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The most surprising winner of the World Cup was American public transit

America is having a soccer awakening. Can it have a transit one too?

Much like its indifference toward soccer, America’s aversion to public transport has made it a global anomaly, an oddity encapsulated by the nation’s sacred pre-game pastime: the tailgate.

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Here in the US, celebrating sports means driving your big car to a colossal suburban gridiron football stadium, where you’ll grill, baby, grill until the smoky scents of burgers and bratwurst float across vast plains of asphalt. So entrenched is the nation’s car culture that the average American spends about half a month sitting behind the wheel every year. In fact, while the US has tens of millions more cars than it has people to drive them, even its largest cities have far fewer trains or buses per capita than our global peers.

As a result, Americans are more than twice as likely to die in a car accident as Europeans, and nearly five times as likely to die in a car crash as someone in train-happy Germany. While many transit projects carry similar price tags, the US still boasts many dozens more college football stadiums than it does rapid transit systems or subway networks.

So, it’s no wonder that critics doubted that US cities hosting this year’s World Cup, the largest single sporting event in human history, could effectively find ways to schlep visiting fans around. After abandoning its initial pledges to shepherd fans for free, New Jersey earned scorn for trying to sell $150 round-trip train tickets to MetLife Stadium, prompting journalists to test how difficult it would be to reach it by foot, bike, or canoe. Kansas City’s shiny new pop-up World Cup buses got caught in hours of ensnarled traffic on their way to their city’s very first game, a match-up between Algeria and Argentina.

And yet, on the precipice of the........

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