Matchday Mobility

Inspiration

FIFA World Cup 2026 inspired us to ask: How can cities welcome thousands of visitors without making private vehicles the default? Across the eleven U.S. hosts, transportation strengths and challenges differ. We wanted to help planners identify those differences and turn them into practical, sustainable actions.

What it does

Matchday Mobility connects a national comparison of host-city readiness to individual city action plans. The Portfolio workspace compares readiness across venue access, traffic management, heat safety, and venue support. Visitors can explore modeled arrival and departure patterns, transportation mode mix, and attendee origins. The Venue Access page brings together access and sustainability scores, transit-stop and parking-facility density, service frequency, pedestrian infrastructure, and fleet-electrification evidence. The City Action Plan translates that evidence into a recommended first action, estimated passengers addressed, operating emissions avoided, vehicle-miles saved, and costs. Selected cities also receive a longer-term investment alternative. Maps and source-linked traffic controls connect recommendations to specific places.

How we built it

We built the interactive application with Python, Streamlit, Pandas, NumPy, and Plotly. We combined supplied Rice datasets with transit schedules, OpenStreetMap walking and parking data, weather information, and cited event transportation plans. Our analytical workflow has three steps:

Establish the baseline: Normalize transportation and environmental inputs into transparent comparison scores.
Explore demand: Model match attendance, hourly movement, broad visitor origins, and transportation choices.
Evaluate actions: Estimate passenger capacity, vehicle mileage, operating emissions, and costs under explicit assumptions. Electric-bus estimates account for regional electricity emissions, charging losses, return trips, and depot mileage. Capital alternatives account for reserve vehicles and event-day delays.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge was making different cities comparable without hiding their differences. Transit feeds, walking-network coverage, published plans, and environmental datasets vary in completeness and geographic relevance. A second challenge was avoiding misleading precision. We separated documented evidence from planning assumptions, preserved missing-data limitations, and showed sensitivity where outcomes could change. Finally, we worked to make a technically detailed platform understandable in a short demonstration, using concise takeaways, clear charts, and city-specific recommendations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of building an interactive platform that connects transportation evidence across all eleven U.S. host cities to practical sustainability recommendations. Through clear maps, charts, and estimates of passenger benefits, emissions savings, and costs, we make complex tradeoffs easier to understand and provide a foundation for planning beyond FIFA.

What we learned

Good access and sustainable access are not the same. Nearby parking can make a venue easier to reach while reinforcing car dependence. We also learned that adding service is not automatically a climate benefit. Its emissions depend on how many people use it, what trips it replaces, and how the vehicles are powered. Electrifying an existing bus trip can reduce operating emissions without reducing vehicle miles. These distinctions shaped both our calculations and the way we present results.

What's next for Matchday Mobility

The next step is to validate assumptions with transit agencies and venue operators, then test selected actions through pilots. The current results are planning estimates, not achieved outcomes. But the workflow is reusable beyond FIFA: compare conditions, identify the constraint, evaluate an intervention, and measure what changes. Our goal is transportation investment that improves event access and leaves a useful legacy.