar facility, all sorts of stuff that we'll make sure are linked down below uh if you haven't seen them. To kind of kick this off, though, uh, we're gonna briefly just go over what the original Kansas City streetcar line was first for folks who are not fully up to speed. So the original line was fairly small at just over two miles long, and it connected the River Market District on the north end of the city, uh the north end of downtown to Union Station on the south side of town. And Chris, I I don't I don't want to put words in your mouth too, but I feel like we were both fairly skeptical about it because of how short it was. But I would say that overall we were pleasantly surprised.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I thought it was gonna feel a little bit more like a novelty and less like actual transit for uh for Kansas City. And I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, the yes, there is a novelty factor to it, right? It's something new and it draws people in, but you know, the areas that it connects are really uh popular areas. You have a lot of traffic moving between that market area all the way through through downtown. And we saw people riding it. So despite it being a pretty small line, like there were a lot of commuters who would hop on, hop off. And when we spoke to the local advocacy groups, uh, so many of them were just so excited about this uh about the streetcar, and that you know, they talked about how they use it every time they get a chance to use it. Um so a lot of excitement around it.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And just to give a little bit more detail into it, so uh it runs in mixed traffic for almost the entirety of the route through downtown, um, which again, at first we were kind of seeing it as a negative, uh, and which it I mean it is in some cases, right? I mean, when traffic is heavy, uh, the streetcar can potentially get kind of stuck in that traffic. Um, but for the most part, it actually did seem to maneuver the area uh fine. The frequencies were were at least every 10 minutes, although in practice it felt almost more frequent while we were there. Um and kind of like Chris mentioned, I mean, it is really great for kind of getting around the downtown area. You know, a lot of the destinations are you know still kind of walkable depending on where you're going. But um, if you're kind of covering the whole distance, it definitely helps speed things up. It makes it so that you don't have to walk over, you know, bridges that are crossing a highway if you're headed over to the river market district and things like that. So um, you know, overall, uh for being such a small line, it was already pretty uh effective at, you know, kind of rejuvenating some energy in downtown. And uh when we spoke with uh Donna and Lauren from the Kansas City streetcar team, a big kind of net benefit from it was actually the kind of economic side with small businesses. And uh Donna shared a really great story about how a small business owner was super against the streetcar line and how you know, after seeing it in practice and once it opened, he totally flipped and you know, understood that wow, this was actually a major benefit for my business.
SPEAKER_01:We had a business that is still located on our downtown route. Biggest naysayer, biggest just adversary about the project.
SPEAKER_03:Basically, people on the line were told when we put metal rails in, economic development will follow. I was not uh a positive guy, but I'm definitely eating crow. Now we're getting numerous people in because they're riding the streetcar, seeing that Michael's clothing is here, and most of the comments were hey, we've driven by numerous times, and all of a sudden we're down here riding the streetcar. We're gonna go in.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I think if I recall correctly, he ran a menswear shop and he said he had to start bringing in newer styles because all of a sudden there were all these younger people coming into downtown on the streetcar, and he got really excited and it helped the business. It was a really cool, cool story. And then one thing that we didn't touch on uh the Kansas City streetcar is free, which is uh unusual in the US, but they were able to do this by um adding a little bit of an extra sales tax on this um sort of district that the streetcar runs through. And they was able to fund this, and it's doing well enough that now we're looking at uh extensions.
SPEAKER_02:One note on the free transit element in uh Kansas City. We just mentioned too that when we were there, the buses were free. The buses are still free uh for a period of time right now. Um, the buses will not be free starting sometime next year. Uh the bus system and the streetcar system are separate entities in Kansas City. The streetcar is going to remain free. Uh, the buses are gonna have a fair kind of return to them. If you're interested in kind of uh an episode where we talk all about the pros and cons of fare-free buses, we did an episode a couple weeks ago you can go check out. Um, but now I I think uh let's let's talk specifically now about the main street extension, um, which again just opened a couple weeks ago, uh nearly tripling the length of this streetcar line, which is amazing. And in my opinion, it really makes this from you know a little thing you can use to hop around to different destinations in downtown into much more of a you know, people commuting to work, students going out into downtown, people going shopping, uh, in a much more major way than it was before.
