It has been so encouraging to get the Metro GETS ridership numbers from our operations team after each match and see them continue to grow. That tells me that more and more people are trusting Metro to help them get where they need to go, whether it’s a match, a watch party or just trying to get through Los Angeles during one of the busiest stretches our system has ever seen.

That momentum has been especially meaningful this week, as our region has also been navigating the realities of fire season and poor air quality. We cancelled one of our planned station activations and pulled out the N95s for our employees and bus riders in the impacted area over the weekend because of the conditions, and it was a reminder that hosting a global event in Los Angeles means preparing not just for crowds, celebrations and heat, but for all the climate challenges that are now part of life here, too.

It was just another pivot our incredible team has had to roll with over the last week and a half. I’ve loved seeing our Metro team step into the excitement of this World Cup moment with both its challenges as well as its thrills right alongside the fans.

Hosting an event like this isn’t only about moving people. It’s also about making sure the people behind the system feel part of it, too. That’s what I’ve loved about our Faces of Metro campaign.

Even before the first whistle blew, we kicked off our Faces of Metro campaign featuring Metro employees with ties to countries playing in the World Cup. Staff were photographed in face paint inspired by national flags connected to their heritage, family, culture or personal story, and the result hasn’t just been fun, it’s the more inspired things we’ve done as an organization.

Operators. Planners. Customer experience staff. Maintenance teams. Managers. Employees from all across Metro, each with a different story and one shared Metro pride. Twelve portraits from the campaign are on display in the East Portal at Union Station throughout the World Cup, giving fans moving through one of our busiest transit hubs a chance to see the people behind the system helping LA welcome the world. And this week, we’ll be welcoming even more cheering faces to join them as Union Station becomes an official FIFA Fan Zone this Thursday.

Los Angeles County is one of the most diverse regions in the world, and Metro reflects that every day. Our employees bring different languages, cultures, histories and lived experiences to this work, and during the World Cup, those differences aren’t in the background. They’re part of what makes this system feel like Los Angeles. That’s also why it mattered to me that our team be part of the celebration, not just the operation.

Today is Father’s Day. It’s also LA’s Match 4 of the FIFA World Cup, a Dodgers home game, which means Metro also will run Dodger Stadium Express on top of World Cup Games Enhanced Transit Service, host station activations, while also providing service to the official fan zone, watch parties and our usual Sunday ridership. In fact, today will likely be one of the most stressful days of the tournament for our system, behind only LA’s opening match on June 12.

That’s not a complaint. It’s the reality of what it means to host a global event in a place like Los Angeles, where the World Cup doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It lands on top of everything else our region already is. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about as I sit down to write my Rose, Thorn and Bud reflections for the past week.

I have come to realize that, so far at least, we have done a good job thinking through the stress-test of our mobility infrastructure plan and adjusting when needed. What I underestimated was the impact of this World Cup mobility stress-test on the human system that runs all of it. Because the best-designed operation in the world means very little if the people who operate it, schedule it and keep it running are stressed out.

Rose: This week’s rose came from one of the things we do to underpin our moonshot. We want people to know that taking Metro isn’t just convenient, reliable and safe, it can also be fun. So one of our World Cup workstreams is something we call “Surprise and Delight.” It’s our way of building excitement around our stations and the system in neighborhoods across Los Angeles.

Even though I knew these activations were happening all over the system, I stopped by one this week and stumbled into the most incredible scene. In partnership with the BLOC, the Downtown LA Alliance and the Special Needs Network, Brazilian and Haitian music, dancers and fans were gathering at the 7^th St/Metro Transit Center station ahead of a Brazil/Haiti watch party at the BLOC in Downtown LA. The looks on the faces of people exiting the station into that atmosphere were unforgettable. You could see the surprise and, most importantly, the delight! The joy was infectious for people arriving to catch their train, and it was a reminder that transit can be more than a way to get to an event. Sometimes it can change someone’s entire day.

