Ian Fraser

i am sick of hearing from europeans about the world cup THIS IS MY FINAL WARNING

The US spent 70 years building a country optimized for cars instead of people. This is what that looks like at full resolution. MetLife Stadium sits on 2.1 million square feet of parking. 28,000 spaces. The parking lots are larger than the stadium itself. The entire Meadowlands complex was purpose-built so that the only way a human being can reach it is inside a 4,000-pound metal box. The New Jersey State Police printed that sign because pedestrians were never part of the design. And here’s where it gets interesting: the 2026 World Cup Final is being played at this stadium in five months. FIFA’s biggest event on Earth, hosted at a venue where walking is literally illegal. International fans from countries where you stroll to the stadium from a pub three blocks away are about to encounter a place where the nearest hotel requires a car to travel a distance you can see with your eyes. The US has 700 million to 2 billion parking spaces. Eight parking spots for every car in the country. Parking lots cover more than 5% of all developed land, an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Minimum parking requirements forced every building, every stadium, every shopping center to dedicate more square footage to storing empty vehicles than to serving the humans inside. American cities didn’t accidentally become unwalkable. They were zoned that way. During the recent Club World Cup at MetLife, only 12.5% of fans used public transit to reach the stadium. The other 87.5% drove. Now imagine that ratio flipping for the World Cup, when the majority of attendees will be international visitors without cars. NJ Transit is spending $100 million to try to move 20,000 people per hour through a single transfer point at Secaucus Junction, a system that already had door malfunctions and 13-minute delays during games with 29,000 fans. Scale that to 82,500. The sign in this hotel lobby is American car culture in a single frame: we built the richest country on Earth, then made it illegal to walk across it.