SPEAKER_04:It takes it away from being a or it helps it advance from being like this downtown novelty that people might ride when they go downtown to, as you're saying, it's it's stretching into the city, it's has the opportunity to collect a lot more passengers um as it's moving into these other areas. I wouldn't call them quite fully suburban, but you know, still sort of midtown-esque, um centralized central neighborhoods to Kansas City. Um, some of those destinations that this extension is going to, one is the plaza, which we had a chance to check out when we were there. It's basically a giant outdoor shopping area. Think of it as like an outdoor mall before outdoor malls, um, but a very, very cool area, a lot of shops, um, some apartments around there. It's also going to go to the uh University of Missouri, Kansas City, uh, and as well as connecting a lot of um housing districts, as I said, those centralized neighborhoods and some of those converse commercial districts uh all along Main Street.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And I I mean to me, this makes so much sense. Like the the southernmost terminus station on the line is the university there. I think this is going to be awesome for students to be able to go into downtown much easier, uh, to potentially get to housing if they don't live right on campus much easier. Um, and is really a net benefit. And it's also probably going to help, you know, it it's much better to have a big destination like a university, a hospital, something to kind of anchor the end of the line that ensures you have ridership the whole way and that it's not just like petering out into nothing at the end, essentially. So um really positive to kind of like see that that was the decision that was made here. Um, speaking of ridership, uh, we don't have numbers yet, obviously, for the new extension. Again, this just opened. I mean, we're recording this on November 6th. This just opened on October 26th. Uh, and so we don't have specific numbers, but the ridership is expected to nearly triple uh from the roughly five to six thousand trips per day that they were used to seeing uh to upwards of 15,000 trips per day. So uh definitely significant.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and uh also something that you touched on about the downtown part of this line is that it runs in mixed traffic. A lot of this line that's now moving out of downtown is actually running in its own dedicated lane. So now we've eliminated this mixed traffic for a significant portion of the line, which is definitely a huge improvement.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. Um one last piece on the Main Street extension, too. Uh while we were there, we were actually starting to see quite a bit of development happening along the line, uh, even before it was open. That development is continuing. And I'm sure that more will be slated for the future uh along the line, uh, making it so that you've got folks who have access to housing, walking distance to this new transit option, uh, commercial districts, grocery stores, all this sort of stuff, which is definitely a net positive for uh the city. So pretty exciting to, you know, we it was not that long ago when we were there back in March. Um, I think both of us would have liked to have tried to make it, but this one was not in the cards. Chris had just made the Dallas uh one barely, but after Chris's trip uh and me being over here in Germany at the moment, um, weren't able to make it happen. But hopefully another trip to Kansas City is in the cards for us in the future. Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_04:I would love to go back to Kansas City. I had a great time there, and everybody's was so friendly, like the groups that we met. So I think we got four episodes out of Kansas City. This would be the fifth. Okay. Uh so if you want to check out more about Kansas City, there's there's plenty of episodes out there and plenty of content to check out. So there's the downtown line that we've talked about, there's the Main Street extension that we also just talked about, and then there's the riverfront extension, which isn't quite open yet. And the riverfront extension, we did see it while we were uh in Kansas City. I remember it was incre it was one of our coldest filming days ever. And we were standing on a bridge over the river, just getting pelted with sleet and trying to get video. So the things that we do uh for the love of transit, I I remember it well. Yeah, it was miserable. Um, but we we did get a chance to see a little bit of the line, and this one's a shorter extension, it's only uh three-quarters of a mile, and it heads north out of downtown and it connects the Berkeley Riverfront Park, um, which is a new housing development. We did see that that housing development, and this line is gonna be pretty critical to it because it's a little disconnected from the rest of sort of the grid. I think there's a lot of rail lines that run through. So this will be a really vital connection uh for this new housing community, and it also is going to connect to the KC current uh soccer stadium, which is the uh women's soccer stadium or sorry, women's soccer team uh in Kansas City.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and uh there's not a specific date for the opening of this line yet, um, but it does say early 2026. I do know that uh construction is essentially done on it. I believe they're doing testing and whatnot. Um, so it should be, you know, should be open imminently uh next year. Um and again, you know, great for folks who are living in that housing the development, great for the soccer games, but also any other events that are happening in that stadium, uh, as well as access to the park that's right there too, right along the riverfront, giving folks kind of easy access to get to all of those things without necessarily needing to use a car. Maybe that's our next trip.
SPEAKER_04:That's definitely we go to Kansas City to see for this extension, and then we can ride the entire length of the streetcar.
SPEAKER_02:That would actually I I could be down early next year, maybe. Maybe we'll make it happen.
SPEAKER_04:So Lauren and Donna, if you're listening, uh get ready. We're coming.
SPEAKER_02:So those are kind of the two extensions that are either now open or about to be open. Um, I've heard a lot less conversation about these, and it's because they're you know definitely a lot further off, but I love to keep the Kansas City momentum moving forward here. And there are two extensions that are kind of in the either planning phase or even just in the like kind of feasibility study phase. Uh, we'll start off with the one that is furthest along, which is the east-west transit study. So uh this would be a five and a half mile east-west line uh that would actually run fairly significantly south of downtown. This is not a line that would kind of intersect downtown and go east and west of it, um, but instead uh connect the uh KU Medical Center just over the state line in Kansas on the west side uh with the VA hospital on the east side. There's a small stretch of this that would actually overlap with the existing streetcar extension uh in the middle that would cover uh I think it was three or four blocks. So you'd have easy transfers there, and it would really connect quite a few key destinations as well as transit lines along the way, which is pretty exciting to see.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, three of the city's max buses, which are sort of the um higher capacity buses, um, those will connect in to this line as well. And those are the max buses, they are really designed to handle the busiest of the bus lines. So, as you're saying, a lot of good transit connectivity uh for the city by by adding uh this line.
