Headed into the fourth World Cup match scheduled for tonight at 6 p.m. at Arlington’s Dallas Stadium (AT&T Stadium), transportation authorities have identified areas where further improvements can still be made.
Regional transportation authorities provided updates at a news conference on Tuesday on how operations have been running. Officials stated that more people used rideshare services, such as Uber and Lyft, to get to and from matches than they had anticipated.
“Our demand for rideshare technology is higher,” said Michael Morris, director of transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, during Tuesday’s news conference. “As a person who’s responsible for the safety of the Dallas-Fort Worth region, I like a whole bunch of people taking rideshare technology to special events, that I think is a win-win”
Transportation officials said approximately 3,000 rideshare drop-offs occurred during each match, holding two to three people each. Because of the additional and unexpected rideshare traffic, regional transportation officials have added another rideshare lot, Lot D, in addition to the current ES Sports Lot.
“We worked with the [Texas] Rangers, the city [of Arlington], Uber and Lyft to open a new lot up,” said Natalie Bettger, a senior program manager for the council. “It became a lot of vehicles trying to get into our ES Sports Lot and so we opened up Lot D. [ES Sports Lot] is not quite large enough to accommodate that amount of traffic.”
To help alleviate some of the post-match traffic, Uber is providing a paid shuttle service to get match attendees to downtown Dallas and downtown Fort Worth. Right now, the rideshare service has 25 shuttles available after matches that can seat up to 54 passengers. Uber is expecting these shuttles to reach 100% capacity by the Round of 32 matches and is prepared to add more shuttles as needed.
“We want to make sure that we’re dispersing fans and trying to get as many people moving as quickly as we can once the matches are over,” said Javier Correoso, Uber’s senior director of federal affairs and U.S. policy for the south.