The FIFA World Cup 2026 is the first men's World Cup on US soil since 1994, and it's arrived in a different country than the one that hosted it thirty-two years ago. Forty-eight teams instead of thirty-two. Eleven American host cities instead of nine. And a transit landscape that is simultaneously more ambitious and more financially precarious than anything those 1994 stadiums ever stress-tested.
Congress appropriated $100 million specifically for transit agencies hosting World Cup matches. The tournament runs June 11 through July 19. With the group stage well underway, we now have real ridership numbers, real operational glitches, and real context for grading how each host city is performing. This is that scorecard.
Los Angeles — Grade: A
Los Angeles came into this tournament more prepared than any other US host city, and the opening weeks have confirmed it.
Metrolink is running special service on eight match dates across five lines — Ventura County, San Bernardino, 91/Perris Valley, Orange County, and Inland Empire/Orange County. A $15 SoCal Day Pass (or $10 for discounted riders) covers unlimited rides and includes free transfers to all LA Metro lines and Foothill Transit buses.
Two infrastructure moves made LA's preparation exceptional. First, the D Line (Purple Line) Extension opened May 8, adding three new Wilshire Boulevard stations — Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax, and Wilshire/Western. D Line ridership jumped 62 percent year-over-year in May; system-wide rail ridership hit a six-year high. Second, LA Metro launched system-wide open payments on May 28 — contactless tap-to-pay accepted across Metro and 26 TAP partner agencies — just fourteen days before kickoff. The timing was deliberate: international visitors who don't know what a TAP card is can now just tap their phone or bank card at any gate. For a global event drawing fans from 47 nations, that's not a minor convenience. It's a barrier removed.
LA28 is two years away. The World Cup is, in part, a dress rehearsal. So far, the dress is fitting well.
Dallas/Arlington — Grade: B+
The Trinity Railway Express does not run on Sundays. For the Netherlands-Japan group match on June 14, it did.
TRE activated special Sunday service specifically for the World Cup — Dallas Union Station to CentrePort/DFW Airport station, then a free 20-minute shuttle to AT&T Stadium in Arlington. The whole trip runs about 1.5 hours and costs $9 for a day pass covering unlimited TRE rides. Arlington has no fixed-route transit of its own; the TRE-plus-shuttle combination is literally the only non-car option to reach the stadium.
Fan feedback from the June 14 match: "super smooth." Trains ran on time, shuttles were coordinated, and no overcrowding was reported. That's a high bar for a system operating outside its normal schedule in a metro area where transit is genuinely secondary to the car. TRE and DART identified a gap, built a temporary bridge, and executed cleanly. The B+ reflects a strong operation with a narrow reach — most fans in the Dallas market are still driving. But the willingness to activate dormant Sunday service on demand is itself a policy signal: frequency and network decisions are political choices, not engineering constraints, and car-dependent metros have more flexibility than their schedules suggest.
A Note on Seattle and the Bay Area
Two US host venues — Lumen Field in Seattle and Levi's Stadium in the Bay Area — are not graded here. Seattle's Link Light Rail and the Bay Area's BART and Caltrain both serve their respective stadiums, and both markets have matches scheduled through the tournament. As of this writing, match-day ridership data for those venues has not been publicly reported in sufficient detail to grade. We'll revisit them in a follow-up post once the numbers surface.
New York/New Jersey — Grade: B
The New York metro area is moving the most fans in absolute terms, and doing it through one of the most complicated multi-agency choreographies in American transit.
NJ Transit carried 25,797 customers to and from MetLife Stadium for the France-Senegal match on June 16 — and roughly 21,500 for Brazil-Morocco on June 13. Those are real numbers representing real scale. The complication is the gap: NJ Transit had committed to 40,000-per-match rail and bus capacity, and actual ridership came in 35 to 46 percent below that target on both opening matches. Whether that reflects optimistic planning, fans still preferring to drive, or demand that will grow in later rounds remains to be seen.
The operational texture has been uneven. Penn Station's rail corridor to Secaucus Junction was designated ticket-holder-only during match windows, which rerouted regular commuters to PATH and Newark Penn Station. Some commuters described the redirect as "absolute mayhem." The $20 FIFA round-trip shuttle offered 12,000 tickets for the June 16 match — all sold out; anyone who waited was simply locked out. An Amtrak switch malfunction on June 16 added about 30 minutes of delays on the Northeast Corridor approaching Penn Station. Six agencies are coordinating the whole effort: NJ Transit, MTA, Port Authority, NJ DOT, NJ Turnpike Authority, and Amtrak. The fact that six agencies are cooperating at all is genuinely remarkable — the fact that a switch malfunction still happened is a reminder of what NEC infrastructure is working with. (For more on Amtrak's fleet renewal and NEC challenges, see Amtrak's Record Ridership and the Airo Fleet Revolution.)
MTA deployed extra service on lines 1, 7, C, and F; suspended scheduled maintenance windows; and stationed hundreds of ambassadors at key stations. Mayor Mamdani proposed a 5-week fare-free NYC bus window during the tournament, estimated at $100 million — an idea that generated significant attention but wasn't enacted. The full backstory is worth reading: NYC's Fare-Free Bus Proposal and the World Cup Pilot.
