Worried about World Cup traffic? Planning, technology should help ease jams.

Atlanta hosts its first of eight FIFA World Cup games June 15 and is among 16 North American cities with this honor.

An event of this magnitude requires significant planning, personnel, equipment and cooperation to go smoothly. And while Atlanta is notorious for slow traffic, the city says it is ready to host the world and has the receipts to prove it.

I sat down with Georgia Tech professor of environmental and civil engineering, Michael Hunter, to get a read on how well Atlanta should be able to move people.

“Georgia had a lot of foresight and it is paying dividends now, because they can hold an event like the World Cup, which is going to involve state coordination, city coordination, local county coordination, and they can do that,” he said.

One wise strategy was implemented at the state level in the last 10-15 years, Hunter said, as the Georgia Department of Transportation incentivized local governments to buy the same traffic signal equipment. That allows traffic lights to “talk” to each other and adjust priorities for vehicles, transit or pedestrians, based on traffic flow.

Flanked by a bank of his own traffic signal boxes and test modeling computers in his lab, Hunter explained the Summer Olympics were a turning point for Atlanta. While the 1996 Games were far from perfect, the city proved it could host the world.

The 2019 Super Bowl proved to be another revelation in A-Town.

“They learned at the Super Bowl how to get everybody to talk,” Hunter explained. “It is about the coordination.”

And, he noted, reflecting on his nearly 30 years in the field, Georgia does this better than other places he has studied.

The Atlanta Police Department recently met with reporters to detail its World Cup efforts. Officers will not be allowed to take vacation during the weeks of World Cup activities. Millions of dollars are approved for overtime. And Atlanta has a flexible and coordinated transportation plan, officials said.

Police will be at GDOT’s Traffic Management Center and at the Georgia World Congress Center ops center.

“We will also rely on Atlanta DOT, their new integrated command center, to also give us real-time information visually from the cameras around to make sure that we can make real-time decisions in a timely manner to best move traffic,” Charles Hampton Jr., deputy chief of the Atlanta police special events division, said at the Tuesday presentation.

Hampton noted that while there are no scheduled road closures for the World Cup around Mercedes-Benz Stadium, they could block streets if large crowds spill over.

Hampton said the city conducted a training exercise among multiple departments in late March and gleaned good feedback. And he said any plans have to be flexible as circumstances change.

Hunter explained the biggest World Cup traffic challenge could be the arrivals of VIPs.

“You’re going to have presidents, prime ministers, royalty — all these people coming in who don’t usually come to all these events. And they all are going to have special needs,” he said.

This could require unplanned road closures or even the removal of pedestrians from certain areas at peak times.