That rose also extends to something we don’t talk about enough during busy moments like this: our regular riders. As much as the World Cup is bringing new fans, new crowds and new demands to our system, we still have an obligation to the people who rely on Metro every day. This week, our cancellation rate was under 2 percent. That means that even as we’ve layered this global event onto the system, we’ve continued showing up for the riders who count on us to get to work, get home and get through their day.

Thorn: I’m sharing something a bit more personal this week, but I suspect it’s one many leaders will recognize. I woke up this morning to a very terse message from my Oura ring. To be fair, it has been gently warning me for several days that I needed more sleep. This morning, it started off ok with “It’s going to be alright” but it was clear that it had had enough because that message was followed by: “It’s time to take action. Your Sleep Score is declining. Find something calming to do.”

Okay, I know it’s not wrong. But I also know there are still 28 days to go until the FIFA World Cup Final.

The reality is that what I’m feeling, and what I’m seeing across parts of the team, is a kind of joyous exhaustion. The kind that comes from doing meaningful work, alongside people who care deeply, in a moment that matters. But make no mistake, it is exhaustion all the same.

As the special guest at our final readiness meeting, held three days before the beginning of the tournament, retired Army Gen. A.C. Roper told us that high-stakes environments have a way of revealing what’s already there. If trust is thin, you feel it. If communication is weak, it shows. If people are carrying too much alone, that becomes clear fast. Pressure doesn’t create those dynamics, it just exposes them. Which means the real work of resilience happens long before the high-stakes moments in the trust you build and the habits you set while the stakes are still low.

It also changes how I think about my own role right now. The hardest part of leading committed people is that they’ll run through walls for the mission. I saw it this week in a teammate who hadn’t taken a day off in far too long. When I asked how she manages it all, she answered by showing me a photo of her husband with her kids and kept right on going. I was grateful her dedication was supported at home, but I also was reminded that with people like that, rest can’t be something I merely suggest. It has to be something I require. Taking care of the operation also means taking care of the people operating it.

Bud: My bud this week is that we are learning in real time and applying those lessons just as quickly. We made significant progress this week on egress from LA Stadium. We still have work to do, but wow, it was markedly better than the opening night, and that’s a sign that the debriefs are working, that the adjustments are working and the team is getting sharper with every match, even in their state of joyous exhaustion.

After tonight, we’ll be halfway through LA’s match-hosting obligations. But we still have more watch parties, more station activations, more lessons to learn and no shortage of buds awaiting. Every watch party, station activation and stadium egress is showing us exactly what to strengthen before the SuperBowl and 2028. This is becoming our baseline and I’m so confident in this team that keeps showing up, joyfully, committed and ready to challenge themselves. That keeps me grateful every day, especially on those mornings when my Oura ring is yelling at me.

Finally, I want to send a heartfelt Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, especially our Metro dads. On a day when many people are spending time with family, thousands of Metro employees will be helping other families get where they need to go. Thank you.

Metro photo credit: Aurelia Ventura
Instagram credit: Alissa Walker

As I was watching Team USA play Australia yesterday at a watch party event, it reminded me that the players representing their countries in the World Cup don’t spend most of the year playing together. They come from different clubs, different systems and sometimes even different styles of play. But when the moment is big enough, they put on the same jersey, trust one another and figure out how to play as one team.

The watch party was hosted by the Southern California Chapter of COMTO, where I was joined by three of our Southern California transit partners on a panel before the match. I left thinking about how much of the real “mobility” teamwork of this tournament isn’t happening on the pitch. It’s happening in the internal operations meetings before dawn, at the start of the match, on late-night calls after a match and in the external World Cup Regional Partner Post-Match debriefs where transit leaders from across our region compare notes, highlight successes, raise problems, and figure out how to make the next time work better than the last.

Southern California’s transit network works much the same way. We run distinct agencies, in different geographies, with different operating styles and different strengths. On most days, we operate as separate systems serving a shared region. But for the World Cup, we’ve had to come together over the last 18 months to deliver one coordinated experience for fans traveling to Los Angeles Stadium and other World Cup destinations from across Southern California.

