The International Federation of Association Football, as translated from the original French and abbreviated as "FIFA" is staging most of the World Cup Soccer Tournament games in the United States and filling transit modes in the host cities.
"We don't have a forecast yet, but I just received pictures while we've been on this call of packed trains of fans headed to our fan festival that starts today, and that's a very positive sign," said Stephanie Wiggins, CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
The comments came during a press conference hosted by the American Public Transit Association on Thursday.
Los Angeles is one of eleven cities in the U.S. hosting the cup along with three in Mexico and two in Canada.
Dallas Area Rapid Transit is relying on a combination of rail and shuttle buses to move fans to the temporarily-named Dallas Stadium which has been rebranded to conform to FIFA commercial sponsorship regulations.
"Our ridership will be probably two times on a daily basis to three times during the nine (match) days, and then beyond that we expect it to kick up about 25%," said David Leininger, interim president and CEO of DART.
"That's on our commuter rail side."
"On the fan fest side, which is the full 39 days, what we're saying is 2x of what we would typically see. It translates into about 40,000 or 50,000 additional trips a day."
DART pegs the average cost of a trip at $1.12. Fan festival days are large scale public viewing parties featuring live broadcasts from the other cities.
The Kansas City Area Transportation Authority had been using a zero-fare transit approach for the past six years but was forced to abandon it earlier this month when COVID relief funding finally ran out.
"We've launched our payment system again prior to World Cup, not because of World Cup, it was tied with the city contract," said Chuck Ferguson, chief operations officer at KCATA
"We've launched fares last week, that's going as you would expect, and we expect to collect fares all through World Cup."
KCATA will also be relying on a hybrid model of rail and buses to move fans to and from the temporarily rebranded Kansas City Stadium.
"We have stood up a regional network connectivity that will allow visitors to traverse the area all throughout both sides of the state line and the Kansas City area," said Ferguson.
In an effort to spare taxpayers from subsidizing the trip to the games, New Jersey Transit rolled out round trip rail passes for the World Cup for the trip between Penn Station to MetLife for $98.
The trip usually costs $12.90.
APTA officials are hoping the FIFA inspired showcase will help convince lawmakers to provide more formula funding to public transit.
"Congress has introduced the bipartisan Build America 250 Act, that's a good first step for us all," said Leanne Redden, chair of APTA and executive director of the Regional Transportation Authority of Chicago.
"We look forward to continuing to work with our lawmakers to build upon current investment levels, including guaranteed funding for public transit and passenger rail to continue to drive job creation, innovation, and economic growth."