SPEAKER_02:Again, this is all still kind of you know further out in the process. We'll go, we'll talk about where in the process shortly here, but they're aiming for similar frequencies that are happening on the existing streetcar line now of every 10 to 12 minutes during the week, every 15 minutes on the weekend. And when you take a look at the alignment on the map, it it seemingly just like makes sense looking at it. You see a lot of uh commercial areas, again, like I kind of mentioned earlier, having hospitals on either end of the line sounds interesting, but hospitals are huge employment centers. Tons of people are traveling there, people are traveling there for doctor's appointments, all sorts of things. So having anchors like that on either end of the line kind of helps ensure that you've got decent ridership throughout. I like that it's got the decent amount of overlap with the existing streetcar line. You've got a couple of my favorite big parking lot, strip malls in between. You could do a lot of work with those uh in terms of building out new housing, more commercial space, uh, especially now that folks will have another way to get there that doesn't necessarily involve getting in a car, which is is pretty exciting.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I think the alignment here really opens up the door for some potential revitalization of parts of the city and um making more dense corridors. I mean, as we've seen with all kinds of lines like this around the country, when you build it, suddenly there's new development, there's a lot more people living along those lines. So the economic opportunities of of this alignment are uh are really high. And it also goes through neighborhoods that at the moment uh are lower income neighborhoods. Some of them, many of them uh don't really have access to a car or struggle to afford having a car. So this really does open up a lot of opportunities for them to connect to multiple, as you're saying, multiple employment centers with the two hospitals. Now you can also join the main line, going from the university into downtown. So a lot of opportunities to get people moving and connecting them to the places that they need to be.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And it's great to see that those are things being called out in the studies being done here where they're trying to, you know, not only look at, you know, where is the highest ridership, but also, you know, where can this have the most, you know, the biggest impact on residents who actually rely on uh the transit, which is good to see. A couple other things to talk about on here. There is in in some of the you know initial feasibility studies and preferred alignments and all this sort of stuff. There's discussion about having they they use the fray, the phrase rubber tire connection. I'm not sure why you wouldn't just say bus, but uh having a bus connection on game days at the stadiums.
SPEAKER_04:The bus is not sexy, Lewis, but a rubber tire connection.
SPEAKER_02:A rubber tire love rubber tire connections, love them. Um, but having a rubber tire connection from the far east end of the line uh to the stadiums on game days, which presently the stadiums on game days don't have you know really reliable transit, uh, this line gets fairly close to it, and you could probably provide a much more uh reliable service in that regard to get out there. So uh like to see uh that there.
SPEAKER_04:So all this sounds great, but when can we actually get a chance to ride it? Or better yet, when will we see construction? Um well, this is currently still very early in the planning stages. Planning for this really began in 2022, and a lot of plans that we are looking at were published in 2023 and 2024. Um, in 2024, they did identify a locally preferred alternative, which is a requirement when you're putting in your um environmental impact study and you're seeking federal funds. So they are well along the way of developing that environmental impact study and getting ready to apply for those federal funds at least. Um so now that the locally preferred alternative was selected, they're uh really moving into the full environmental review, the preliminary engineering, um, advanced planning, engaging with the public to you know get their buy-in on this plan. So all of those planning stages that um you know lay the groundwork for getting to the construction period uh have already started. And all of this is uh all this planning and work is going towards uh again applying for federal funding. And the hope here uh is that they can uh get a decent amount of funding from the new starts grants.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And we'll see. I mean, it's still early in the process, there's a long road to go, but uh again, they're they're taking the right steps. And the early response from the public seems to be pretty positive. I was reading a couple news articles about it so far, and one in particular from K A K S H B. There's a couple quotes in here, you know, someone saying that would be great if only one of us had to have a car and we could share it. This is someone who lives in the neighborhood talking about the potential that, you know, going car light, going from two cars to one. There's also someone talking about uh quote, there's a lot of businesses on 39th that I'd love to be able to take the streetcar over there and love to be able to frequent them in that way. What's funny though is that same person also mentions, although there's so little parking right in front of the businesses as it is anyway, is everyone gonna be forced to park in the neighborhoods? Is that gonna adversely impact the neighborhoods along 39th Street as a result? So the same person who is saying, wow, I would actually frequent these businesses in the streetcar is simultaneously worried about the parking, which is a little funny, but um not to knock on that guy, but I thought that was uh