The 2026 FIFA World Cup, running June 11 through July 19 across 16 host cities, is the first 48-team edition of the tournament and the largest sporting event ever staged in North America. For the 11 US host cities, FIFA required a Transportation Plan as part of the bid package. Now those plans are being tested in real time, against real crowds, with real consequences for the regular commuters who share the network. A week into the group stage, the picture is mixed: some cities are moving fans smoothly, others are not, and the divergence has less to do with effort than with infrastructure decisions made decades ago.
New York/New Jersey: Penn Station Under Pressure
MetLife Stadium, the tournament's largest venue at roughly 82,500 seats, sits in the Meadowlands Sports Complex — a site reachable by car, by bus, or by NJ Transit's dedicated Meadowlands Line spur from Secaucus Junction. On paper, that rail link is the showpiece of the NY/NJ transit plan. In practice, the early matches have exposed how thin the margin is.
Ridership below target
For the tournament's first NY/NJ fixture, Brazil–Morocco on June 13, NJ Transit moved roughly 21,500 riders to the Meadowlands — well short of the 40,000-rider commitment baked into the original plan. Three days later, for France–Senegal on June 16, the agency moved about 25,797 riders by rail and bus combined. FIFA's own $20 round-trip dedicated shuttle sold all 12,000 tickets before kickoff, suggesting demand is there; the question is whether the rail spur, the buses, and the Penn Station concourse can absorb it.
The commuter tradeoff
The most contentious operational decision has been NJ Transit's ticket-holder-only entry policy at Penn Station on match days. For the June 16 match, regular commuters were turned away from the concourse and rerouted to PATH or to Newark Penn Station. Local outlets described the scene as "absolute mayhem," and an Amtrak switch malfunction added roughly 30 minutes of delay on top of the congestion. NJ Transit carries about 90,000 weekday riders through Penn Station; protecting the event experience meant imposing real, measurable costs on people who had nothing to do with the World Cup.
The MTA, for its part, added extra service on the 1, 7, C, and F lines, suspended overnight maintenance windows, and stationed hundreds of ambassadors at key stations. That kind of surge response is exactly the playbook New York perfected during earlier mega-events — but it does not solve the commuter-versus-fan tradeoff, which will recur for every remaining NY/NJ match and which has obvious implications for LA28. The political response has been varied too, with some local officials reviving discussion of a fare-free bus pilot tied to the tournament as a way to make the experience smoother for everyone.
Kansas City: A Bus-Only System Meets a Two-Gate Bottleneck
Kansas City Stadium — formerly Arrowhead, capacity just over 69,000 — has no heavy rail connection. None. The Truman Sports Complex is reachable by car or by bus, and that is the entire menu. The locally branded ConnectKC26 bus system was built to fill the gap, and on paper it looked solid: 247 buses on 3 routes, a target of sub-20-minute waits, and a $15 Stadium Direct round-trip ticket. The KC Streetcar along the Main Street corridor fed fans from downtown and the Fan Fest to the ConnectKC26 boarding zones, running 12 streetcars at 4-to-5-minute headways.
What actually happened on June 16
The first KC match — Argentina vs. Algeria, the one where Lionel Messi scored a hat trick to tie the all-time World Cup goals record — did not match the plan. KC2026 officially acknowledged "operational constraints" that caused significant delays, and the underlying problem was structural: at NFL Chiefs games, the stadium opens eight ticket-holder entrances. FIFA reduced that to two — the northwest and northeast corners of Lots G and C. With ingress capacity cut by 75 percent, the approach roads backed up, law enforcement began rerouting vehicles, and bus drivers found themselves without real-time guidance.
The KC Streetcar briefly closed the National WWI Museum stop near Fan Fest for about 30 minutes due to overcrowding. Communications director Donna Mandelbaum framed it plainly: "We don't ever want to close the stop, but if it's for a safety concern, we will. We got that stop opened, I think, within 30 minutes." That was the system working — a calibrated safety response, brief, reversed quickly.
The buses were a harder story. John Haltiwanger, a fan from New York, boarded a ConnectKC26 bus at Fan Fest at 4:15 pm and did not enter the stadium until 7:30. "The bus driver seemed very confused about what to do next," he said. "We just started trying different routes, kind of driving in a circle around the stadium." He eventually walked the last mile and a half on foot. Alinda Sabin, from Olathe, said it took two hours to reach a disembarkation point from Johnson County. Not everyone struggled — Algeria supporter Mouloud Roua, traveling from Washington, said his bus was "on time" and called it "a good experience" — but the variance itself is the problem.