The NY/NJ market's B grade reflects genuine capacity and genuine execution — with real friction that FIFA's 5 million expected US attendees will continue to test.
Kansas City — Grade: C+
Kansas City has no light rail. It has no subway. It has, for the duration of World Cup 2026, ConnectKC26.
The host committee assembled 247 buses across three dedicated routes, with sub-20-minute waits and a $15 Stadium Direct round-trip fare. Roughly 200 of those vehicles are charter buses rented specifically for the tournament. For the first Kansas City match on June 16, asphalt at the bus mall staging area cracked under the weight of heavy bus traffic. Multiple vehicles broke down — at least three. Operations were functional, but visibly improvised.
Here's the honest context: Kansas City built a pop-up transit system from scratch, in a city where virtually none existed. ConnectKC26 is not a transit system that revealed its weaknesses under stress. It's a transit system that had to be invented because there was no baseline to build on. The cracked asphalt and broken buses are failures of execution. That any system exists at all is a genuine achievement for one of America's most car-dependent major cities. The C+ reflects both.
What happens to transit in Kansas City after July 19 is the more interesting question. The transit fiscal cliff that's squeezing agencies nationwide makes new fixed-route investment harder, not easier. But the World Cup has at least demonstrated that KC residents and visitors will use transit when it exists.
Philadelphia — Grade: B (Operations) / F (Context)
Philadelphia produced one of the most creative transit moves of the entire tournament: Airbnb funded free SEPTA return trips on the Broad Street Line for fans heading home from matches at Lincoln Financial Field. It's the first time a hospitality company has directly offset transit fares at a US World Cup venue. The Broad Street Line performed. Fans got home. Give the operations team credit.
And then there's everything else.
SEPTA is managing a $192 to $213 million operating deficit for fiscal year 2027. Without Pennsylvania passing dedicated transit funding before the June 30 state budget deadline — which is nine days away as this posts — the agency faces up to 45 percent service cuts and a 21.5 percent fare increase beginning in August. Thirty-two bus routes are scheduled for elimination on August 24. Five Regional Rail lines vanish January 1, 2027, along with a 9 PM curfew on all rail service. The base fare rises to $2.90. Governor Shapiro's proposed 1.75 percent sales-tax diversion — roughly $300 million per year — remains stalled in the state legislature.
The same agency hosting international showcase matches this month is preparing mass-layoff notices for next month. That is not a transit operations problem. It is a governance crisis wearing a transit agency's face. The Airbnb partnership is genuinely clever; it is also a band-aid on an arterial bleed. Full breakdown: The Transit Fiscal Cliff: SEPTA, BART, and the IIJA Deadline.
Vancouver — Grade: A+ (Benchmark)
Vancouver is not a US city, but it's a host city, and it sets the standard against which every US performance should be measured.
On June 13 — the first match day at BC Place — TransLink recorded more than one million boardings. The busiest Saturday the system had seen since the 2010 Winter Olympics. The Canada Line ran at 3-minute headways during peak windows. B-Line rapid bus services added supplemental trips on key corridors. Multi-language wayfinding went up at SkyTrain stations before the tournament opened. The Transit app made its premium Royale tier free for all Vancouver users for the duration of the World Cup, with TransLink as the official trip planner.
This is what a transit system built for dense urban movement, operated by a single coordinated regional authority, with years of major-event experience embedded in its operating culture, actually looks like. One million boardings on a single day. The US cities are not there yet. Some are further away than others.
The Invisible Backdrop
Every city in this scorecard is deploying World Cup transit investments against an identical backdrop: the national transit fiscal cliff.
SEPTA's cuts land in August — five weeks after the final whistle at MetLife. BART is managing a $375 million structural deficit; it balanced its FY27 budget without a fare increase, but a roughly $302 million remaining gap depends on a November 2026 statewide ballot measure. The federal IIJA — the infrastructure law that has underpinned transit capital investment since 2021 — expires September 30, 2026. The BUILD America 250 Act, which would authorize $87.6 billion for transit over five years, cleared the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in May but has not been enacted.
The one genuine bright spot: Illinois. The Northern Illinois Transit Authority Act took effect June 1, 2026, delivering roughly $1.5 billion per year in new operating funding and putting Chicago-area transit on stable footing for the first time in years. The RTA is transitioning to NITA governance by September 2026. That's what transit stability legislation looks like when a state actually passes it.
APTA's standing estimate: every $1 billion invested in transit generates about $5 billion in economic returns, supports roughly 41,400 jobs, and produces $251 million in tax revenue. The World Cup is demonstrating demand at scale. The question is whether that demand converts into political will once the cameras leave.
What Comes After July 19
The tournament ends. The stadium shuttles stop. The charter bus contracts expire. And then the real test begins.
The World Cup is, in the end, a stress test with a timer. Some cities are passing it with distinction. Some are passing with asterisks. One is passing it while quietly preparing for a collapse. All of them are showing, in real time, what it costs to move large numbers of people without a car — and what it costs not to have built the infrastructure to do it routinely.
The scorecard is live. Come back in August when we see what holds.