US Open Traffic Hits Queens: What It Means for Newark and Staten Island Car Service This August

The US Open's Fan Week opens August 23 and the tournament runs through the men's singles final on September 13, per the tournament's official schedule. That's three full weeks of the world's attention, and a lot of traffic, funneled into Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. It's not a KulaRides service area, but it might as well be one this month: a large share of the people driving, flying, and rideshare-ing into the tournament are coming from Newark, Staten Island, and the rest of NJ, whether for a match, a client outing, or a flight home right after. Here's what's actually changing in and around Flushing this year, and what it means for anyone starting their trip in KulaRides' home markets.

Two Mets homestands turn Flushing into a two-stadium traffic jam

Citi Field and the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center share the same parking lots and the same highway exits, and this year the Mets are home for two stretches that directly overlap the Open: August 25–27 against Milwaukee and August 28–30 against Houston, confirmed on the Mets' official 2026 schedule, plus a Labor Day weekend series against San Francisco from September 4–6. A parking guide covering the tournament, published by Prked on July 18, calls these the "2026 Mets Conflict Dates" — August 25 through 30 and September 4 through 6 — and warns that tennis fans are locked out of the main Yellow Zone lot on those days and redirected into the Blue and Orange Zones inside Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, with a longer 10-to-15-minute walk in and traffic that backs up well past the Grand Central Parkway exits.

Rideshare drop-off is geofenced away from the gates — and pickup after night matches is worse

Anyone planning to lean on a rideshare app should know the venue is entirely geofenced. Per the same Prked guide, Uber, Lyft, and yellow taxis are barred from the main gates and routed instead to the New York Hall of Science lot, a walk away from the South Gate. That's a manageable inconvenience on arrival. Getting picked up after a night session is the harder problem: the guide reports post-match surge pricing routinely running three to five times the standard fare, with waits at the Hall of Science pickup point exceeding 45 minutes as thousands of fans try to hail a car at once. For a client dinner running late or a match that goes to a final set, that's not a small variable.

Official parking is cashless, first-come-first-served, and requires arriving hours early

Driving in doesn't fully solve it either. Official lots charge a flat $40 for cars and $80 for buses, are 100% cashless, and don't take advance reservations — arriving two to three hours before your session is the only way to guarantee a spot, according to Prked's guide, and on a Mets conflict date you'd want to be off the highway by 8:30 a.m. for a day session. The tournament's own transportation guidance, echoed across ticketing partner travel pages, still points most fans toward the 7 train to Mets-Willets Point or the LIRR's Port Washington branch as the more predictable options — good advice if your day starts and ends in Manhattan, less useful if you're coming from Newark or Staten Island with no one-seat ride to Queens at all.

Why this lands harder on Newark and Staten Island travelers

None of the transit options above start in New Jersey or Staten Island. A trip from Newark to Flushing means a transfer through Manhattan or a long drive around the exact highway interchanges the tournament is congesting; a trip from Staten Island means the ferry, then a transfer, then likely a second transfer to reach the 7 train — with no direct rail link to Queens at any point in that chain. It's the same structural gap KulaRides has flagged before with Staten Island's lack of direct airport rail: when there's no single fast option, the value of a car that's simply already scheduled to be there goes up. That's especially true for anyone using tournament week for business — client outings during the Open are common practice among NJ and NYC companies, and a driver who already knows to avoid the Citi Field conflict-date bottleneck is worth more than the fare difference from a rideshare app.

How this maps to KulaRides

KulaRides doesn't run scheduled service into the tournament grounds, but a large share of the trips we do run this month, airport pickups landing at EWR ahead of an evening session, client dinners before or after a match, a ride back to Newark or Staten Island once the last train's already gone, sit exactly on top of this traffic pattern. Our airport transfer service tracks incoming flights and holds a fixed pickup time, so a client flying into EWR for a Tuesday-night match isn't stuck figuring out Flushing's geofenced rideshare zone on arrival. For companies entertaining clients during tournament week, our corporate travel service gives NJ and NYC businesses one driver and one point of contact instead of a different app-based driver, and a different surge price, every time. If a night session runs late and the math on a 3-to-5x surge fare doesn't look great, our breakdown of black car vs. Uber Black covers why a pre-booked chauffeur holds its price when rideshare doesn't, and our corporate travel guide has more on how growing NJ and NY companies structure ground transportation around events like this one.