How the Kansas City Streetcar Is Trying to Rewrite History

David Trowbridge: I remember as a kid, if you can imagine, like a 1984 Buick LaSabre going down Main Street, and there’s this little boy with his face pressed up against the window.

This is Dr. David Trowbridge. He’s a professor of digital and public humanities at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Trowbridge: I thought, “Wow. You know, people coming out of these buildings must be important and doing important things, and if I could only end up here, I could be important, too.” Well…one of the things I do now is tell Kansas City’s story.

Forty years after a much younger David cruised down Main Street, a new sort of vehicle is about to start making that same trip. But in many ways, it’s not new at all — much like the Buick LeSabre, it’s actually a bit of a throwback.

I’m Janek Schaller, and this is In Transit: a Midstory series bringing you dispatches from the cusp of a new era in Midwest public transportation. Today’s episode: how the Kansas City Streetcar is trying to rewrite history.

In the second half of 2025, a streetcar will carry passengers south of Pershing Street to the Midtown neighborhood of Kansas City for the first time in nearly 70 years. To fully understand why this is such a big deal, we need to rewind all the way to 1870, when the first horse-drawn streetcar lines were established in the city. The impetus for these early forays into public transit didn’t come from civic engineers or transportation planners. In fact, the lines were mostly created by landlords hoping to increase the value of their property by connecting it to the city core. 

This is important; the development of public transit emerges in Kansas City in part through the development of real estate. We’ll circle back to this later.

In the twentieth century, those individual lines were gradually electrified and consolidated into a single transit network serving all of Kansas City. The system’s popularity peaked during World War II, reaching 152 million passengers in 1942.

But Kansas City’s streetcar heyday did not last forever. In 1955, only 13 years after the system’s peak, the Board of the Kansas City Public Service Company unanimously voted to halt service on the last six lines in operation and sell the remaining 144 streetcars to other cities. Proponents of the decision cited the significant cost savings, but a handful of the people in attendance at that late-summer meeting did voice some opposition. A petition aiming to prevent the removal of the system even amassed 11,000 signatures by April of 1957 — roughly 1.3% of Kansas City’s total population. But it was all for naught. In June of that year, the last of the city’s streetcars were finally decommissioned. 

What led to such a dramatic fall from grace? David has two main explanations for the streetcar’s decline:

Trowbridge: One is Detroit starts making automobiles again in huge numbers, and the other is suburbanization spreads like wildfire.

Suburbanization, as the name suggests, is a process where a population migrates from the urban core to surrounding areas, and, as a result, decreases in density. Kansas City was far from the only U.S. city that experienced this phenomenon, but it serves as a pretty striking example. According to an article from Strongtown, a nonprofit organization that analyzes development patterns in American cities, the population of Kansas City in 1946 was 434,000, and its geographic footprint was about 60 square miles, which gave the city a population density equivalent to modern-day Chicago. In the next 18 years, the city’s population grew by about 12%, while its area increased by 423%. 

As population density in the KC metro area decreased through suburbanization, personal vehicles became better positioned to meet the city’s transportation needs, right at a time when car manufacturing was taking off. Building infrastructure for all those new vehicles quickly became a national political priority, too. In 1956, the Federal-Aid Highway Act funneled $25 billion — $290 billion in today’s dollars — towards highway construction over the course of 12 years. Massively outspent and with fewer and fewer people to serve, the KC streetcar had little choice but to fold.

As was the case with the streetcar lines 70 years prior, Kansas City’s highway construction boom was fueled by the desire to develop lucrative real estate at the margins of the metropolitan area and connect it with the city center. But while the highways did draw thousands of residents to several new suburban communities, their construction came at the expense of some historic and well-established urban neighborhoods.

Highway 71, for instance, connected three northern suburbs with downtown, but the construction effort displaced 10,000 residents of Eastern KC in a historically Black and redlined portion of the city. During the construction of the Downtown Loop highway, locals pointed to the piles of rubble on what was formerly 6th Street as evidence of the “Kansas City Blitz.”

Suburbanization stalled downtown KC’s economic engine and gutted several thriving communities, many of which still have not recovered. In 1950, Midtown was home to 73,000 people — today, only 28,000 remain. Fewer people now live within the city’s 1946 geographic boundaries than lived there in the year 1946.

Tom Gerend: We lost hundreds of 1000s of people and jobs from the core of our city to the fringe. And for 50 years, all we focused on was building out and all while hollowing out our, our core, and so we’re now…being intentional about how do we, how do we regrow ourselves as a city sustainably from the inside out.

That’s Tom Gerend, the Executive Director of the Kansas City Streetcar Authority. He was the organization’s very first employee back in 2014, two years after KC voters approved the creation of something called a Transportation Development District to fund a new two-mile streetcar line in downtown Kansas City.

A Transportation Development District, or TDD, is essentially a new revenue stream that is created to help fund the expense of a transit project. In this case, the funding structure included a one-cent sales tax, a property tax and a tax per parking space in every surface lot — a slick built-in incentive to keep car infrastructure in check. 

Given the high population density in the district, even these relatively small increases would generate enough revenue to cover all operating expenses, making the streetcar entirely free to ride. In a resounding display of excitement for the project, 99% of the district voted in favor of the TDD.

In 2025, the KC Streetcar will officially add an additional three and a half miles of track running directly through Midtown, the aforementioned neighborhood suffering from population decline and gentrification. With Tom’s talk of revitalizing Midtown through new economic and commercial development, I couldn’t help but think about the historical relationship between real estate and transportation in Kansas City. It’s great to attract new residents and businesses to the neighborhood, but what about the people that already live in Midtown? Who have lived there for generations, and are at risk of being priced out of their homes?

Tom didn’t shy away from the subject. Affordability was a primary concern in the development process, and he said that a zero-fare form of public transit adds significant value to a working class neighborhood where few residents own cars. It’s also something the majority of Midtown inhabitants are interested in. The route expansion was paired with an extension of the TDD to cover the new service area, and the proposal passed with 70% of the vote. But above all else, Tom sees the streetcar as a conduit, as something that creates momentum in a part of the city that sorely needs it.

Gerend: It’s never really been about the shiny streetcar. It was about “What does downtown see for itself? What does downtown want to be, physically, in the future, and what’s transportation’s role?“

In our conversation, Tom talked a lot about what he called “false fears” surrounding the development of public transit in Kansas City. People have said that KC is too invested in car culture, that the streetcar would be unsafe, or that it wouldn’t make enough of an economic impact. In large part, these fears can be seen as “false,” through the overwhelming support the proposals enjoyed at the ballot box, or the millions of riders that have embraced the streetcar, ringing in a long-awaited public transit resurgence in a city that used to be shaped by it.

The streetcar could remake Kansas City once again. But, as Tom said, it’s only a conduit for a much bigger vision of what the city could be. Beyond the false fears, there’s still a question that the streetcar can’t answer on its own: Who gets to look out at Midtown and dream of being important? As David Trowbridge would tell you, it very much depends on the windows we press ourselves up against.

^{This story was updated on January 10th, 2025 to reflect an update provided by the Kansas City Streetcar Authority on the official opening date of the system expansion.}