There is no perfect recipe for streetcar success. But from route design to fare price, experts say, there are cities Omaha can look to.
At the height of the modern streetcar boom, construction crews tore up roads in Washington, D.C., installed overhead wires in Atlanta and welded rails in Kansas City.
But that was more than a decade ago.
The urban transit trend fizzled once Obama-era funding dried up. Now, Omaha is belatedly hopping aboard to become the least populous metro with a modern streetcar. The estimated $478 million project has one benefit the others didn’t: hindsight.
Omaha has modeled its system after streetcar success stories and learned from others’ missteps, project leaders said.
The goal to drive development came from Portland, where the nation’s first modern streetcar helped turn an industrial district into a high-density neighborhood, said Steve Jensen, the interim director of the Omaha Streetcar Authority.
The downtown-to-midtown route mirrors Kansas City’s strategy of linking lively areas that appeal to locals and visitors, said streetcar operations manager Eric Miller.
Offering free rides follows a lesson learned by Oklahoma City, where ridership grew after fares disappeared, Miller said.
Armed with the historical playbook, Miller is aiming high — to make Omaha’s “the best streetcar in the world.”
But many critics still regard the project as a sweetheart deal for developers and big businesses without much public benefit. They say Omaha’s streetcar could end up like systems in Washington and St. Louis that didn’t attract enough riders to justify their huge cost.
“Streetcars basically are built for the stakeholders, but the stakeholders are not the riders (and) are not the taxpayers,” said Tom Rubin, a transportation consultant who grew up in Omaha.
There’s no perfect guidebook to a successful streetcar, said Peter Rogoff, who led the Federal Transit Administration during President Barack Obama’s first term. But there are examples across the country Omaha can look to, he said.
“I just hope that they’re learning from all of them,” he said.
Getting the green light
Is the public’s blessing needed to turn a proposed streetcar into a reality? In Omaha, Washington and Atlanta, the answer was no.
But nine of the other 16 modern streetcar projects had some kind of citizen mandate to move forward.
Portlanders and Kansas Citians living along proposed streetcar routes formed special tax districts, effectively funding the projects by taxing themselves.
Voters in Oklahoma City and Arizona’s two most populous counties approved spending packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars that included funding for streetcars. Cincinnati voters twice rejected anti-streetcar ballot measures to keep the project on the rails.
The lack of public consensus is still the Omaha project’s major shortcoming, said local real estate agent Ron Rubin, who is not related to Tom Rubin. In a 2023 letter to the Omaha World-Herald, he criticized the city for handing “profiteers access to citizens’ resources” without a public vote.
“There’s no sense of citizen input,” Ron Rubin said in an interview. “We’re just kind of in the dark.”
Omaha never voted on the streetcar because the project doesn’t rely on existing city funds or traditional public bonds, Jensen said. Instead, it’s paid for through a tax increment financing plan that draws on future taxes generated by new streetcar-adjacent developments.
“If you’re not paying for it, what are you voting on?” Jensen said. “It comes back to just a basic misunderstanding on the part of the public where they just can’t believe that they’re not paying for it in some way.”
No vote meant there wasn’t much public discussion before the project’s approval, which bred misinformation and skepticism, Jensen said. He estimates about 70% of Omahans are either against or unsure of the project.
Portland and Kansas City added another layer of public representation by forming diverse boards to govern their streetcars.
When construction began on the KC Streetcar in 2014, its board featured real estate developers, small-business owners, a city councilman and advocates for local transit and specific neighborhoods.
Including non-governmental voices focused Kansas City’s streetcar on rider experience and community engagement, said David Johnson, a transit advocate who served on the board for 13 years.
Six of the seven Omaha streetcar board members are employees of the city or Metro Transit, and the lone private-sector representative is influential developer Jay Noddle. None of the members hold elected office in Omaha.
The board’s makeup should better reflect local stakeholders, said Clark Ross, who founded the Streetcar Impact Alliance earlier this year to advocate for construction-affected businesses and residents.
“It didn’t seem like we were asked (for input) in the first place, so I do know a lot of us felt unheard,” said Ross, the owner of downtown bar Mercury.
The city isn’t obligated to include business owners or neighbors on the board of a TIF-backed project, but leaders plan to create an advisory committee to gather those perspectives, Jensen said.
The public can attend meetings and engage with the board the same as any other government panel, Jensen said.
Mayor John Ewing said he didn’t want to change the streetcar board he inherited since it could have disrupted the project’s timeline and cost, but he recognizes the need for diverse input. The city has expanded its communication on the project to keep business owners and neighbors informed, he said.
Where (not) to run a streetcar
Before shovel meets dirt, backers of a streetcar must answer a question that could make or break its appeal to riders: Where will it go?
The most successful streetcar routes are intuitive to riders and blend popular destinations with undeveloped land for future growth, transit experts said.
Kansas City threaded that needle with a straightforward track that runs through downtown, said Miller, the Omaha streetcar operations manager.
