Lawrence Transit adds World Cup shuttle service on match days

Lawrence Transit is setting up a pressure valve for one of the region’s biggest travel surges in years: a special Score Lawrence shuttle that will link downtown Lawrence with Central Station during Kansas City World Cup match days. The route is aimed at residents, visitors and businesses that will feel the tournament ripple through parking, traffic and late-night travel.

The city, working with Explore Lawrence, will run the shuttle between the downtown transit hub at Vermont and Seventh streets and Central Station at 2315 Bob Billings Parkway. It will operate from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. on all six days when Kansas City hosts 2026 FIFA World Cup matches: Tuesday, June 16; Saturday, June 20; Thursday, June 25; Saturday, June 27; Friday, July 3; and Saturday, July 11. While in service, the bus will come every 15 minutes, and riders will be able to track arrivals in the Transit app and on Google Maps.

The move puts Lawrence into KC2026’s broader ConnectKC26 transportation network, the official tournament transit plan for the Kansas City World Cup. Central Station is one of 15 regional sites tied directly to downtown Kansas City through the larger system, which is designed to move fans between the FIFA Fan Festival and regional destinations without forcing every trip onto a private vehicle. KC2026 has said Region Direct is the service connecting the Fan Festival with those regional hubs.

The pricing is meant to make those trips simple. KC2026’s published Region Direct fares are $5 for a one-day pass, $25 for a seven-day pass and $50 for a full-tournament pass. The broader World Cup transit service is expected to run from June 11 through July 13, with buses arriving every 15 to 30 minutes depending on the route. KC2026 also contracted 215 motorcoach buses for the event, underscoring the scale of the regional operation.

For Lawrence, the shuttle also serves as a test of how Douglas County handles a sudden spike in demand without letting daily life grind to a halt. Central Station, which opened after a project developed with the City of Lawrence and the University of Kansas in July 2020, now serves seven local routes and two regional routes. The station replaced years of temporary downtown transfers that Lawrence Transit had used since 2010, and it became the centerpiece of a phased route redesign that began in August 2022 and continued in 2023.

That history matters because the World Cup will push the system in a different way. Lawrence Transit has already experimented with fare-free service citywide for one year in 2023, and the new shuttle gives the agency a chance to turn a global event into a practical local mobility win. It could help keep fans, workers and residents moving while limiting the parking, traffic and out-of-town travel headaches that tend to follow a tournament of this size.