But that didn’t happen automatically. Like any operation of this scale, we started with challenges–-how would we streamline the fare? how would we reimburse the transit partners for their costs? how would we plan the routes?—and we were able to resolve those well before the tournament began. However, there were surprises we couldn’t fully predict until service was live. Things like shifting demand, changing pickup locations, redeployment of buses and parking and layover plans that had to be adjusted in real time. As one of our partners put it yesterday, “Have there been surprises? Yes. Did we expect surprises? Absolutely.”

What has made it all work is not that everything has gone perfectly, it’s that no one treated those surprises as someone else’s problem. This group has built a rhythm together. We planned together, then started operating together and from there we have debriefed together so we can improve together.

I heard versions of that theme over and over yesterday. One partner talked about the importance of the pre-meetings and then the meetings reviewing what happened after each event. Another described it as “the pre-planning, and then the debrief, and making the adjustments … every game day has been different.” That regular debrief loop has been the key. It has given us a place to identify what didn’t work, acknowledge it honestly and fix it before the next match. It has helped us move resources where they’re needed, communicate more clearly with riders and keep refining a service plan that is operating at a scale and complexity no one agency could manage alone.

And in a high-stakes environment like this one, that kind of candid honesty is so critical. It’s easy to critique a live operation from the sidelines without seeing its full complexity. It’s much harder when you’re the one in the arena, making decisions in real time, adapting to what the day brings and staying accountable for the customer experience. What I’ve appreciated most about this regional transit partner group is that we’ve stayed focused on the work itself to solve problems together.

For Match 3 alone, the ridership continued to grow, and the World Cup Games Enhanced Transit Service recorded 27,112 rides for the match at Los Angeles Stadium. But that service depends on far more than one agency. It depends on regional partners sharing buses, operators and frontline teams to help move fans from 15 locations across two counties. It depends on intercity and regional carriers helping connect people to the action. It depends on local jurisdictions and operational partners helping clear paths, manage traffic and make the customer experience work on the ground.

It also depends on trust. As one partner said yesterday, our agencies may often operate independently, but “we are all part of a network.” The World Cup has put that truth to the test, and it has shown what’s possible when we have the opportunity to play on the field as one regional team instead of a collection of separate systems.

And we know these lessons will serve us far beyond this summer. The World Cup is giving us a live test of what regional coordination at this level can look like. It is also giving us a preview of what we will need for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in two years. We’ll need to suit up again as one team but with even more coordination, flexibility and an even deeper commitment to making transit the easiest, most reliable way to get where people need to go.

Now we’ve made it through Match 3, and just like Team USA, we’ll suit up and advance to the next round together for LA’s Match 4 tomorrow!

A crossover is the blending or intersection of two different styles that were never meant to meet but end up in the same place at the same time.

Take Mexico and South Korea, for example. On the field, they’re rivals. Two nations, two fan bases, the kind of matchup where you’re supposed to pick a side. But in the streets of Mexico City, their have fans practically fallen in love with each other and it has become a global social media sensation. They traded jerseys, shared chants and celebrated side by side. Rivals aren’t supposed to become friends. But they did.

So, it was no surprise that when their matchup was scheduled for yesterday, the world would be watching. And in LA, we have communities with such deep ties to both countries, naturally there was going to be lots of interest.

But we had a plan for yesterday. A World Cup match at LA Stadium, and months of preparation aimed squarely at moving people to it.

As it turns out, a love story doesn’t always unfold where you expect it to.

While we were laser-focused on the stadium, something else was rising across town. In Koreatown, thousands of fans poured onto our rail lines at key stations like Wilshire/Western and Wilshire Normandie and into the streets to watch the Mexico-South Korea rematch. Down the line, others streamed toward the Wilshire/Fairfax Station to the Fan Zone at the Farmer’s Market (Thank goodness the D Line Extension opened last month!). In East LA, the Mariachi Plaza station activation was a key destination, along with Union Station in Downtown LA because of nearby Casa Mexico located at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes. By the day’s end, systemwide rail ridership was up nearly 25 percent. But the surge that blew us away was on the D Line. It was up more than 95 percent!

