Infrastructure Technology Podcast: How the 2026 FIFA World Cup will impact public transit, technology and infrastructure Part I

Episode 13 kicks off a two-part episode examining the infrastructure implications of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Gavin Jenkins, Brandon Lewis, Jessica Parks and Noah Kolenda discuss how host cities across the United States are preparing for one of the largest sporting events in the world. The conversation centers on stadium access, public transit capacity, crowd movement, security and the challenges of moving large numbers of visitors efficiently through cities that often rely heavily on automobiles. The hosts explore how transit agencies, governments and event organizers must coordinate to ensure smooth operations and positive visitor experiences.

Here is a transcript from the episode:

GJ: And welcome to the Infrastructure Technology Podcast. I'm Gavin Jenkins, head of content at Roads and Bridges, and with me today, we have a special episode. And so we brought in Noah Kolenda from Mass Transit, and we also have with us, as always, Brandon Lewis, associate editor of Mass Transit and Jessica Parks, staff writer at Roads and Bridges. Noah, how you doing today?

NK: Doing well, thank you. Hope you're all doing well as well.

GJ: Thank you for joining us. And then Brandon, tell the people what day it is.

BL: Today is Tuesday. It is a podcast day, and today we're talking about the one sport that I really don't know anything about.

GJ: We're not talking about the sport, we're talking about all things infrastructure revolving around the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which North America is hosting, 16 cities. We got here in the United States, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York area. So we got New York and then parts of Jersey, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle. And then we will not be talking about these cities. We will not be talking about in Mexico, Guadalajara, Mexico City and Monterey, and though it's North America as well, we won't be talking about Toronto or Vancouver. Vancouver, lovely city, Toronto, lovely city. But today we're just going to be sticking to the United States of America in those first cities that I mentioned and the topics we're going to be talking about. We're going to start off with stadium mobility and last-mile transportation, so that's where we're going to start the conversation. If we have time, we're going to get into transit capacity, reliability and security, and later on, if there's time, we're going to talk about digital infrastructure and smart mobility, but that topic is so rich, we might hold that for part two, but let's start it off with stadium mobility and last-mile transportation. This is the most immediate issue fans will experience and many stadiums, especially the ones here in the USA, as they were designed for NFL tailgating, not global transit heavy events like this, and these cities are going to be experiencing a massive amount of visitors, an influx of tens of thousands, maybe over 100,000, maybe 200,000 visitors to their city, depending on the city, depending on the teams that'll be playing there, and it is just going to be a stress on the roads, the bridges and the transit. And so let's kick it off with stadium mobility, last-mile transportation. I'm turning to you, Noah, what matters more: rail access or the last mile between transit and the venue?

NK: So for me, it's kind of really seeming like the last mile component is going to matter most here because especially for these stadiums that don't have direct rail access or having to stand up a completely new transportation system for these events, they're really showcasing the fact that rail is not 100% necessary to facilitate these events in these large capacities, so it's kind of showcasing how that doesn't have to be a prerequisite for a city to host an event like this. They're able to employ those last mile options and park and rides and shuttle buses and stuff like that and in better capacity than cities that may have smaller rail operations or more fragmented rail operations. And so while that's something I would've initially thought would be almost a prerequisite to a city hosting a game like this, it's really been shown to not be necessary at all, especially in cities like Kansas City, where that's just not an option or a Houston. And so a lot of the service is being carried out by those shuttle bus operations and the cost is pretty cost effective both for fans and for the region in comparison to having to shut down a full rail corridor to just host FIFA service and the security that comes along with that. And so all told it kind of worked out to be a better solution than I initially expected it to be.

GJ: Brandon, your response, do you want to piggyback on anything?

BL: Yeah, I think Noah is right. I think that the last mile to get to the stadium obviously is going to be the biggest challenge just because of all the traffic that's going to be right there at the stadium.

