US Open Second Week: When the Tennis Gets Serious, So Does the Traffic

The first week of the US Open is a festival. The second week is an event. Starting Monday, September 7, the field is down to the last sixteen, every match matters, and the crowd at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center changes character: fewer families making a day of the grounds, more people holding expensive tickets to a specific stadium session that might not end until after midnight.

If you are heading to Flushing Meadows from Long Island between now and the finals, this post covers what changes in week two. Our full US Open transportation guide has the complete rundown of the parking zones, the drop point, and the routes; this is the week-specific plan.

The Week at a Glance

The main draw runs through Sunday, September 13. The round of 16 wraps up as the week opens, the quarterfinals run Tuesday and Wednesday, the semifinals take Thursday and Friday, and the finals land on the closing weekend. Every one of those days has a day session and a night session at Arthur Ashe, and the night sessions are the ones that decide whether your ride home was planned or improvised.

This is also a record-money year, which tells you about the stakes and the crowd: the 2026 tournament is paying out $108 million in total player compensation, the largest purse in tennis history, with $5.5 million to each singles champion. The corporate suites know it. The second week at Ashe is one of the densest client entertainment scenes on the New York calendar.

First, the Labor Day Weekend Trap

Before week two even starts, there is a parking problem with a date on it. The Yellow Zone at Citi Field, the only lot with a direct boardwalk walk to the East Gate, closes to tennis fans on Mets home dates, and the Mets host San Francisco September 4 through 6, right across Labor Day weekend and the round of 16.

On those three days, roughly 40,000 baseball fans and a full tennis session share the same park. Tennis parking pushes into the Blue and Orange lots inside Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the walk gets longer, and the official guidance is to arrive by 8:30 am for a day session. If you were planning to drive yourself to a Labor Day weekend session, that is the fine print that ruins it. We covered the full Labor Day weekend collision separately, because the airports and the Hamptons closeout are happening at the same time.

Night Sessions Run Later in Week Two

A first-round night session can be a quick straight-sets evening. A quarterfinal between two players who both believe they can win the tournament is a different animal. Night sessions start at 7:00 pm and week-two matches regularly push past midnight, and there is no way to know in advance. That is the sport.

Here is what that means practically. All rideshare and black-car traffic gets one drop and pickup area: the parking lot within the NY Hall of Science, with a direct walking path to the Champions' Entry. At 12:30 am after a five-set quarterfinal, tens of thousands of people hit the same app inside the same ten minutes, pricing runs 2 to 4 times normal, and that lot becomes a crowd holding phones over their heads looking for license plates. Our US Open hourly service page has the map link and the full pickup plan.

The chauffeur version of that moment: you text when you stand up from your seat, walk out, and get into a car whose driver has been staged nearby since the second set. That difference is the entire reason our tournament clients book hourly service for week two instead of point-to-point. A quarterfinal does not end on a clock, so the car should not be on one either.

The Week-Two Route Call

From Nassau and Suffolk the run is the LIE west to the Grand Central Parkway, with Northern Boulevard as the bail-out when the GCP jams at the Whitestone interchange. Nothing about that changes in week two, but the timing does: day sessions in week two draw a heavier corporate crowd out of Manhattan, so the Queens-bound flow builds earlier in the afternoon ahead of the night session.

One more regional note for the calendar: the Meadowlands is running its own September at the same time, with BIGBANG at MetLife on the 11th and the Giants opening against the Cowboys on the 13th, the same day as the men's final. If your household has tickets to both sides of the city that weekend, the transportation is worth exactly one conversation, and it should happen now.

Clients Flying In for the Quarters

Week two is when out-of-town guests show up. LaGuardia sits three miles from the tennis center, a 10 to 15 minute run, the closest airport-to-venue pairing in our entire service area. JFK is 20 to 30 minutes up the Van Wyck. One booking covers the arrival pickup and the run to Flushing the same afternoon, and we track the flight, not the schedule, so a delayed wheels-down does not strand anyone at the terminal with a 7:00 pm ticket. Our LaGuardia car service covers how we run that airport.

The Short Version

Week two of the US Open is the best sports ticket in New York, attached to the worst late-night pickup scene in Queens. The fix is one decision made in advance: a chauffeur who knows the Hall of Science staging rules, holds through the session, and is already there when the handshake happens at the net.

Request a quote with your session date, day or night, and we will build the timing around the draw, the Mets schedule, and the way this tournament actually ends: late.