News and Views - When the World Cup Rode Transit: Record Crowds, Real Impact

The World Cup drove unprecedented transit ridership across U.S. host cities, while New York unveiled an $8 billion redesign for Penn Station that mixes grandeur with controversy. Meanwhile, a proposed federal bill could cut transit funding just as Bogota launches its long-awaited metro, highlighting the stakes for transit investment and political will.

Transportopia News and Views with Rick L'Amie - our bonus episode between full episodes - breaks down these top stories and what they mean for the future of public transportation.

SOURCES / SHOW NOTES

1. World Cup Drives Record Transit Ridership — APTA Passenger Transport / Metro Magazine, June 2026 https://aptapassengertransport.com/bay-area-partnership-a-success-for-world-cup-opener-record-breaking-ridership/ 2. Penn Station $8B Redesign Unveiled — PBS NewsHour, June 10, 2026 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/new-yorks-penn-station-to-get-8-billion-remodel-with-columns-sunlight-and-trumps-name 3. BUILD America 250 Act Analysis — Urban Institute, June 11, 2026 https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/congresss-transportation-reauthorization-bill-would-drastically-underfund-transit-and

4. Bogotá Tests First Rail Metro — High Speed via NJTOD, June 1, 2026

https://www.highspeed.blog/bogota-gets-its-metro/?ref=high-speed-newsletter

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
The World Cup arrives, and America's transit systems put on a show of their own.

(00:06):
Penn Station finally gets its long-promised redesign.
Federal transit funding takes a serious hit on Capitol Hill.
And Bogota, after decades of waiting, finally puts a metro train on the tracks.
This is Transpertopia, the podcast exploring the past, present, and future of public transportation.

(00:29):
Urban planning and more.
Hello everyone.
I'm Rick Lemme.
Welcome to Transpertopia News and Views, our bonus segment between full-length episodes
where we break down what's happening right now across public transportation, urban planning,
and more.
Just the top stories, what they mean, and why they matter.

(00:52):
Let's get into it.
We start with the biggest two weeks American public transportation has had in a very long
time.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicked off June 11, and across 11 U.S. host cities and 26 transit
agencies, public transit wasn't just held up, it has set records.
In the Bay Area, ART, Caltrain, and Santa Clara VTA together moved more than 30,000

(01:16):
fans for the opening match alone, exceeding ridership for Super Bowl 60 by more than 6,000
passengers and clearing the stadium light rail platforms in under 90 minutes against
a two-hour benchmark.
In Los Angeles, where transit ridership competes with the almighty car, LA Metro logged more
than 100,000 rides to and from SoFi Stadium.

(01:36):
Across the first four matches and on the day of the U.S. Paraguay match, faregate taps
at Expo USC station were up nearly 600%.
Up in Vancouver, the regional transit agency TransLink had its busiest Saturday since the
2010 Olympics, over a million boardings, 18% above a normal weekend.
Big take?

(01:57):
For years, transit has been told it's dying.
For two weeks, it has been delivering hundreds of thousands of fans, including a lot of people
who almost certainly do not ride transit in their daily lives.
They're voting with their feet, choosing trains and buses over cars and parking and traffic.
The systems are showing up, the riders are showing up, and the skeptics should take notes.

(02:18):
To New York, where the busiest train station in the Western Hemisphere got its first real
look at the future.
On June 8th, Amtrak, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and a private consortium called
Penn Transformation Partners unveiled the official design for the long-awaited $8 billion
overhaul of New York's Penn Station.
Renderings show 50-foot ceilings flooded with natural light, a new grand entrance on 8th

(02:43):
Avenue carved out of the existing Madison Square Garden Theater, and a return to the
beau arts grandeur the city lost when the original Penn Station was demolished in 1963.
It's targeted to break ground by the end of 2027, with construction phased over roughly
six years while the station stays in operation.
But the rollout hasn't been without controversy.