GJ: Yeah, absolutely. So Jess, let's move on to another question. I want to ask you about the people. So how do these cities move, like say 80,000 people in and out of stadiums within a narrow window of time?

JP: So I think it's mostly about moving people in bulk and not individually. When you're trying to move that many people in a really tight window. I think the worst case scenario is for people to be using their own car or single in person rideshare vehicles like Uber, so that creates a major gridlock, so you're trying to encourage them to take these public transit options such as bus shuttle or rail, and that'll load as many people in as few vehicles as possible, just making for smoother traffic flow and shuttles, which you're seeing being used in a lot of cities. I know they're being used in Kansas City for sure. There's shuttles in Boston, they play a major part in that because they can run continuous loops around the stadium. You have the park and ride lots as well and transit hubs, which helps spread demand out instead of funneling everything into one exit point, so I think it's creating multiple exit points, discouraging, discouraging single vehicle use. especially at MetLife, where they are not even allowing parking, so you only have that option. We have a limited rideshare access, and you have to either take a NJ Transit bus or shuttle.

GJ: Again. Brandon, turning to you for rebuttal, is there anything you want to add to that?

BL: No, so the idea is, and I know, too that we're talking about obviously what it means for traffic coming in and out of games and things like that, but the idea is that obviously most of these games are taking place during the week so unless you're dealing with regular workflow traffic, like Jessica said, most of these cities are initiating car bans, and that's going to help cut down on vehicle traffic.

GJ: Yeah, absolutely. Alright, so why isn't Cleveland hosting one of these? I don't see this on the list.

BL: Because simply because I will tell you living here, I pray and I hope that we would not get any of these World Cups because we just do not have the infrastructure for it.

GJ: Okay, alright. I don't think Pittsburgh does either. Alright, so Brandon, I want to turn to you and ask about traffic. What happens when traffic collides with normal commuter traffic?

BL: So again, I think that these cities that they're going to try to reduce it as much as possible. As I said, there's a reason why there are a lot of car bans on this, and I do think that the shuttle vans are going to help with the fact that obviously you can take loads of people at a certain amount of time, but I think the idea is most of these matches and games are going to be happening, like I said during the day, so I don't think you're going to have crazy amount. I mean, I think obviously there's going to be a lot of traffic, but I don't think it's going to be this point where it's going to be like you're in a massive two-, three-hour delay because of the fact that really, again, once you get to that last- mile, as we talked about, public transit is really the only option in and out of the stadium.

GJ: Yeah, absolutely. Some of these cities, they're not the type of cities that rely heavily on automobiles for transit. I know a city like Pittsburgh, we just hosted the NFL Draft. We're a car oriented city. There's no metro here. Well, I mean there's a little bit, there's one line, but it's not like New York's and the bus system is nothing compared to Houston's bus system, and for these cities, timing is going to be so crucial. World Cup traffic is going to be episodic, it's going to be emotionally driven. The people leaving these stadiums are going to be feeling highs, feeling lows. 

BL: That's a good point.

JP: That it is.

GJ: So it's like they're going to be coming out of stadiums and some of them are going to be celebrating, others are going to be just distraught, and that emotional factor has to be taken in when they're putting stresses on these networks. So the next thing I want to talk about is what breaks first, highways transit systems or pedestrian infrastructure? I want to start this one off. And so the first thing that is going to fail, and when I say fail, it’s mostly overwhelm. The first thing that's going to be overwhelmed is the pedestrian infrastructure is going to be overwhelming, and it's going to receive the least attention beforehand, but the sidewalks are going to be packed, and so these cities are focused on the stadium capacities, the rail schedules and then the traffic and congestion on the highways, but the bottlenecks that are going to emerge are going to be crosswalks. The timing of the crosswalks, the exits of the stadiums, the security zones are going to be bottlenecks. And then any curbside pickup area where you could say Jess makes a huge point. It is going to be crucial that people are not taking the Ubers or taxis, but people are going to be taking Uber's, taxis and Lyfts and those points where people are lining up to take those are going to be catastrophes. There's massive, massive crowds. And then after that, next comes probably the transit system. And then from there, then the highways. What do you say, Brandon?