We were NOT planning for that. And yet the system was ready for it.

This was the part I was most proud of yesterday. You can’t anticipate every moment a community decides to come together. Sometimes the feeling rises on its own and it can be unplanned, unscripted, driven by a viral video and beautifully outside your control. But what you can do is build a foundation strong enough to carry it when it comes.

So, the crossover I witnessed wasn’t only an emotional one of two cultures, one city and a shared reason to celebrate, it was an operational one. That systems we had built and tested for the expected were there to hold the unexpected. Supported by Metro MVP staff, Ambassadors, and security personnel, fans and neighbors were able to connect to their destination without an issue.

I’ve loved watching how these games build community. And in a county as vast and diverse as Los Angeles with our 88 cities, more than 100 unincorporated areas and countless neighborhoods, Metro is a vital part of that connection. We make that crossover possible.

Because the most important signal isn’t always where you planned for the crowd to be. It’s where the community decides to gather--and whether you’re ready to meet them there.

In February 2024, Jeff Zimm, our Executive Officer for Creative + Brand put this slide together on his first day with Metro. I asked him to come up with how we wanted to talk about the 2026 World Cup. Eighteen months later, it reads less like a tagline and more like a prediction.

When the FIFA Fan Festival opened at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum a week ago, we expected crowds. What we didn’t expect was how clearly it would show the link between a major event and transit.

For four days, fans from around the world gathered at the Coliseum to watch matches, celebrate their teams and soak up the energy of the World Cup. Unlike LA Stadium where direct rail service doesn’t exist, so fans have to arrive by GETS, the Fan Fest sat directly on Metro’s E Line, with two stations just a couple of blocks from the venue.

And every day of the FIFA Fan Fest, E Line ridership jumped compared to the week before. Thursday up 27 percent, Friday up 36 percent. Saturday our highest jump at 43 percent. And Sunday finished close to 30 percent above the prior week.

But the best part was the incredible energy of the fans. A sea of jerseys filled the bowl with people dancing and cheering, the kind of spontaneous joy only sports can create. I watched people arrive on Metro carrying flags, singing and leaving with new friends.

Vogue captured the feeling, too. In its roundup, The 5 Best Moments From the Opening Days of the 2026 World Cup, writer Emma Specter included the tournament’s very first goal with Mexico’s opening strike against South Africa. Here in LA, our Fan Fest crowd—all 40,000 of them—got to experience that moment together on the big screens at the Coliseum:

And one more item on Vogue’s list? Metro. Specter, an Angeleno, gave a shout-out to our enhanced World Cup bus service to LA Stadium and even noted that a bus ride here still costs just $1.75. So, we can finally say we’ve made it into Vogue Magazine!

We also debuted a one-of-a-kind custom bus, created through a partnership with West Coast Customs and the County’s Justice, Care and Opportunities Department. Let me tell you, this bus was impossible to miss and that was exactly the point. It wasn’t just a wrapped bus, it was a masterpiece inside and out. The project brought together creativity, craftsmanship, opportunity and partnership to create something memorable and uniquely LA. It was a reminder that some of the best things we build aren’t just infrastructure, they’re connections between people, communities and possibilities.

FIFA often calls its Fan Festival “the soul of football” outside the stadiums. After being there this weekend, I understand exactly what they mean. It wasn’t just a place to watch matches, it was a place for people to come together. And because Metro connected directly to it, transit became part of that shared experience.

As we move through the tournament, we’ll keep measuring ridership and tracking performance. But the Fan Fest showed us that when you make transit the easiest possible way to get somewhere, people will choose it.

And for four unforgettable days at the LA Coliseum, Metro connected Los Angeles to something extraordinary.

When people think about preparing for a massive public event, especially one as large as the FIFA World Cup, they probably think of giant conference rooms, nonstop presentations and marathon meetings. And we definitely did all of that. It takes hundreds of planning hours and people to pull off an event of this magnitude.

