Fueled By Success, Kansas City Streetcar Extends Its Reach | Columbus Ohio Dump Trucks

Ten years ago, a 2.2-mile streetcar system opened in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Now it is growing, with a $350-million, 3.5-mile extension to the south opening last fall. A $61-million, nearly mile-long extension to the north is slated to open this spring, with construction ongoing on a $5-million new station pavilion and public space at the Berkley Riverfront Park.

“We had been trying for decades to bring high-capacity transit to the city,” says Tom Gerend, executive director of the KC Streetcar Authority, recalling the opening of the starter line. “We said, let’s start small and demonstrate that we can do this, that it will work, and the benefits are real.”

In the first year, the daily ridership was some 6,600 trips—twice as much as anticipated—and millions of dollars were invested in related development. 

“It redefined our downtown,” says Gerend. 

As the authority began planning extensions, it decided to forego a typical fare-based scenario. Seventy percent of voters approved a measure to pay a 1% sales tax on retail purchases within the Transportation Development District area, assessments based on their property values, and parking lot assessments. The funds fuel the construction and operations and maintenance, says Gerend.

“We remove the fare, people [ride the streetcar to] buy stuff, and we collect indirect fares” from the sales tax, he says, adding that the authority reaps savings by not having to spend on fare collection and enforcement. “It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

The Southern Slope

The streetcar authority partnered with the city and the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority on the Main Street southern extension, which received a $174-million federal grant. 

HDR, which led design of the starter system, reprised its role for the extensions. “Once you go south, where the starter line ends, it’s through the central business district core,” says Nick Stadem, HDR senior vice president. The streetcar shares alignment space with a six-lane road and buses. The goal, says Stadem, is  to create an urban renewal opportunity that might include increasing sidewalks, narrowing the road, and creating green space.

A joint venture of Herzog Contracting Corp. and Stacy and Witbeck built the southern extension through a construction manager-at-risk contract in five years.  The alignment included a couple of “significant hills” of up to 7% grades, notes Jon Collins, the joint venture’s project manager.  

“The biggest challenge was the congested columbus oh dump truck work area,” he adds. “There was a lot of traffic and ton of businesses like the Federal Reserve and the Westin. We couldn’t ever shut the road down.”

The team formed hundreds of traffic control plans, new drainage systems, improvements to the main street and intersections, and built 15 stations and a new vehicle maintenance facility. Every day at 1 pm, “we huddled up and talked about the plan for the next day,” he says. It also hired a sub specializing in dump trucks columbus oh community outreach. The route connects to the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Riverfront Redevelopment

The Port Authority of Kansas City joined the project partners for the northern extension in a public-private partnership, contributing funds in addition to a $32-million federal grant.

Radmacher Brothers Excavating leads a team building the riverfront extension to the north under a progressive design-build contract. Most of the extension runs on the existing curved Grand Avenue Viaduct, notes Stadem. “It was not designed for embedded rail, and not wide enough for a separate track.”

voestalpine Railway Systems Nortrak, a subsidiary of an Austrian railway systems firm, provided specialized rail that could fit on the bridge. The alignment ends near the KC Current Stadium.

Burns & McDonnell leads the design-build team building the $5-million CPKC Pavilion located at the northern terminus. The public gathering space at the south platform includes a 12-ft-high structural steel canopy clad in metal panels and supported by 11 structural steel columns on 6-ft by 6-ft by 3-ft concrete footings, according to the firm’s website. The pavilion is scheduled to open later this year.

Gerend says that due to the northern extension, there are now 1,200 occupied units on the waterfront, with another 1,000 under construction. “When we started planning, there was nothing there,” he says. Now, the city anticipates some $1 billion in developments by the end of the decade.

The streetcar authority is continuing studies regarding three possible expansions, including an approximately 6-mile east-west line, an extension over the Missouri River into north Kansas City, and an extension into the 18th and Vine district.

Aileen Cho, ENR's deputy editor for infrastructure, is a born-again Angeleno and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. She has been honored, solo or with ENR colleagues, with several journalism awards. For ENR, she has traveled the world, clambering over bridges, touring airports, and descending into tunnels. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun (bridge engineers aren't far behind). She is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Eagle Rock, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.