the car culture runs Tun. Yes, it does, it does. Hey, and that's that that's fine. That's fine. So, yeah, pretty, pretty exciting there uh for the East-West transit study, and we'll definitely be keeping an eye on that one. And then kind of moving on to the final proposed extension for now, because Kansas City is surprising us with all sorts of extensions and plans, and hopefully they they keep it up. But this one covers a smaller area. We've got a lot less information on it because this is just started with the feasibility study beginning in September. But this is a study for the 18th and Vine area, which is an area where uh you have a lot of kind of cool old historic jazz clubs. The Negro League's baseball hall of fame is in this neighborhood, and it's definitely an area where a lot of people are going to visit. Um, there's potential about extending a line over here. And when you look at this one on a map, it looks really short. And I was kind of saying to Chris, it'd be interesting. Like this doesn't almost feels like it doesn't make sense as just a line that only goes back and forth. Maybe it does. I I I'm not I'm not 100% sure, but you could do all sorts of things where maybe you have a line that starts here, hits the main line, and then goes all the way south and goes down to the university, or one that goes north up to the river market. Uh, so it doesn't necessarily need to just go back and forth. You could potentially, you know, as you start laying more and more tracks, um, get creative with different uh uses of those tracks and have different routes utilize the same tracks that kind of have different start and ending destinations, which would be pretty cool to be able to take advantage of that.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And this extension makes sense to me as well. I mean, we visited this area while we were uh in Kansas City and uh saw some of the attractions here. And it does make sense to have some type of better transit connection between the core downtown and this part of town, um, not only for the historical sites you're gonna go visit, but also the neighborhoods around this area could really benefit from having uh really reliable and free, hopefully still free, uh transportation back into downtown. And then with the further extensions, being able to connect to many, many more places in the city.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And important to note too, there there is a decent amount of apartments in this area that folks would be able to take advantage of. Um, it seems like there's some industrial. I know that I remember going by kind of a bus depot there, so it could be a good way for bus drivers to be able to get in to go visit.
SPEAKER_04:We saw a lot of underutilized space. I feel like there were some vacant lots and some other um large areas, a little large uh uh redevelopable areas uh over here that would be prime for uh some economic development with this new line, too.
SPEAKER_02:And and in a way too, where it's like, I mean, you're not display you're building in parking lots, you're not you're not displacing people. Your your like you know, abandoned warehouse space, parking lots, empty lots, that sort of thing, which yeah, definitely is a major win. Curious to see where both of these go. It's excited to see you know the the momentum with the main street extension opening. I know there's a lot of excitement around it. I saw a few transit YouTubers. We'll we'll make sure that there's some links for videos for folks who actually got to go to the opening. Miles.
SPEAKER_04:We'll make sure that our videos Miles and Transitarios were together during their filming.
SPEAKER_02:Oh yes. So we'll we'll make sure that that links to their videos are there. Chris ran into both of them uh in New Orleans for the opening. And you just missed them by a day, I think, in Dallas. Chris got the the inside scoop. Our our friends at Data hooked us up with the uh the early invite for like the the the official like the ribbon cutting day, the one like the behind the scenes day. Um so so Chris got the sneak peek before the public got to ride the train. But um uh but yeah, so you you missed them that that day. But yeah, uh we'll we'll definitely make sure there's links there to check them out. And if you're interested in the streetcar two, something really cool that uh we put together for our Patreon members when we were in Kansas City for the early trip was uh we did the entire uncut tour of the maintenance facility where Lauren and Donna kind of walked us through the whole thing. And some of that made it into the YouTube episode. But the Patreon version of that is just like 45 minutes straight of like this is what the inside of the streetcar facility looks like. So if you want to support the show directly, um, you get access to early episodes when we have the Merley, although we've been fairly bad about that lately, but you also get a couple little bonus clips here and there, uh, such as that, uh, in addition to just helping us continue to do this every week. So um, yeah. Um overall, very exciting stuff though.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, absolutely. Very, very excited to to see this growth, to see this continual uh evolution in Kansas City, and I'm excited to go back. I definitely, I definitely think now thinking about it, we're going to try to make this uh this riverside extension happen. So if you can't be there, Lewis, I think.
SPEAKER_02:Somehow it's it's somehow the city we have done the most episodes in. Yeah. But uh with all that being said though, uh if you want to support the show, the best ways to do so are via our Patreon, by subscribing here on YouTube, leaving a comment. You can check out our merch store down below, all that good stuff. Um, but uh thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your transit tangents to the RJ, I'm saving that.
SPEAKER_00:Yo, public transit we have stacked, watch me go.