How to find out if your Kansas City bus stop is still served

You want to know whether the bus still stops at the corner, so you look it up. What you find depends on where you look, and the most obvious place is the wrong one.

KCATA’s schedule is the authority. It is what the RideKC trip planner and the Transit app run on, and KCATA publishes it for anyone to download. Kansas City’s open-data portal carries two bus-stop files, and neither one matches it. The older file is still up and still downloadable. It shows more than a thousand stops with no scheduled bus anywhere near them. The newer file is a snapshot from November 2024. Its search comes back empty if you type a stop’s name out in full, because the file cuts the names short.

The thirty-second version

• Ask the schedule. On a computer, go to ridekc.org and choose Plan Your Trip. On a phone, use Transit, which RideKC calls its official app, or RideKC Go. Or call KCATA at 816-221-0660.
• Do not trust a route page’s stop list. The timetables on ridekc.org name timepoints, the major stops, not every stop.
• Do not settle it with data.kcmo.org. One bus-stop file there is labelled Deprecated and last changed in March 2023. The other describes itself as current as of November 2024.

The route that works

1. Go to ridekc.org and open Plan Your Trip, under Getting Around.
2. In the From box, type the intersection where your stop is, for example 12th and Locust. Put anywhere you actually go in the To box.
3. Press Get Going. The planner works from KCATA’s current schedule. If it walks you a block to a different stop, look at that result closely.
4. On a phone, use Transit or RideKC Go. RideKC lists both on its Mobile App / Transit App page under the Rider Guide, and says Transit has real-time arrivals and a trip planner.
5. If the answer matters, say for a daily commute or for someone who cannot walk an extra block, call KCATA at 816-221-0660. That is the number KCATA puts in its own schedule file.

Before you decide a stop is gone, check the service alerts across the top of ridekc.org. Two detours were running when The Stare checked on September 23, 2026. The 18 Indiana and 27 27th Street are rerouted for the I-70 project until December 2027. The 402 Johnson-Quivira and 118 8th Street are rerouted for the 18th Street Bridge until fall 2027. A detoured stop drops out of the schedule while the work lasts, then comes back.

THE CATCH

The file most people have downloaded is the old one

Kansas City’s open-data portal, data.kcmo.org, carries two files with KCATA’s bus stops in them.

KCATA Bus Stops - Deprecated, dataset bd2s-bfst, was created in April 2013 and its rows were last written on March 2, 2023. It holds 3,566 stops. It is still public, and it has been downloaded 14,880 times.

The city deserves credit for the label. The title says Deprecated, and the description says: “This is an old dataset. Please refer to the KCATA Bus Stops dataset for more comprehensive data.” But the download is a list of stop numbers, names, and coordinates, and none of that warning travels with it. Once the file is in a spreadsheet or on somebody’s map, nothing in it says it is old.

The Stare checked all 3,566 stops against KCATA’s current schedule, the version dated August 27, 2026, on September 23, 2026:

The 150-meter test is there so a renumbered stop does not count as a missing one. When KCATA gives a stop a new number, the old number vanishes from the schedule while a bus still pulls up at the same curb. 61 of the old file’s unmatched numbers have a scheduled stop within 40 meters, which is almost certainly what happened to them. The other 1,218 have no scheduled stop within about 500 feet.

The current file is almost two years old

KCATA Bus Stops, dataset ydqf-pvmx, is the file the old one sends you to. It describes itself as a list of stops “as of November 2024,” and the city uploaded it on February 18, 2026. It has not changed since. Against the same schedule:

Seventy-six stops that KCATA schedules today appear in neither city file.

Type the full name and you get nothing

The current file cuts stop names off at about 25 characters. 227 of its 2,467 names are exactly 25 characters long, and none is longer than 26. So the eastbound stop at 12th and Locust is stored as:

ON 12TH AT LOCUST EASTBOUN

The Stare ran the searches a rider would type against the file’s own search on September 23, 2026:

A zero here looks exactly like “that stop does not exist.” It means the name was too long for the column. Search for one street name, and type it the way the sign would, 12th rather than 12th Street.

The route pages leave out most stops

The timetable on each ridekc.org route page names timepoints, and the page says what those are: “major stops where specific times are listed.” The Stare compared the route 12 page with the schedule. The 12 serves 66 stops, and 13 are named on the page. The eastbound stop at 12th and Locust is one of the 53 that are not. It is served, and it has one of the highest counts in the city’s file.

A stop missing from a route page is not a missing stop.

What the city’s file says about your stop

The current file does carry something the schedule does not: what is at each stop. It is the only public record of it, it is a November 2024 snapshot, and its description warns: “This data may be inaccurate or incomplete.” With that said, it records:

Each stop also carries an on, off, and total count. The file does not say what period the counts cover, so The Stare does not turn them into riders per day. Ranked by that total, the 100 busiest stops account for 45.9% of all the activity in the file. The file records no shelter at 32 of those 100 and neither a shelter nor a bench at 20. The 12th and Locust eastbound stop has the fifth-highest count in the city, and the file records no shelter and no bench there.

If a shelter has gone up since November 2024, this file would not show it. That is the problem in one sentence.

The best defence, and what survives it

Bus networks change. KCATA revises its schedule several times a year, and the version checked here runs only until October 3, 2026. Any fixed copy of a stop list starts going stale the day it is saved. The portal belongs to the city and the stops belong to KCATA, so a file on the portal is only ever a copy. The old file does say it is old. Some of the unmatched stops are on detours that will end.

That covers the drift. It does not cover a deprecated file that stays one click from the current one, more than three and a half years after its last edit, with no warning in the download. It does not cover a “current” file that was fifteen months old on the day it was posted. It also does not cover the link. The old file’s source link, kcata.org/transit_data/access_gtdf, now forwards to a general KCATA page on ridekc.org, not to the data. The live schedule is at ridekc.org/static-gtfs, linked from RideKC’s Open Data page, and neither city file points there.

Check us

The schedule is a zip file of plain-text tables, and stops.txt is the list of stops. Open it in any spreadsheet. Search it without regard to case, because most names are in capitals and a few are not.

# Download KCATA's current schedule, the file that decides whether a bus stops
curl -sL "https://ridekc.org/static-gtfs" -o ridekc-gtfs.zip

# Find your stop in the city's current file, by one street name
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/ydqf-pvmx.json?\$q=locust&\$select=stop_id,stop_name,shelter,bench"

# Watch the full-name search come back empty
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/ydqf-pvmx.json?\$q=12th%20at%20locust%20eastbound"

# Read the city's own dates and description for both files
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/bd2s-bfst.json"
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/ydqf-pvmx.json"

The backslash before each $ is there so your shell leaves it alone. Every count in this piece comes from those files as they stood on September 23, 2026.