BL: Yeah, I completely agree. When you have this massive event, and again, even when it comes to taking public transit, when you're right next to these stadiums, and there's massive people, they're going to be on the sidewalks or coming from different directions, it's going to be really hard for just buses to go to the stadium to drop people off because they're not going to be able to stop where they need to stop. They're just going to be people in the way.

GJ: Absolutely. What do you think, Jess?

JP: I think that hopefully it really, really depends on getting people in the direction that they need to go and making, so for me, I'm thinking about Ubers, as I said, how do we get from Foxborough, for example, you have, which is Gillette Stadium. You have one road in and out, so you're going to have, if you have the Uber, let's say two miles from the stadium, you're just going to have hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of people walking down this one road that is being used by vehicles being used by buses, being used by Ubers. I think it's just such a key as to how to get pedestrians, as we're saying, as I agree with you, that's the biggest, that's going to probably be the most overwhelming point, is how do we get these rideshares into a place quickly and quickly get them out. It's just funneling people, funneling vehicles, funneling, funneling transportation options into one place smoothly, and I agree that we just don't have the pedestrian infrastructure to do that. I'm wondering if places like MetLife, where there's no parking, obviously, well, we have expanded sidewalks or how is that going to work?

GJ: And Jess, you're our Massachusetts resident. Are you going to be attending anything in Boston?

JP: I really did want to go originally, but I have to tell you, I've been totally deterred by the traffic that I'm going to see to get there and the ticket prices, so if I had really, I didn't know when the tickets came out. Well, I didn't know that I'd be living back in Massachusetts when I first found out the game was happening here, so I just didn't really prepare for it. 

GJ: Yeah, well, I think it would be cool to go. It's such a world event.

JP: It is. I would love to go, but yeah.

GJ: Alright, well let's move on to the next topic, which is transit capacity, reliability and security. And Noah, we're going to come back to you, and I want to ask you, can transit agencies have staff extend their time and operate hours? Are these agencies going to be fully staffed? What's going on with the labor side of this?

NK: That very much sounds like something that these transit agencies have worked out well in advance of these events. Thankfully, a lot of the agencies have already committed excess hours, excess service and have funded it as such. New Jersey Transit has been pretty notable because they've had to hike their ticket price to account for extra security and extra staffing. And so their World Cup fare right now sits at $98, I believe, but that is covering things like extra security, extra safety personnel, extra ambassadors that are helping guide riders to where they need to go and to just facilitate the use of that system safely and efficiently, and it's also helping to cover things like the closure of Penn Station for the time that it's going to take to facilitate that transportation. And so over, I think the four matches that are taking place there, Penn Station will be closed for four hours ahead of those matches to help facilitate transit for the ticket holders for those events. And so while it is coming at a bit of a higher cost, it is something that agencies have really built deeply into their plans for this event. And so much so it was a large point of discussion at APTA’s recent Mobility Conference. I actually attended a session specifically around FIFA World Cup planning, and that is really one of the elements that these agencies are really driving home in their planning is making sure that they have adequate staffing that can come in and cycle through as well, so that they're making sure they're not overworking their staffing through these events as well, so it seems nicely and thoroughly planned.

GJ: Jess, what do you think? Because I imagine resilience is a word that's popping up in a lot of these meetings with agencies. Do you agree with Noah?

JP: I agree with Noah, yeah. I think it's really interesting how innovative these approaches are to solving these, to trying to make traffic and transit run smoothly. I mean, closing Penn Station for four hours is unprecedented. That's really cool.

GJ: That’s mad. I cannot believe they're doing that. That's crazy. Brandon, what makes transit feel intuitive for global travelers?

