Jeroen Olthof of San Diego made a last-minute decision on Thursday evening to buy a ticket for the next day’s World Cup match in Los Angeles, taking advantage of a drop in prices after the United States was eliminated from the tournament this week.
He woke up at 2:30 a.m. on Friday, walked to a nearby station, and boarded a train for Los Angeles, where Spain and Belgium were set to play. There, at Union Station, he took a bus to SoFi Stadium, in Inglewood, part of the region’s expanded tournament transit options.
Three hours before the game, he was taking in the scene from the concourse. “They were pretty organized,” Mr. Olthof, 54, said of his public transit experience. “Lined us right up.”
Friday’s quarterfinal match was the Los Angeles region’s eighth and final game of the World Cup tournament. While a full assessment of the economic impact to the region will take time, data has shown that air travel and hotel bookings fell short of expectations.
Public transit, however, has been used by hundreds of thousands of fans like Mr. Olthof to reach games, fan events and watch parties, a notable achievement in a region where the automobile is king. That performance, in particular, bodes well for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, for which the World Cup was seen as something of a dress rehearsal.
Metro, the L.A. region’s public transit agency, expanded options on rail lines and buses from transit hubs, and it reported ridership numbers that steadily climbed during the tournament. There were roughly 26,000 rides on Metro to and from the first game on June 12.
For the game on July 2 between Spain and Austria, that figure grew to 49,000.
“Beautiful, all good,” said Juan Carlos Munoz, who is from Colombia but has lived in Southern California for decades, of his public transit journey to a Los Angeles match.
For regional officials, the World Cup has shown that with the right incentives, even Angelenos who are accustomed to endless traffic will use public transport. SoFi Stadium had fewer parking spaces available than for many other events, like NFL games, because of the wider security perimeter and sponsorship events.
Away from the stadium, Metro also expanded transit routes to events like watch parties and fan zones. “You just see all these people trying to get to these places where they know driving just isn’t going to be the best option,” said Alissa Walker, a transit expert who writes about Los Angeles for her website and newsletter, Torched.la.
Metro, she said, has, “done a really good job of making it seem like a cohesive system.”
During the Olympics, driving to venues will make even less sense than during the World Cup. Designated as a “national special security event” by the federal government, the Olympics will require an even larger security perimeter around venues.
“We’re really trying to change the behavior of L.A.,” said John Harper, the chief operating officer of LA28, the organization in charge of the region’s Olympics preparation. “And I think the World Cup has been a good example of doing that. We are just going to be doing it on a much larger scale.”
The cheery attitude as the tournament approaches its end is in marked contrast to the pessimism that prevailed at the start. There were endless worries. Fans were angry over sky-high ticket prices, and many wondered if television broadcasts would show pockets of empty seats at stadiums. Advocates and officials feared federal immigration enforcement, and the games occurred against the backdrop of the war in Iran, raising terrorism concerns.
But there have been no major security incidents. Confrontations in Los Angeles between different factions of Iranian fans — those who see themselves as pro-democracy, and others who wish for a return of the monarchy to that war-torn country — remained minor in scale.
“To me it was, how do we not end up in the paper for any kind of safety and security issue,” said Kathryn Schloessman, the chief executive of Los Angeles’s World Cup Host Committee.
Paul Krekorian, the executive director of the office of major events for the Los Angeles mayor, described the World Cup as a “good test drive” for the Olympics.
“Even some of the naysayers about the ’28 games will have to look at the unmitigated success of the World Cup here in Los Angeles and say, OK, now I understand what you’ve been talking about, when you talk about the benefit of major events. Now I get how this is beneficial to Angelenos.”
He conceded that there are limits to that comparison.
“It’s one thing to have a Taylor Swift concert or a World Cup match or something like that at SoFi,” he said. But the Olympics mean “the equivalent of seven of those things every single day for two-and-a-half weeks. The scale is orders of magnitude different.”
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