But one of the most valuable planning tools in our arsenal turned out to be one of the smallest. It was a standing weekly meeting. And it was 26 minutes long.

More than a year ago, as Metro’s preparations for the World Cup began to pick up speed, I started a standing weekly meeting with Conan Cheung, our Chief Operations Officer and the executive charged with leading our planning effort. I’m a fan of alliteration, so we called it “World Cup Wednesdays.”

It started with a realization. This event would be the single largest undertaking in Metro’s history, and our head of operations needed two things from me that aren’t always easy to offer at once: my full support and my full trust to run it himself. I didn’t want to micromanage, but I also needed to stay connected to the most important thing we’d ever attempted. World Cup Wednesdays was how I “squared that circle.” I could stay close enough to help but stay far enough to let him truly lead.

My caveat for World Cup Wednesdays? The meeting could only last 26 minutes. Not 30. Not 60. Twenty-six.

The number was intentional. The World Cup is happening in 2026, and I wanted every conversation to reinforce the idea that deadlines are real, time is finite and preparation doesn’t happen someday. We need to prepare now.

The first few meetings were an adjustment. You’d be surprised how quickly 26 minutes can pass! And at the beginning, I was strict about it to the point of being almost ridiculous. When the clock hit 26 minutes, the meeting ended, sometimes mid-sentence.

But over time, the meetings became one of the most valuable tools in our preparation. They weren’t designed to do the work, they were designed to unblock it. A standing place where Conan could get a fast yes, quick no or some help to just keep moving.

When I asked Conan recently if the format was helpful for him, he was honest. He said at first, he wasn’t sure we needed it. We were already meeting constantly for his “actual job” as Metro’s Chief Operations Officer. But the discipline, he said, turned out to be the point. With a deadline that couldn’t move, those weekly minutes became the place where decisions got unstuck.

One example he gave was related to our bus staging planning. We’d spent more than a year planning one of our largest bus operations with FIFA, the stadium and our partners and, about three months out, the plan changed and we had to find a new location. There was only one real option, which was a nearby lot that meant a longer walk for fans and a significant lease cost. There was no time to keep looking, and if someone else claimed it, our biggest operation would have had nowhere to stage. Conan brought it to a World Cup Wednesday, and we made the call in minutes. He later told me that decision, made on the spot, was a lifesaver.

For me, that’s what those 26 minutes are all about. Not providing status updates but removing roadblocks. Staying connected enough to understand the challenges, support the team, and make sure the right people are empowered to lead. On a personal note, it’s been rewarding watching Conan lean into this immense challenge, stretch his own leadership skills and we have been lockstep as we tackle this event together, with decisions ranging from traffic patterns to uniform colors.

Recently, I was talking with another transportation executive who led the opening of London’s Elizabeth Line. He told me that during the most critical phases of preparation, he met with his team every single week. Not because he didn’t trust them. Because the stakes were too high not to stay connected.

That conversation reminded me how important this simple tool can be. As we move through this FIFA World Cup and when we turn the page to prepare for the Super Bowl and then the Olympic and Paralympic Games, I will continue to depend on the lessons we have learned from World Cup Wednesdays, and apply it to the next major event, under a new name, of course.

Big moments are built through consistency and preparation. One week at a time. Sometimes all it takes is 26 minutes.

I know most people judge World Cup games by the number of goals scored. But during match night at LA Stadium, I’m focused on different numbers. Our ridership, wait times and whether we were better than the match before. Last night, as Iran took on New Zealand in Los Angeles, the numbers said we were. Ridership on our Games Enhanced Transit Service (GETS) jumped 41.3% over our last match. So, during halftime, I caught up with Conan Cheung, Metro’s Chief Operations Officer, to ask how the day was actually going. Here’s more of our conversation:

SW: Okay, Conan, how do you feel about seeing 12,736 inbound passengers so far compared to just over 9,000 at our last match?