BL: Yeah, so I think the thing about transit is it's universal, right? I mean, no matter if you're in the U.S. or if you're coming from another country, and we've talked a lot about other countries and their infrastructure when it comes to transit, but most of these transit systems throughout, whether it is the U.S. or other countries, they generally run the same. Everybody knows a railcar, everybody knows a bus. Obviously there's differences in the different names of lines and how they operate in services and things like that, but generally when you are in a town, and you don't know where to go, I think public transit is sort of the first thing that comes to somebody's mind when they think, how am I going to get from point A to point B?

GJ: Right, absolutely. So you want to make sure that payment is frictionless. You want to make signage visually consistent, and you want to make transfers obvious. You want staff presence to be visible and you want the apps to work without any hiccups there. And a lot of the visitors are going to be multilingual and so there is a language barrier that is going to be present in all these bottlenecks.

BL: There is, and I think that obviously a city like New York, Los Angeles, they're used to having visitors and tourists and more people from there, so I think those cities are going to be more equipped, more so than others. But also most of these agencies already have built in, I don't want to say bilingual, you can choose your language within these apps so they have that option for people that aren't necessarily English speaking.

GJ: So the ideal World Cup experience then would be for a foreign traveler to land at the airport, let's just say New York, they land in New York, they have one payment method everywhere they go, they follow color-coded signage, they receive realtime alerts automatically on their phones through the apps that they have and they reach venues without needing verbal assistance. That is the way to go. I mean, there's going to be people from all literally every corner of the globe coming to this continent for this event.

BL: I would say too, just quickly, we have, the big thing on fair collection, too is a lot of the fares now, you don't have to have a physical card. A lot of it is contactless and you can, instead of your card information within the app itself, which I think technology wise made it a lot easier, not just for the World Cup, but really just traveling abroad in general.

GJ: Yeah, absolutely. And all of this that we just mentioned leads us to the final topic that we're going to discuss today, which is cybersecurity risks, and it's a huge threat for the transit industry in these cities. And Brandon, what do you think are some of the cybersecurity risks for transit operations during a global event such as this?

BL: Yeah, so I think that the biggest thing when it comes to security is obviously just making sure that everybody's safe, and these agencies have done a great job. A lot of these agencies are going to have personnel on board, I think, which is a big thing as well, and I know that there's obviously going to be security everywhere around these arenas, and there's going to be security in the streets and all that, so I think again, the biggest thing is just having the personnel there, having the bodies and just ensuring that people feel as safe as possible.

GJ: And make events like this expand the attack surface for transportation systems and so things that could be targeted include traffic signal systems. The lights in these cities are going to be operated on AI, which is something we'll get into in a part two, but that can be hacked. Transit scheduling software can be hacked, payment systems, airport operations, digital signage, Wi-Fi networks, emergency communications, and they can be hacked. And they also, I mean, some of the threats include criminal ransomware, those kind of groups that use that to get extort and blackmail, that sort of thing could happen. We could have nation state actors that are hacking into systems and just regular scammers, and there's some realistic threats that are not necessarily catastrophes but could cause shutdowns, and that's like a payment outage. Some GPS spoofing that happens with some of the drive shares. There could just be literally misinformation campaigns on social media that really mess up a lot of people and where they're going and then that could cause a lot of traffic and a lot of confusion in transportation. So there's a lot of cybersecurity concerns that are going to be out there. What do you think, Noah?

NK: I think that's a really great kind of reason that a lot of these systems, these systems like open loop payments have already been implemented. 

GJ: Why is that is so necessary? 