But other cities’ routes have undermined their usefulness. Oklahoma City’s streetcar twists and turns in confusing loops, Miller said.
Atlanta’s streetcar runs through areas that are too underdeveloped to draw many riders, said Joel Mendez, an urban planning professor at the University of Kansas.
Other streetcars struggled because they had only enough money to build a short route with no real benefit for riders. Without political buy-in, planned expansions never moved forward.
That was the case in Washington, which shut down its streetcar in March.
The $200 million streetcar opened in 2016 with a 2.4-mile route bookended by Union Station and RFK Stadium. Washington relies heavily on public transportation, and leaders initially had plans for a 37-mile footprint.
But the DC Streetcar couldn’t compete with a parallel bus system. Daily commuters found the trolleys slow and unreliable. Compared to the streetcar, the nearby bus route saw an average of 8,000 more daily riders in February 2026.
It took more time to plan and construct Washington’s streetcar than the line actually ran, according to the Washington Post. An electric bus line is slated to replace the defunct route.
Omaha’s route takes a page from Kansas City by connecting two bookends — Blackstone and the Riverfront — in a straight line through downtown with plenty of developable land, Miller said.
All cities face the same challenge once they have designated a route: years of painful construction.
Portland set the pace in the early 2000s, building its initial 2.4-mile route in just over two years. Kansas City finished its first line in under three years.
Both cities later committed to more construction and roughly tripled the length of their routes.
California’s Orange County has been working on its 4.1-mile route since 2018. Delays and lawsuits ballooned the cost to more than $600 million and pushed back opening day until at least early next year.
Omaha’s streetcar is slated to open in 2028, about two years behind its original timeline.
If you build it, will they come?
St. Louis businessman Joe Edwards had a simple pitch: Revive a piece of the city’s historic trolley and bring tourism and new developments to a neighborhood on the rise.
The St. Louis streetcar opened in 2018 with the help of federal funding. Officials projected 400,000 riders in the first year of operation.
In reality, it sold about 17,000 tickets in year one, charging between $2 and $5 for passes. It shut down in 2019 because it was too expensive to operate.
But then the feds came knocking: Get the streetcar back up and running or pay back the $37 million in funding. That line now runs seasonally. Total ridership in 2025 — about 10,300 —- was lower than the worst-attended Cardinals home game that year.
And rides are free, a tactic of nearly all streetcars completed since 2016. Omaha’s will be the same.
Streetcars in Cincinnati and Oklahoma City saw ridership grow after axing fares in recent years, proving the model’s virtue, Miller said.
In 2018, Omaha streetcar ridership projections estimated between 820 and 1,060 daily boardings. That would be roughly half of this year’s daily ridership of ORBT, the eight-mile bus route connecting downtown Omaha to Westroads Mall.
Jensen dismissed the projection as outdated and meaningless. Miller said he hopes for “at least a few thousand a day.”
To Tom Rubin, the projections should have been the red flag that halted proposals. The streetcar route is redundant with the faster and farther-reaching ORBT, which has also fallen short of its initial ridership projections, he said.
“It will be filled somewhere between extremely rarely and never,” Rubin predicted.
A magnet for growth?
Keith Novorr didn’t buy the “build it and they will come” argument for the Kansas City streetcar.
The owner of Michael’s Clothing blasted the creation of a special tax district encompassing his family’s century-old shop. He criticized the “construction hell” that drove businesses like his to the brink.
Then, the streetcar opened — and new buildings started rising up around his store.
Within a few years, a street “where you could shoot a cannon and not hit anybody” had transformed into a high-traffic business district lined with apartments, Novorr said. His new neighbors, many of them younger than his typical clientele, have become customers, he added.
“I was the naysayer the whole project, and now I’m eating crow because it’s really good,” Novorr said. “They were right. Economic development followed.”
Downtown Kansas City boasts more than $4 billion in development and at least 44% population growth since 2014.
Portland’s Pearl District is a glowing example of streetcar-driven development. Once a rail yard and warehouse hub, it’s now Oregon’s densest residential neighborhood, said streetcar spokesman Andrew Plambeck.
Despite the St. Louis streetcar’s struggle for riders, the city’s Delmar Loop — the business district along the trolley route — boasts new investments and commercial businesses in the last two years. Edwards believes the streetcar played a role.
Omaha claims the under-construction streetcar has already spurred $1.3 billion in development, with more to come. That growth justifies the streetcar, even if its immediate ridership doesn’t, Jensen said.
But streetcars don’t deserve all of the credit for spurring development, said Mendez, the Kansas professor. Cities usually pair streetcar projects with TIF and tax breaks, making it difficult to tell whether developers are responding to the new transit system or the other incentives, he said.
If a city’s primary goal is to encourage development, financial incentives might be cheaper and easier than a streetcar, Mendez said.
The financial and developmental outcomes of a successful streetcar project aren’t guaranteed, Rogoff, formerly of the FTA, said.
“But I think it’s a bet very much worth taking,” he said.