Capacity is not the same as communication
KC2026 called the day "an extraordinary success" while simultaneously acknowledging the failures. FIFA followed on June 18 with a statement promising "lessons related to traffic and transportation… are learned ahead of the next matches." A transportation press briefing was scheduled for June 19, ahead of Ecuador vs. Curacao on June 21. The honest read is this: 247 buses is plenty of vehicles. What KC lacked was the dispatch authority to reroute them when law enforcement changed road access mid-match, and a passenger information system to tell riders where to go when the original plan stopped working.
Dallas/Fort Worth: A Quiet Win on Rail-Plus-Shuttle
AT&T Stadium in Arlington is, like Kansas City's, not directly served by rail. But DART and the Trinity Railway Express stitched together a workable Sunday operation for Netherlands–Japan on June 14: fans rode TRE to the CentrePort/DFW Airport station and transferred to a free 20-minute shuttle to the stadium. Total journey about 1.5 hours, $9 day pass. Fan feedback described the experience as "super smooth" — a notable contrast to Kansas City just two days later, with similar underlying geography. The difference was that the rail-to-shuttle handoff was a single, well-rehearsed transfer point, not a system improvising under live conditions.
Los Angeles: A Hub-and-Spoke Rehearsal for 2028
LA is hosting 8 matches at the Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park (capacity ~70,240) through a possible July 10 final, and the city's plan is the most ambitious of any US host. LA Metro is running direct buses to the stadium from 12+ boarding locations across Southern California, every 10 minutes, beginning 3.5 to 4.25 hours before kickoff. The hubs read like a regional map: LAX/Metro Transit Center (about 15 minutes to the stadium), Union Station (about 40), Downtown Long Beach (about 50), Downtown Santa Monica (about an hour), North Hollywood (about 75), and ARTIC in Anaheim (about 70). Drop-off is at Lots S, R, or T, with a 5-to-13-minute walk to the gates. This is the multimodal hub-and-spoke approach executed at regional scale.
Metrolink added special service on five lines for all eight match days, including late-night returns, and a Metrolink ticket includes free transfer to Metro bus and rail. Buses depart Union Station every 10 minutes after each Metrolink arrival.
The open-payments stress test
Perhaps the most consequential piece is the timing of LA Metro's system-wide contactless open payment launch on May 28, 2026 — two weeks before the first match. Tap-to-pay is now a ticketing option on Metrolink's World Cup hub. This is the first major real-world stress test of open payments at LA scale, and it matters far beyond soccer: it is also a rehearsal for LA28, where the same network will move spectators across 16 days of Olympic competition plus the Paralympic Games. Every operational lesson from 2026 — sufficient headways, bus bottlenecks, payment-system performance under surge — feeds directly into a larger event two years out.
A Canadian Comparison: Vancouver's Record Saturday
Across the border at BC Place, TransLink recorded more than 1 million boardings on the tournament's first match day, June 13 — the busiest Saturday on the system since the 2010 Winter Olympics. TransLink also partnered with the Transit app to make the premium Royale tier free for Vancouver users on match days, a small but smart frictionless touch. Vancouver's advantage is the same one LA enjoys: a rail-anchored network designed and tested for a prior mega-event.
What This Week Has Already Taught Us
A few cross-cutting lessons are emerging clearly.
Infrastructure decisions made decades ago are decisive
KC and Dallas have no heavy rail to their stadiums; NY/NJ and LA do, and still strained it. The cities that invested in fixed-guideway transit a generation ago are better positioned today — a pattern that echoes the broader transit fiscal cliff debate about whether agencies have the capital plans to keep their systems intact, let alone expand.
Operational capacity is not the same as rider communication
KC fielded 247 buses. The buses ran. What failed was the information layer — drivers without rerouting authority, riders without real-time guidance, a plan that did not survive contact with two-gate ingress. Future match-day playbooks need a live operations center with the authority to push route changes to drivers and passengers within minutes.
The commuter tradeoff has no clean answer
NJ Transit's ticket-holder-only Penn Station policy protected the event but disrupted 90,000 daily riders. There is no template for this yet. Whatever NY/NJ settles on will become the de facto starting point for LA28, and for any future US host of a tournament this size.
Open payments are event infrastructure
The reason LA Metro's May 28 launch matters is that fare friction is event friction. Tapping a bank card is simply faster than buying a paper ticket at a kiosk staffed by an overwhelmed ambassador. It is also more accessible to international visitors who do not want to learn a regional fare app. Every host city, eventually, will need to get here.
The World Cup has another month to run, and the operational story will keep evolving — KC's June 21 fixture against Ecuador and Curacao is the next real test, and the knockout rounds will concentrate larger crowds at fewer venues. But the bigger story is already visible: the United States is using this tournament as a continent-scale experiment in moving people, and the data being generated over the next four weeks will shape Olympic transportation planning in Los Angeles, future World Cup bids, and the case every transit agency makes for the kind of long-horizon rail investment that pays off precisely when 69,000 people need to be in the same place at the same time.