NK: Because you don't necessarily have to rely on a network of fare cards. Everyone can just tap a basic Visa, MasterCard, amex, what have you to get in. You don't need to worry about a network of people having to adopt a local region's clipper card or fare payment card, and I also think, too, that's another point towards having these transit services have unique event tickets. I know the New Jersey Transit service for that World Cup, having a unique ticket as opposed to utilizing a regular Amtrak or New Jersey Transit style ticket is probably adding an extra layer of security into the system as well, because it's kind of not exposing it to the normal ticket risk of an everyday ticket and so I think a lot of the planning that's gone into this, too, and especially with all of these plans being so laid out and not necessarily having to rely directly on technology because they've been so thoroughly planned ahead, yes, you're still going to look at things and track like you normally would, but a lot of these things, you're not having to, I guess, fly blindly with technology like you would be in running a daily service as opposed to, in my head anyways, as opposed to saying, ‘alright, we've got to hit this timetable every six minutes’. You're going, ‘alright, we're aiming to depart at 12:30 here because we've got to get into the station for this 2:00 game’. Things are a lot more rigorously scheduled here, too, which I think is going to add another element of safety to the planning.

GJ: Yeah, absolutely, and the planning is essential. Jess, we went to CONEXPO earlier this year. How many meetings did we have on the run up to CONEXPO? We were meeting once a week for an hour for months, and this is the World Cup. These agencies have been meeting probably every day for months.

BL: Oh, I would say the planning started as soon as World Cup 2022 ended.

GJ: Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

JP: You would hope.

GJ: And cybersecurity has been a topic in every one of those meetings, I would hope, and they probably have joint cybersecurity command centers set up. They have real-time threat monitoring. They have communication systems that are set up so they can talk about what's going on as the games are, games as the matches. We need to get the verbiage right. These are matches, not games, as the matches are being held and hopefully nothing bad happens. Hopefully, as the president says, only good can happen. Right? Only good happens.

JP: I think that we should expect that something bad is going to happen at some point, on some front.

GJ: Yeah, it's possible. Well, we didn't have a guest today, so that is part one of our FIFA World Cup discussion. We're going to have others. Brandon, what'd you think of the discussion?

BL: I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think we all made different points, and we all brought different perspectives to the table, and it's going to be very interesting to see when these games kick off here in a couple weeks.

GJ: And you're not a soccer buff, but are you going to watch the World Cup?

BL: I have never watched a full five minutes of soccer on television, I don't think in my life. I love playing soccer. Don't get me wrong. I loved playing it in gym in school. I have not found it entertaining to watch on television at all.

JP: I think it’s fun to watch.

GJ: It's really fun. First off, what's great about it is there's no commercials, there's no timeouts, there's no break. Football, as great as it is, has way too many breaks. Way too many commercials, too many timeouts, too many play stoppages. Soccer is just like, it's just nonstop up and down the field. And soccer players are so athletic.

JP: I can't imagine they are running nonstop for, it's like, what is it? How long is it?

GJ: It’s a marathon. 90 minutes or something in every match. They’re insane.

JP: And when you get a score in soccer, when you get a goal up, there's nothing more exciting. I think that's the most exciting sport to get a goal for sure.

GJ: Well, I don't know. Well, let's not be too hyperbolic.

JP: Yeah, it is.

GJ: It's not a touchdown. Come on.

JP: For me. I don't care. I don't care about a touchdown. I'm not a football person. I just don't like football. So I like when you get only a few goals so that each one's really exciting.

BL: Well, the interesting part, and obviously in all the other countries, soccer is called football.

JP: Yes, exactly.

GJ: Hold on guys, I'm getting a message. Karina is telling us to shut up and end the episode. Karina Mazhukina is our producer and editor, and we want to thank her for listening to us talk about this subject, and we also want to thank Endeavor B2B, our parent company for giving us this podcast, so we can chit chat, and we'd like to thank you, the listener for listening to us. Please email us your thoughts on the World Cup and all the stresses that it is going to cost across these cities in the United States. You can email us at [email protected]. For Roads and Bridges, I'm Gavin Jenkins.

JP: I'm Jessica Parks.

BL: I'm Brandon Lewis. 

NK: And I'm Noah Kolenda.

GJ: Alright. Thank you so much. Stay tuned. We'll see you next week where we'll be talking about part two, about the World Cup. Until then, goodbye.