In Brief:
- The Kansas City Streetcar is opening a new extension to the Missouri River waterfront today.
- In combination with an extension opened last year, the route is now three times as long as it was when it opened a decade ago.
- Officials credit it with spurring development and boosting transit ridership.
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.”…