Rachel McCleery is the executive director for SAFE's Coalition for Reimagined Mobility, which supports accelerating real-world deployment of secure and resilient U.S. transportation systems. SAFE is a non-partisan, nonprofit policy think tank focused on the intersection of national security with energy, transportation and supply chain resilience.
For American cities, the World Cup was more than a sporting event. It was a national stress test.
Across the country, host cities moved unprecedented numbers of fans through streets, sidewalks, highways, stadium districts and downtown corridors, often under intense time pressure and global scrutiny. The result could have been paralysis. But in many places, it was experimentation.
Technologies and systems that had long been stuck in pilot programs, planning documents or procurement limbo suddenly became real. Smart traffic signals, real-time data sharing, lidar-enabled traffic monitoring, new shuttle networks and tournament-specific transit systems moved from “someday” to “game day.”
Innovative digital infrastructure solutions for transportation are here. In many cases, these solutions are faster, better and cheaper than building new physical infrastructure. The question now is whether we treat these innovations as temporary World Cup fixes or as the beginning of a smarter, safer and more efficient transportation future.
In Arlington, Texas, traffic engineers used the World Cup as an opportunity to expand smart signaling to reduce congestion after a successful pilot program. The city deployed the AI-powered platform NoTraffic, an Israeli-developed radar and livestream video detection system that differentiates between vehicle types, cyclists and pedestrians, automatically adjusting signal timing in real time. The $600,000 investment, covering about 30 intersections in the Entertainment District around AT&T Stadium, came after a 2023 pilot triggered by a World Series parade that drew three to four times the crowd.
Kansas City, Missouri, which lacks the direct transit infrastructure of coastal host cities, built a new tournament-specific bus network, Connect KC26, a direct motorcoach service to 15 locations that previously had no public transit access. The city also deployed a smart signaling system to support transportation during the tournament, leaving behind a more responsive traffic-management network designed to improve the safety, efficiency, and reliability of travel throughout the region.
MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which hosted eight matches including the World Cup Final, has undergone a massive transportation digital infrastructure transformation across the highways and surface streets surrounding the Meadowlands Sports Complex. In addition to traffic monitoring from camera live feeds, New Jersey’s Department of Transportation has deployed lidar — a remote sensing technology that builds 3D digital models of environments — at over 40 locations around the stadium. This digital environment enables operators to act on bottlenecks and safety incidents immediately. Although these transportation systems were installed with the World Cup in mind, they’ll continue to serve transportation purposes long after the tournament has ended.
These investments paid off for fans. In North Texas, international fans using the rail-and-shuttle system to reach Arlington called the trip “seamless” and “super smooth.” In Kansas City, operators made rapid adjustments after early bottlenecks, but by the city’s second game day, ConnectKC26 carried 21,500 passengers and cut most trip times by 30 minutes or less. And at the Meadowlands, fans at the first game reported transit in and out of the complex generally went smoothly.
This reflects what many transportation professionals have known for decades: Countless technologies and systems can make day-to-day transportation faster and safer, but only if we actualize them in the real world. All these cities needed was a justification to move forward — which the World Cup provided. With focused and committed preparation, our transportation systems can adapt quickly, deploying transportation technologies surgically and episodically. But jurisdictional fragmentation and outdated procurement processes prevent cities from scaling innovative mobility technologies that have proven to deliver consumer benefits.
Thankfully, the federal government has a forward-leaning approach and is seeking to change this. The Department of Transportation is seeking information to formalize a national strategy for transportation digital infrastructure. The U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee recently advanced a bipartisan transportation bill that, for the first time, calls for studying and deploying new and emerging transportation technologies.
The cost of not acting is significant. According to the transportation analytics company INRIX, American drivers lost 49 hours per person and $86 billion in time sitting in traffic in 2024. And according to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, they wasted another 2.8 billion gallons of fuel on top of that.
Without a cohesive federal strategy, our country’s ability to innovate will be perpetually unable to scale. Officials have an opening to keep this World Cup momentum going by moving ahead with policies and regulations that enable the deployment of transportation digital infrastructure solutions — getting people where they need to go safely, securely and efficiently.