Conan: Well, it’s definitely exciting. I’m not surprised, because I know we’re putting our A game out there. I’d love to see the bus numbers continue to increase, but this is definitely a great step in the right direction.

SW: How did you adjust from Friday’s experience to prepare for today’s match?

Conan: I think one of the big things that we did was work with the City of Inglewood to make sure that we were improving our operations through traffic, trying to make sure that we’re getting people to the game on time. We also improved our queuing, working with our MVPs (Metro staff) to make sure they were at all the hub locations to greet fans when they came early, and to ensure that we are working in lockstep with our regional transit providers, so that busses are running on schedule, they’re safe, they’re reliable, and they’re as fast as possible.

SW: So the match has started. Are you happy with the ingress part of today’s match?

Conan: Absolutely. I mean, seeing over 30% increase in ridership in just one game is definitely great progress. We’re looking to exceed that. We already have some of the origin hubs where we’re exceeding our bus capacity, so we’re looking now to add busses [at those locations] for the next match, so that we can improve our numbers even more.

SW: Okay, we have about 40 minutes left to go in this match before egress begins. What improvements are you looking for leaving the stadium compared to last Friday?

Conan: Well, I definitely want to make sure that the busses are able to float in and out of all three of our terminals at the stadium smoothly, on time and reliably. We’ve worked really hard with the City of Inglewood over the past weekend to ensure that we have their commitment to give us priorities where we need them, and also traffic control at key intersections where we were bottlenecked on last Friday.

SW: So, do you have any metrics you’re looking at from a high level tonight to tell you if we made a difference or if we improved on our egress tonight?

Conan: Yeah, we definitely will be looking at our clearance time, making sure that we don’t have a lot of people queued up for long periods of time. We are going to be looking at our average trip times as well, because that will tell us how long it takes you to get back to your home location, and then we’ll also be looking at the speeds throughout Inglewood. We’ve been working with the city as well as the other local jurisdictions on their traffic information and traffic data, and we’ll be able to see the average speeds to find out if we see faster rides back home.

SW: Thank you, Conan

For an operation of any scale, it’s important to be nimble and willing to pivot. Our team did exactly that between the first and second match to demonstrate Metro’s commitment to our riders to continuously improve. As always, there is more work to do as this marathon continues.

Paris was hot!

Not hot in the fashionable way, although it is that, too. It was uncomfortable-hot. The kind of heat that changes how people think about their time outside, how much water they need and where they might find some shade. It can also quickly turn a fun day into a difficult one.

That unexpected lesson was one we incorporated as part of our FIFA World Cup 2026 planning. We already had workstreams for everything from transportation operations to security to wayfinding. But I remembered from Paris that heat mitigation needed its own plan.

The last few days have brought that point home for me. Los Angeles has been hot, reaching into the 90s on most days. And that’s exactly the kind of weather that turns a planning notion into an operational reality, especially when thousands of people are waiting for a shuttle like they were last Friday for our first LA World Cup match.

We’re not the only ones who reached that conclusion. This summer, for the first time, FIFA built two mandatory 3-minute hydration breaks into every match, regardless of the weather. They essentially made the same shift we did planning for heat from the start instead of reacting to it.

Metro also launched a Heat Awareness Campaign to help riders and employees stay cool, hydrated and prepared. It kicked off at Union Station with our new Heat Awareness Guidebook, developed with city, county and community partners to provide practical tips, cooling resources, and tools for navigating extreme temperatures.

And we’re not just focused on heat mitigation for World Cup fans and visitors. With more than 13,000 bus stops served every day, we are also focused on upgrading our bus shelters. Since the trip to Paris, we have programmed funding for more than 390 bus shelters in the San Fernando Valley, 101 of which have been recently installed. And thanks to $2.6 million in newly appropriated federal funding for Metro’s Regional Bus Stop Enhancement Program, more shade is coming for our more than 800,000 daily bus riders.