(03:03):
The renderings prominently feature a presidential seal with President Trump's name etched on
an interior wall.
Transit advocates have called the bidding process opaque, and the question of who actually pays
the federal government, New York State, or commuters is still unsettled.
Quick take, a redesigned Penn Station has been on many New Yorkers' wish list for a

(03:23):
half a century, and the design itself is genuinely beautiful, but the politics around this one
are going to get noisy.
Watch the funding fight, watch the public engagement process, and watch who, in the
end, actually owns a project that 650,000 daily commuters depend on.
Next to Washington, where the next five years of federal transit funding got its first serious

(03:45):
independent analysis, and the numbers aren't encouraging.
On June 3rd, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held its first hearing on
surface transportation reauthorization.
A week later, the Urban Institute published an analysis of the House-passed BUILD America
250 Act, concluding that the bill would cut federal transit funding by roughly 15 percent

(04:06):
and funding for new transit projects by 45 percent, while shifting hundreds of billions
of dollars toward highway construction.
Brookings reached a similar conclusion the same week, noting that while the bill nominally
increases some transit formula programs, eliminating the advanced appropriation structure
of the 2021 infrastructure law produces a net decrease in guaranteed transit funding.

(04:29):
The current law expires September 30th.
Quick take.
We led with this story on May 18th, when it passed the Committee 61-2.
Six weeks later, the picture is sharpening, and what looks like bipartisan good news in
the headline is starting to look like a serious problem in the fine print.
A 15 percent cut to transit and a 45 percent cut to new projects is not promising.

(04:53):
And finally, a piece of news from outside the U.S.
On June 1st, after decades of delays, false starts, and political fights, the Colombian
capital of Bogota launched the first trial test of its inaugural rail metro system, a
true subway-style rail line, separate from the city's bus network.
Bogota is the home of TransMilenio, the largest bus rapid transit network in the world, and

(05:16):
the system that transit planners everywhere study as the model of how to do BRT right.
But with the city approaching 10 million residents, even the best buses in the world have reached
their limit.
The new rail line will carry significantly higher passenger volumes per hour than buses
can and unlock new capacity for a city that has outgrown its surface-level system.

(05:37):
Quick take.
Bogota built its BRT because the city couldn't afford or wait for a rail system.
Forty years later, it's earned both.
There's a real lesson here for American cities.
Buses and trains are not enemies.
They are stages in the same conversation.

(05:58):
This week's ThruLine is the gap between what transit is doing right now and what it might
be allowed to do next.
The World Cup shows that Americans will choose transit in massive numbers when it's reliable,
frequent, and goes where it needs to go.
Penn Station illustrates what's possible when a project that has languished for decades
finally gets political will behind it.
Bogota demonstrates what's possible over an even longer arc, 40 years from BRT to rail

(06:24):
metro.
And then there's Washington, where the next five-year transportation bill is quietly being
shaped in a direction that would make all of those success stories harder to repeat.
The hard part of transit is not whether it works.
It's whether anyone in power has the patience to fund it.
That's your Transportopia news and views for the past two weeks.

(06:46):
If you missed it last week, my full conversation with Aaron Ophir, CEO of ImageryDropped.
We talked about autonomous transit buses and the first U.S. deployments hitting the road
in Florida and Nevada.
Here's a quick taste.
So, indeed, our system, every vehicle that Imagery operates, and we run autonomously
on public roads since 2019, and the U.S., California, Arizona, Nevada, Germany, Japan,

(07:13):
and Israel, every such vehicle is completely self-sufficient.
We don't need anything coming from the outside.
First of all, we are mapless.
We don't need pre-prepared HD map to be fed into the vehicles, which means that we can
drive everywhere, unlike robo-taxis that can only drive in very specific geo-fenced
areas where they have the maps.

(07:34):
If that hooked you, go find the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.
We'll be back next time with another full-length episode.
Until then, thanks for listening to Transportopia, the intersection of transportation and utopia.
Like us wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, send me a note, and visit transportopia.org

(07:56):
for show notes, our blog, and more.
I'm Rick Lemieux.
Goodbye, everybody.