Those themes shaped a panel discussion hosted by Arrive, where leaders from city government, transportation, automotive, payments and technology reflected on Atlanta's preparations for the World Cup and the lessons they offer other cities. Moderated by Leroy Chapman, Editor-in-Chief of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the discussion explored how global events can accelerate long-term mobility change.

How Atlanta accelerated its mobility strategy

For Courtney English, Chief of Staff to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, one of the biggest misconceptions about the World Cup is that it created Atlanta's mobility strategy. The city had already committed to improvements to MARTA, its first Bus Rapid Transit corridor, autonomous shuttle pilots, complete streets initiatives, and public realm investments as part of its long-term vision. What the tournament created was urgency. As English put it, the World Cup became "an excuse to do things faster."

It's a lesson that extends well beyond Atlanta. Every city has transportation projects competing for funding, political attention and public support. A global event doesn't necessarily change those priorities, but it can create the momentum needed to align organizations, accelerate decision-making and move long-term plans forward.

That urgency also brought a more difficult challenge into focus. MARTA is the ninth largest public transit system in the country, yet the only one of that size operating without direct funding from its state. Atlanta also absorbs significant commuter demand from beyond its city limits: in 2023, 81.7% of jobs located within the City of Atlanta were held by people who lived outside the city. The result is growing pressure on Atlanta’s roads and transit system, which must serve not only the city’s residents but a much larger population moving into and through Atlanta each day.

It's part of why the city is now considering measures once seen as politically challenging, including exploring congestion charging akin to what launched in New York City last year. A global tournament can accelerate the projects a city already believes in. Closing the funding gap beneath them is a longer, harder conversation, one Atlanta's leadership is only just beginning to have publicly.

Cameron Clayton, CEO Arrive

Public agencies, private companies and technology providers found themselves working toward that shared goal, not only to deliver a successful tournament but to make lasting improvements for the people who live in the city. Arrive CEO Cameron Clayton encouraged the audience to think beyond the event itself. While major tournaments can accelerate investment, he said their lasting value lies in creating more livable cities where getting around is simpler, more connected and ultimately improve people's quality of life.

Cities build transportation systems. People remember journeys.

Earlier that morning, Duncan Licence from Arrive's Automotive & Data business had been talking with Uber drivers, hotel staff and people working across Atlanta. Their conversations weren't about artificial intelligence or autonomous vehicles. They were about everyday travel: better bus connections, simpler transfers and spending less time figuring out how to get from one place to another. Different conversations led to the same conclusion. Cities organize transportation into separate systems, but people don't experience it that way.

Cameron Clayton, CEO of Arrive, and Duncan Licence, Head of Automotive & Data at Arrive.

Public transit, parking, curb management, payments, electric vehicle charging and roads are often managed independently, each with its own priorities and technology. Travelers simply experience one journey; they remember whether finding parking was easy, transferring between services was seamless or paying for a trip felt intuitive. Those small moments shape how a city feels far more than the technology operating behind the scenes.

It also changes how success should be measured. Building new infrastructure will always matter, but encouraging people to use it depends just as much on removing the everyday friction that discourages adoption.

Designing mobility around people

Chapin Flynn, Senior Vice President, Transit and Urban Mobility at Mastercard, explored how payments help shape the visitor experience. He reflected on arriving in a new city, where even the simplest decisions can create uncertainty: Should I take a train or a taxi? Which one is cheaper or faster? Which train can I take? Can I tap my phone to pay right at the gate or do I need to go to a ticket vending machine? Do I need another app? Where do I buy a ticket?

Courtney English, Chief of Staff to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, and Chapin Flynn, SVP, Global Public Sector, Urban Mobility at Mastercard.

Individually, these questions are simple, but together they can create friction that interrupts the flow of a journey. Flynn's ambition was clear: transportation works best when people barely notice the systems behind it.

Today, Arrive estimates it saves an average of three minutes per transaction across approximately two billion transactions each year. By the company's calculations, that amounts to more than 6,300 years of time returned to citizens annually. Every minute saved searching for parking, waiting to pay, or navigating disconnected systems is time people can spend on what brought them to the city in the first place.

That's the real measure of progress: not the technology people see, but the complexity they never have to think about.

