An influx of soccer fans attending the 2026 FIFA World Cup could exacerbate the typical summer backups at the Canadian border. Ideas for smoother crossings are getting kicked around that could last beyond the tournament. (Tom Banse)
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Transport planners look to design winning plays to beat traffic, border blues. But is that goal possible in high season?
Legions of soccer fans will descend on the Pacific Northwest in peak summer 2026 for the men’s FIFA World Cup. It seems like a long time away, but not if you’re a transportation or travel planner.
The Pacific Northwest will host 13 World Cup matches — split between Seattle and Vancouver. The potential for monumental backups at the U.S.-Canada border as superfans ping-pong between the host cities is one factor causing a range of local figures to raise yellow flags. Event organizers have already passed the ball to the Washington Legislature and Congress with requests for assistance totaling millions of dollars.
“What are we, 597 days out? Not that we’re counting,” said April Putney, barely missing a beat to recall numbers during a late October interview. Putney is the chief strategy officer with the Seattle 2026 World Cup Local Organizing Committee.
The host committee estimates that up to 750,000 visitors will come to the Seattle area to take in the spectacle during the four-week span of games in Cascadia. About half of the crowd could be fans from abroad, based on past World Cups. Putney also noted that only about 50% of the expected influx will have secured tickets to the matches.
“A lot of people show up to be part of the vibes” without a ticket, Putney said.
The men’s FIFA World Cup is considered the globe’s most watched sporting event. The 2026 tournament will be bigger than ever, having been expanded to 48 national teams who will play in a total of 16 cities across the USA, Canada and Mexico. Naturally, local elected officials, tourism directors and chamber of commerce leadership in Seattle and Bellingham want our region to look its best under the international spotlight — and attract return visitors.
In terms of event management, Seattle’s and Vancouver’s hosting task is regularly compared to staging six Super Bowls or Taylor Swift concerts in a row. The six matches awarded to Seattle will take place at Lumen Field (capacity 69,000) and Vancouver’s seven will unfold at BC Place stadium (capacity 55,000).
The Taylor Swift comparison rings apt to Laurie Trautman, the director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University. Trautman distinctly remembers the ripple effect at the Whatcom County border crossings in July 2023 when pop superstar Swift played two concerts in Seattle. Coincidentally the same weekend, the Toronto Blue Jays hit town for a series with the Seattle Mariners, always an occasion for lots of British Columbia baseball fans to flock south to root for Canada’s team.
The surge of fans caused massive backups that led to wait times of more than three hours at the land border crossings from Vancouver into Northwest Washington. Social media lit up with complaints from unhappy campers worried about arriving late to the highlight of their summer. That episode contributed to Trautman’s institute being among the first to publicly call for border agencies and governments to plan to do better during the 2026 World Cup.
“We don’t want that to happen during FIFA. We do not want people to get stuck at the border and go home and say, ‘Phooey, I’m never going to try to cross that border again’,” Trautman said.
The Northwest has prior experience with the border crossing issue from when Vancouver and Whistler hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics. Canada and the U.S. opened auxiliary border crossing lanes in Whatcom County and staffed up to handle day-trippers coming from northwest Washington for the Olympics. The measures headed off excessive border backups.
But there’s an important difference between then and now. The upcoming World Cup is happening in the summer when cross-border traffic is already high. An initial analysis by the Whatcom Council of Governments projected that World Cup attendees traveling by car could increase border traffic in either direction by a nightmare-inducing 50%-100% on certain game days.
An alphabet soup of federal, state and local government agencies, business associations, bi-national groups and transit operators are now meeting in work groups to hammer out solutions to move soccer fans within and between Cascadia’s host cities in June-July 2026. Options on the table range from increased cross-border Amtrak service, improved bus service, advance screening of border crossers and various traveler information tech tools. Some require long lead times to implement.
Rail enthusiasts in the Northwest want to leverage the upcoming World Cup to achieve a long-desired goal of adding a third or even fourth daily Amtrak round trip between Seattle and Vancouver — with intermediate stops including Bellingham and Mount Vernon. That will necessitate multiparty negotiations between the track owners BNSF and CN, Canada’s VIA Rail, Amtrak and funding agencies from Washington state and British Columbia.
“We’re hoping the legacy from these games is the third and fourth roundtrip to Vancouver,” said Bruce Agnew, a program director at the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region nonprofit. “For us rail advocates, that is a great opportunity.”
Should adding round trips to the Amtrak Cascades schedule prove infeasible, the rail division at the Washington State Department of Transportation is also examining whether it could add carriages to the existing trains on the route to increase capacity for the World Cup. But WSDOT passenger rail program manager Kirk Fredrickson said he was reluctant to make any promises to avoid possible disappointment in 2026.
“Amtrak has told us that because of the national equipment shortage, they probably will not be able to provide us any additional equipment for the World Cup,” Fredrickson said in an interview.
