The 2026 FIFA World Cup is just around the corner, and Vancouver is getting ready to welcome millions of soccer fans from around the world for the seven games that will be played in the city.
But with those visitors come extra vehicles on Vancouver’s already-busy streets, which begs the question: are we ready for the traffic impacts of the upcoming event?
Not entirely, at least not compared to other host cities.
This is according to a new report released by Ontario-based Geotab, which tracks the movement of millions of commercial vehicles around the world.
In a ranking of all 16 cities, Vancouver is sitting at number 15, just ahead of Toronto.
The numbers were compiled by examining several components, including how congested the cities’ roads normally are, how much time vehicles sit idling, and safety concerns.
The fourth and final factor was resilience, which may be the most interesting component, suggested Mike Branch, VP of data and analytics for Geotab.
“And this was how quickly was the city able to get back to normal? And normal might have been good, it might have been bad, but how quickly did it get back to that baseline?” Branch asked.
“Was the city able to cope with this influx and reasonably have not much of a change? Or did it take hours and hours upon end for it to get back to normal?”
Related articles:
The company determined the resilience ranking using measures of how well a city’s road network holds up during a big event. It looked at past large-scale events and compared traffic volumes on event days to those on non-event days.
Branch says cities fare better in terms of resilience when events take place on the outskirts rather than right in metropolitan areas, as will be the case in Vancouver.
“The one that was super interesting was Mexico City. Mexico is hugely congested. But they were number three on the list in terms of being good,” he said.
“The reason was because they bounced back pretty quickly. So what you are in for in Mexico City would be very akin to what you’d be in for normal sporting events.”
Branch says Vancouver’s ranking was really hurt by the city’s relatively high number of traffic lights, which led to continual starts and stops. This decreases the ability to bounce back from gridlock quickly.
“The hard stopping and hard acceleration…there’s a lot of signal-controlled intersections. It’s a very much a gridded kind of layout there,” he said.
“So those two factors, the resilience and then the harsh braking and hard acceleration, that pulled Vancouver’s score down a bit there.”
Andy Yan, director at SFU’s City Program, says while Geotab’s report has some good data, there are some factors that weren’t taken into account.
“There doesn’t seem to be a lot in terms of the diversity of transportation modes,” Yan said.
“Whether it’s the visitors or people going to the games, as well as the workers, may be taking transit. So that might be some kind of mitigating factor in terms of how different the rankings would be…specifically in terms of transit users.”
Yan says this is an important point because Metro Vancouver actually does quite well in terms of people taking transit to work when compared to other, older North American cities.
For that reason, he says, anyone heading to the games should take transit if they can. TransLink CEO Kevin Quinn said earlier this month that they will be adding around 600 more bus trips per day, as well as dedicated FIFA Fan Festival shuttle along certain routes.