I didn’t go to Paris looking for this lesson, but it sure did find me. In leadership, we often must be open to the things that “aren’t on our BINGO cards” to prepare for what isn’t obvious yet. If you are ever lucky enough to shadow a position or event that you may inherit someday, don’t just study the obvious. Look at the not so obvious things that may not even fall in your purview. You don’t have to wait for the struggle to look for the fix. If you build those lessons into your plans, you may never need the solution at all. But if you do? Think of the time you’ve saved.

As Los Angeles hosts the world this summer, the heat is showing up right alongside it. Whether we like it or not. But because we planned, we’re doing our best to stay one step ahead of it.

You can learn more about Metro’s Heat Awareness Campaign here.

You can’t serve a meal without trying it yourself. That’s how you discover whether it’s missing salt, whether the instructions make sense or whether something that looked perfect in the recipe tastes different when it actually reaches the table.

As leaders, it’s a reminder that there’s no substitute for experiencing your product the way your customers do. Friday night, I rode Metro to and from LA Stadium with thousands of fans for Los Angeles’ first World Cup match. And although I was absolutely there to celebrate Team USA’s 4–1 victory, I was also there as a Metro rider.

In a recent Metro leadership team meeting, we reflected on our rose, thorn and bud moments for the week. If you haven’t heard of this before, the “rose” highlights what went well, the “thorn” is what challenged us and the “bud”, my personal favorite, is the ability to look forward and start again -- something new, fresh and hopeful, and a chance to address an issue.

If I were to give an honest assessment of our first big test, I’d report this in our team meeting:

Rose: Metro safely moved tens of thousands of fans to the match and FIFA Fan Fest and there are hundreds of pieces that go into making that happen given the scale and complexity of this region. Incredible. Plus, transit wasn’t a headline, which in our business is a very good thing.

Thorn: Riding alongside our customers revealed moments of friction. Small details that looked different from the rider’s seat than they did from the planning table. The little ingredients that separate good from great.

Bud: The gift of tasting what you cook is that you don’t have to wait until the end to improve the recipe. You add a little more seasoning. You adjust and learn. And you make the next experience better than the last.

I am so proud of our Metro team for the work they have put into our “recipe” for these games. Every experience will make us better and will add just the right seasonings until we become Michelin rated in moving riders for these massive events and everyday mobility.

One match down. Many more “buds” to go. Go Metro!

For LA’s first match, our Games Enhanced Transit Service (GETS) provided 18,541 rides. Meanwhile, our Expo/USC E Line Station, the closest to the FIFA Fan Fest at the Coliseum, saw fare gate taps increase by 598% compared with a typical day. Another 2,346 fans came to the Pasadena Civic Auditorium watch party, contributing to a 7% increase in fare gate transactions at Memorial Park Station on the A Line.

Yesterday’s Official Metro App Stats:

• More than 2,000 people downloaded the new Metro app (biggest day since our official launch on May 11).

• Riders took more than 21,000 actions inside the new app, planning trips and looking up lines and stations, up 17% from the day before the match.

• Searches for directions to LA Stadium hit 1,139, 4X the day before, and 32X our pre-tournament baseline.

Those searches had been climbing for nearly a week, since June 6. That means people were planning and deciding days in advance that Metro was how they’d get to the match. These small shifts in behavior are the ones we’re working toward. Not just moving people on match day—but also becoming a planning tool they reach for when they’re figuring out how to get somewhere that matters on any day.

A 4-1 win, 25,933 journeys to a World Cup match, and thousands of others who chose to meet up using Metro. Not a bad way to start.

Tonight, Los Angeles hosts its first match of the FIFA World Cup 2026. The world is here.

I’ve spent this week moving between external kickoff events, fan celebrations and press conferences and internal readiness reviews, MVP Kit Pick-Ups, and dignitary briefings. Everywhere I go, I’m struck by the same thing: You can feel the city and the agency leaning into the energy of this moment.

Most people don’t realize that a big part of my job isn’t about running operations at all. It’s being Metro’s loudest cheerleader. Because if we’re ever going to make public transit the first choice for Angelenos, moments like this are how we win people over--one ride, one fan, one “I didn’t know it could be this easy” at a time. Promoting Metro is part of how we get closer to that goal.

