Streetcar rides skyrocketed during World Cup. Agency points to another cause
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- KC Streetcar ridership jumped to nearly 700,000 passengers in June.
- The agency reported 75% of June riders traveled between non–festival stops.
- The agency said the 6.5-mile expansion contributed to higher ridership.
The FIFA World Cup and an extended route have pushed the KC Streetcar to break another record.
The KC Streetcar Authority said that ridership in June jumped to nearly 700,000 passengers, shattering the transportation service’s previous monthly record.
The increased ridership is also nearly double the monthly average for the first five months of 2026, according to the organization’s June report. In May, ridership reached 474,000.
Soccer fans have embraced the free transportation service while visiting the city for its World Cup matches in June.
The agency said ridership increased significantly on days the FIFA Fan Festival was open at the National World War I Museum & Memorial. The agency previously said the single-day ridership record was broken on June 27, when Algeria and Austria faced off at Arrowhead Stadium.
However, the majority of passengers who used the streetcar in June did not appear to be related to the fan festival. The agency said 75% of riders used the service to travel to and from other stops on the line, such as the River Market and Country Club Plaza.
The agency said that means the increased ridership also stems from the expansion of the service, which now travels 6.5 miles from the riverfront to the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s campus.
In June 2025, when the streetcar traveled just 2.2 miles in the city’s downtown area, a little more than 162,000 passengers used the service, the agency said. That’s less than a quarter of the passengers who used the service last month.
Tom Gerend, executive director for KC Streetcar Authority, said in the news release that the increased ridership shows “our expanded streetcar alignment is delivering lasting value, with improved connectivity benefiting residents, businesses, and visitors across the city.”
Streetcar ridership had already been on the rise this year before the World Cup, vastly outpacing total passenger rides of previous years.
The agency reported the streetcar transported more than 350,000 passengers each in March, April and May of this year. The streetcar had only surpassed that many monthly riders once before in December 2025.
Additional expansions of the streetcar route could come in the future. The Streetcar Authority has studied the feasibility of an east-west route from the Crossroads to 18th and Vine. A previous study also examined an east-west streetcar connecting the University of Kansas Medical Center and the VA Hospital along 39th Street and Linwood Boulevard.
The agency is also studying a possible expansion across the Missouri River into North Kansas City.
Meanwhile, Mayor Quinton Lucas has envisioned an even grander extension. He recently said on a KC Studio podcast that a streetcar stop at the Kansas City International Airport was on his extension wishlist, calling it the “grand kahuna.”
“I think that’d be great for KC,” he said.
The Star’s Eleanor Nash and Robert A. Cronkleton contributed to this report.