Reducing friction in everyday urban travel

Removing everyday friction is often just as important as building new transportation options. Flynn pointed to New York's contactless tap-to-ride system as proof of how quickly that change can happen: Mastercard recorded around 2,300 transactions on its first day in 2019, and today contactless payments account for roughly 72 percent of subway fares, the result of sustained, repeated messaging rather than a single announcement.

Expanding choice, not replacing it

Andrew Capizzuto, Director of Corporate Affairs at Rivian, challenged one of the biggest assumptions in mobility: that the future belongs to one mode of transportation over another.

Moderator Leroy Chapman, Editor-in-Chief at AJC, and Andrew Capezzuto, Director of Corporate Affairs & Public Policy at Rivian.

Successful cities, he argued, will not be defined by whether everyone drives electric vehicles or everyone uses public transit. They will be defined by how well different modes work together, giving people the flexibility to choose the option that best suits each journey.

That idea carried into one of the discussion's clearest insights. While Clayton spoke about America's love of cars, Licence suggested that people do not necessarily love the car itself, but the freedom it represents. The challenge for cities is not to replace that freedom, but to make it possible regardless of how people choose to travel.

Rather than asking people to choose between public and private transportation, cities have an opportunity to connect every part of the mobility journey. When every mode works together, people gain more choice, travel becomes more intuitive, and cities become more livable.

Accessibility is fundamental to adoption

Better mobility is not only about convenience, it is about opportunity. Better bus connections, simpler transfers, and more intuitive journeys do more than improve the travel experience. They help people access jobs, education, healthcare, and the opportunities that shape everyday life.

English described transportation as one of the foundations of healthy neighborhoods, alongside housing and healthcare, while also highlighting the importance of encouraging more people, particularly younger generations, to choose public transportation. Initiatives such as free transit for students, he suggested, can help establish lifelong travel habits.

Courtney English, Chief of Staff to Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, and Chapin Flynn, SVP, Global Public Sector, Urban Mobility at Mastercard.

  • Atlanta's geography presents its own challenges. With more than 50 major routes leading into the city each day, managing demand requires more than expanding road capacity. It requires transportation options that are connected, reliable, and easy to choose.

    Capizzuto pointed to electric vehicle charging as another example of accessibility. Even as EV technology advances, many people living in apartments or multifamily housing still cannot charge at home, highlighting that accessibility depends as much on infrastructure planning as it does on technological innovation.

A vision for the next 20 years

  • Looking two decades ahead, each panelist shared a remarkably consistent vision. Rather than a single breakthrough technology, the future lay in making cities easier to move through.

  • Flynn imagined a future where mobility becomes almost invisible, where planning, paying for and completing a journey happens so naturally that people hardly think about the systems making it possible.

  • Licence looked even further ahead, predicting that private car ownership could fall dramatically over the next 20 years. If 70 to 80 percent of people no longer own a car, he suggested, cities would have the opportunity to rethink how space is used. Streets currently dominated by parking could become bike lanes, parks, public spaces and neighborhoods designed around people rather than vehicles.

  • Capizzuto described a future shaped by changing patterns of work, housing and commuting, with transportation systems needing to become more flexible to support a wider variety of journeys than the traditional daily commute.

  • Clayton closed by returning to the idea that had surfaced throughout the afternoon: time. If three minutes saved per transaction already adds up to thousands of years given back to citizens each year, he challenged both his own team and the wider mobility industry to think much bigger. His ambition is that, through continued collaboration across governments, transportation providers and technology companies, cities could eventually give people back as much as 45 minutes every day, making cities more livable by giving people more time for the things that matter most.

The full Mobility Panel.

More than a successful tournament

Atlanta's World Cup preparations showed that hosting a global event can do more than test a city's infrastructure. It can accelerate investment, strengthen partnerships and create momentum that outlasts the tournament itself, provided governments, transportation agencies, automotive manufacturers, payment providers and technology companies keep designing around the complete journey rather than the individual systems that support it.

Every city will face its own version of this challenge, whether driven by population growth, aging infrastructure, climate commitments or major events still to come. Atlanta's experience doesn't offer a formula that every city can simply copy. What it does demonstrate is the value of a shared purpose and a willingness to collaborate across traditional boundaries.

The future of mobility won't be judged by the technology cities deploy. It will be judged by how effortlessly people move through them, and by how much time those cities give back to the people who call them home.