Where to park in downtown Kansas City

You’re driving downtown for a game, a show, or a court date, and you want to know where to leave the car and what it will cost. Kansas City publishes a list of downtown garages and lots for exactly that. It’s a fine map of where lots are. Just don’t believe its prices, and check it twice before you pay for a lot on a Saturday.

The thirty-second version

• The city’s list is dataset h52f-6dpi, “Off Street Parking,” on data.kcmo.org. It has garages and surface lots across downtown, the Crossroads, and Crown Center.
• It has not changed since the day it went up, August 18, 2023, and has no date on any row. The sign at the lot entrance beats the file.
• Some lots are in it twice, at different prices. Read every row for an address.
• On weekends, look at 601 and 711 Main first. The KC Streetcar says both are free on weekends, except during KC Current home games. The city file says one is for bank employees.
• Use the search box, not a column filter, or type the street with a capital first letter. A filter for MAIN returns nothing.

Finding it, in a browser

Go to data.kcmo.org and search for Off Street Parking, or go straight to data.kcmo.org/d/h52f-6dpi. The page offers a table and a map. Each row is one garage or lot: its name when it has one, address, ZIP code, whether it is a garage or a surface lot, the number of spaces, and fields for hours, height clearance, daily, monthly, and event prices, and a phone number.

Use the search box on the data view and type the street you are headed to. It ignores capitals: on September 28, 2026, Main, MAIN, and main each returned the same 22 lots. The column filters do not ignore them. Filtering the address column for MAIN or main returned zero lots, with no error, while Main returned 22. The file stores streets with a capital first letter and the rest lower case, so type them that way, or use search.

Then read the daily rate field before you go. In 22 of the 148 rows it does not hold a price. It says the lot is not yours: UMB Employees Only on six rows, Commerce Employees and tenents only on six, Quality Hill Tenants Only on one, Hotel Guests only on two, Private Lot on four, and Monthly Only on three.

Two lists, one file

Scroll past row 72 and the file changes character. The first 72 rows have names like Auditorium Plaza Garage and Town Pavilion Garage, a phone number, and most have hours. The other 76 have no name, no phone number, and no hours. They have an address, a type, and usually a single price.

That is two surveys pasted end to end, and where they cover the same ground, the lot shows up more than once. Ten street addresses appear two or three times, across 22 rows, and the copies do not always agree:

Some of that is real. Two things can sit at one address, and 1220 Walnut may have a garage and a small lot. But the file has no column that says which survey a row came from or when it was taken, so a reader can’t tell a second lot from a second opinion.

The duplicates also spoil the one number everybody wants. The space counts in the file add to 36,827, across the 118 rows that have one. That total counts some lots twice and skips the 30 rows with no count. The KC Streetcar’s own figure is “nearly 40,000” spaces around its downtown route. Neither number comes with a method.

The free lot the file calls private

The KC Streetcar’s parking page has the best tip on the subject, and the city file contradicts it.

On weekends, the streetcar page says, parking is free at the 7th and Main lots, 601 Main and 711 Main, beside the North Loop northbound stops. It promises signs and “at least 150 FREE parking spaces,” and warns that the lots “are not free during weekdays or KC Current home games.”

The city’s file has 711 Main as a 118-space surface lot for Commerce Employees and tenents only. It has 601 Main twice, at 112 spaces and at 91, with no daily price and $65 a month.

Both can be true. A bank’s weekday employee lot can open to the public on Saturday, and the arrangement may have started after August 2023. The file can’t say, because nothing in it has a date, and the streetcar page doesn’t give one either. Go by the sign on the lot. On a weekend with no Current game, try Main Street first.

The ZIP codes that point to the wrong part of town

Nine rows carry a ZIP code from well outside downtown. 2301 McGee and 2510 Grand at Crown Center, and 1400 Walnut in the Power and Light District, are filed under 64145, a ZIP in far south Kansas City. 300 Wyandotte, in the River Market, is filed under 64118, north of the river. 800 Charlotte is under 64131, and 1100 and 1300 Main under 64111. Two rows have no address at all: they read 0 No Address, ZIP 64165.

The file’s own map points for the seven with an address sit downtown, within a block of where the U.S. Census Bureau’s geocoder puts the street address. So the lots are where you’d expect. If you filter the file by ZIP, you won’t find them.

What to do with all that

Use the file to find where the lots are, and nothing else. For the rest:

• Price and hours: the sign at the entrance. The file’s prices were collected before August 2023 and carry no date.
• Street meters: Visit KC’s parking page sends drivers to the city’s Park KC app to pay for metered parking by phone.
• On the streetcar route: park entirely inside the painted white lines, mirrors included. The streetcar can’t swerve, and its page says a car over the line or on the tracks can be ticketed, fined, and towed.
• Or skip downtown parking. The streetcar is free to ride and runs from the riverfront, through the River Market and downtown, to UMKC at 51st and Brookside. Union Station, on the line, has paid surface lots and a garage.

Check us

These re-run the numbers in this piece. The city file has not changed since 2023, so its counts should hold; the streetcar page can change without notice.

# When the city's parking file was created and last changed, and what columns it has
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/h52f-6dpi.json"

# A column filter for MAIN in capitals: zero lots
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/h52f-6dpi.json?\$where=address%20like%20'%25MAIN%25'"

# The same filter as the file stores it: 22 lots
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/h52f-6dpi.json?\$where=address%20like%20'%25Main%25'"

# Every row the file holds for 601 Main and 711 Main
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/h52f-6dpi.json?\$where=address%20like%20'601%20Main%25'%20OR%20address%20like%20'711%20Main%25'"

Sourcing: all figures about the city's parking list are from dataset h52f-6dpi, "Off Street Parking," on data.kcmo.org, and its published metadata, queried by The Kansas City Stare on September 28, 2026. The weekend-parking arrangement and the 40,000-space figure are from the KC Streetcar's parking page, kcstreetcar.org/route/parking/, read the same day; the Park KC app is named on Visit KC's parking page. ZIP codes for the listed addresses are from the U.S. Census Bureau's public geocoder. The Stare did not visit any lot or confirm any price. The file's column naming lot managers is not reproduced.