Vancouver’s Pacific Central train station is slated for a much-needed facelift in 2025, which includes a U.S. Customs “preclearance” facility. When that feature goes live, passengers will complete immigration formalities before boarding. Then southbound trains will no longer need to stop at the border in Blaine for agents to collect forms.
WSDOT is also exploring options with charter bus operators for expanded express bus service between Vancouver’s Pacific Central Station and downtown Seattle during the World Cup. Ideally, that could utilize the new preclearance facility as well to eliminate the need for all passengers to disembark with their luggage at the border for inspection.
A hitch with the intercity bus solution is that Fredrickson anticipates “bidding wars” for spare buses. For one, the cruise lines homeported in Seattle and Vancouver soak up a lot of spare capacity in summertime to shuttle their customers around.
A suggestion advanced in a policy brief by WWU’s Border Policy Research Institute is to significantly expand the use of app-based tools and vetted traveler cards to make border crossing more efficient. Trautman said she’d like to see the Canadian government revamp and promote a free smartphone app named ArriveCAN that was first used during the pandemic. The app contains a secure questionnaire by which an inbound traveler can provide info in advance that the border inspector would otherwise need to gather at the inspection booth.
Similarly, U.S. Customs and Border Protection developed smartphone apps for pre-screening at selected airports and along the southern border. Trautman said the 2026 World Cup would be a fine excuse to pilot using a mobile app at a northern border crossing to move cars through at a brisker clip in a dedicated lane.
“That could be hugely valuable in terms of improving security and efficiency at the border,” Trautman said.
A spokesman for the Blaine sector of CBP said the agency was early in the planning stages for the World Cup and unable to provide comment at this point about what strategies or staffing levels it might pursue to reduce pain points at the border.
The bi-national policy forum PNWER is advocating for yet another initiative: the creation of a “Know before you go” web portal or digital tool that could funnel customized travel tips and document requirements based on a soccer fan’s nationality and destinations in Cascadia. This project awaits a funder to launch.
Earlier this year, the Washington Legislature set aside $1 million for World Cup transportation planning by WSDOT and the Seattle host committee. Putney said that money could potentially be used on an education campaign for how to get around during the event, particularly to encourage walking, biking and transit use. A caveat is that the Legislature made this funding contingent on the defeat of a statewide ballot measure this November that seeks to eliminate climate emissions permit auctions.
Separately in midsummer, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) introduced a bill to authorize $50 million per year in grant money to assist World Cup and Olympics host cities in the U.S. with transportation demands. According to a press release, the federal grants could support road construction, expanding light rail, purchasing new buses, creating bike lanes or making airport terminal improvements. However, the Senate has given no indication this proposal will see action before the whistle sounds on this session of Congress.
[Inline image, right justified: annotated match calendar] Caption: Match schedule: Seattle and Vancouver host games on alternating dates, except for two days with dual matches in late June 2026. Most of Cascadia’s games are in the group stage of the World Cup, but both cities also have at least one match in the knock-out rounds. Credit: Seattle 2026 World Cup LOC
Youth soccer coach Danny Navarro shares World Cup fan travel advice with a large following on TikTok and Instagram. Navarro himself is a superfan who has plotted out a complex trip to view matches in all 16 host cities during the 2026 World Cup.
“Fans unfortunately tend to be last-minute planners for these types of events,” Navarro said in an interview by phone from his home in northern Virginia. “I have been obsessing about travel and logistics because I know that is going to take the most time.”
Navarro’s planned trip takes advantage of host city pairs with matches scheduled on alternating days. So, this superfan and others could fly into Vancouver to catch the match there on June 18. Then he plans to board a train to see a game in Seattle on June 19 before jetting off to the East Coast.
Navarro recommended that fans planning cross-border trips during the World Cup apply early to get the appropriate trusted traveler card to beat the lines. That could be a NEXUS card (U.S.-Canada border), Global Entry card (international airport arrivals) or SENTRI card (southern border). Each of these cards costs $120 and the membership lasts for five years.
“That’s an investment in your time and that’s how fans should see it,” he said.
A complication for plan-ahead types is that game tickets won’t go on sale until late next summer or fall and teams aren’t drawn into groups and assigned to cities until December 2025. A few high-interest placements were released early. FIFA said the U.S. national team will play an unknown opponent in Seattle on June 19 and the Canadian men’s team will take the pitch in Vancouver for group stage games on June 18 and 24.
“You make your plan. But there will always be those curve balls,” Navarro said about his epic draft itinerary. “It’s pending on me getting the tickets to those games.”
— By Tom Banse
Also read in Salish Current: “FIFA’s green promise for Cascadia extends beyond the soccer pitch,” Oct. 22, 2024
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Correspondent Tom Banse is an Olympia-based reporter with more than three decades of experience covering Washington and Oregon state government, public policy, business and breaking news stories. Most of his career was spent with public radio’s Northwest News Network, but now in semi-retirement his work is appearing on other outlets.
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