But today isn’t only celebration. Much of my day will be spent with our team walking through the last details, pressure-testing our assumptions one more time, and making sure that when the first fans arrive, we’re ready for them. Even after all our preparation, the work continues right up to kickoff.

Tonight is about the beautiful game. It’s also about hospitality, teamwork and a region stepping onto the world stage.

For now, I’m taking a moment to appreciate the scene as Los Angeles has opened its doors.

Today the first whistle will blow. For the 39 days of FIFA that follow, Los Angeles will help welcome millions of people from every corner of the planet. It’s the kind of moment a city waits a generation for.

I want to spend this first post on the part of those 39 days almost no one sees, the nearly two years of work that has to happen before the first fan ever boards a plane, train or automobile to get to LA for a match.

For the better part of 18 months, our teams have been meeting. And then meeting again. Seventeen workstreams designed to address the customer journey, each one its own meticulous effort to improve the fan experience, while ensuring regular riders can still get where they need to go. How many buses we’d need, and where they would stage. The fastest routes to the stadium and back. Where people would park, and how they’d reserve it. How to keep people safe and comfortable in the punishing heat of a Los Angeles summer. How to design wayfinding clear enough that someone who has never set foot in this city can step off a train or bus and know exactly where to go. How to stand up an emergency operations center ready for whatever a given day decides to bring.

Very little of this is glamorous work. Most of it will never be noticed and that’s the point. When it works, it’s supposed to look effortless. A soccer dad will park in the right parking lot and take the right train. A proud Paraguay fan will take the right bus that gets them to that amazing match they were so excited about, and they never once think about the thousands of decisions that made that simple trip possible. The invisibility is the achievement.

Along the way, we’ve practiced. And we’ve been tested.

Not long ago, during one of those very readiness exercises, we ran into a real-life disruption. I’m talking about the kind you can’t fully script. I’ll save that story for a future post, but I’ll tell you what I told my team the next morning: this was a gift.

Not because it was easy. It was the opposite of that. But it came while the stakes were still a rehearsal and not the real thing. It showed us exactly where we needed to be sharper, and it gave us the time to figure it out. I would far rather learn a hard lesson in practice than discover it with the world watching.

That, to me, is what preparation is actually about. Not the absence of problems. The practice of meeting them calmly, together, again and again, until meeting them becomes second nature.

Today I am thankful for all the people who do this work. The operators and the planners. The engineers and the customer experience teams. The people who will be in the operations center before dawn and the ones who will still be on a station platform long after the last fan has gone home. They’ve given months of nights and weekends to a moment most of them will experience from behind the scenes. They are the reason I have any confidence at all heading into these next weeks.

And now, when the whistle blows, all of that preparation meets the real world for the first time. I’ll be documenting it here as it happens—the good, the hard and everything in between.

The world is on its way. We’ve been waiting for them. We are ready.

Over the next three years, Los Angeles will host the world in an unprecedented trilogy: the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Super Bowl LXI in 2027, and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. LA is entering one of the most consequential periods in our history.

At the same time, LA Metro is in the midst of the most transformational transportation effort in its history and as CEO, I have the extraordinary privilege and enormous responsibility of leading through this moment. Every day there will be decisions, challenges, breakthroughs and lessons.

Some will be visible to the public. But most will not.

For a long time, I’ve thought about documenting this experience. Not because I have all the answers, but because moments like these have a way of teaching us things that are worth capturing before they are forgotten. And because they remind us that big things are possible.

From the outside, big achievements can look like a single, victorious moment. From where I sit, they’re something else entirely. Transformation is messy: years of preparation, hard-won partnerships, difficult tradeoffs and the steady work of people who care enough to get the details right.

That’s what I hope to explore here.

Some posts will focus on transportation and the next generation of mobility. Others will focus on leadership, teamwork, public policy or just the moments that make us human.

All of them will be observations from my front row of this transformational moment for LA Metro and I look forward to sharing them with you.