Long Islanders' Broadway show attendance up nearly 11% despite congestion pricing

Long Islanders came to see Broadway shows more this past season than in any since before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an industry survey that showed the second-highest overall attendance ever to the Great White Way in history. Both spikes overlapped, at least in part, with New York City’s congestion tolling.

About 586,400 Long Islanders attended shows during the 2024-25 season — which ran from June 2024 through May 2025 — a 10.94% increase from the 528,470 from the Island who did so during the previous season, according to The Broadway League, which conducted the survey. The city's congestion tolling — $9 for most vehicles driven south of 60th Street, intended to disincentivize driving, encourage mass transit use and fund public projects — began Jan. 5, 2025.

Broadway’s latest figures are rare good news for the industry about Long Islanders and other suburban attendees, who have gone to Broadway shows less and less over the past quarter century. Long Islanders' attendance is less than half what it was in the early 2000s. The latest share of Long Islanders at shows — 4% of the total audience — is at its lowest point since records have been kept. The rate was 10.5% during the 2001-02 season, according to industry figures.

Overall, though, Broadway is booming: There were 14.66 million tickets sold last season, the second-highest number ever, reflecting an increase of 19.28% over the previous year's 12.29 million. The highest ever number was in 2018-19: 14.77 million.

The Broadway League’s president, Jason Laks, greeted the news with cautious optimism but said, "I love that this trend is going in the right direction."

"What we are so lucky to have, and I think what you’re seeing with the people in the suburbs beginning to remember this, is that we have something in our backyard that is so special and unique the world over," Laks told Newsday. "People travel from all over the world to experience what we have right here in our backyard."

Record attendance jump

The jump is the biggest in history between full seasons, with the Long Island jump one of the few years over the past quarter century when attendance by Long Islanders didn’t fall from the prior year.

News of more Long Islanders attending Broadway shows is yet another indicator suggesting toll critics’ apocalyptic forecasts of what would befall New York City and the region were unfounded.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, speaking last Monday afternoon to note the toll's anniversary, said 27 million fewer vehicles entered the toll zone,  crossing speeds have risen by up to 51% and transit ridership is up 7%. And, she said, pollution in the zone is down 22%,  traffic crashes are down 7% and injuries are down 8%, while the Manhattan economy is booming. Last year was the best for office leasing in nearly a quarter century,  sales tax receipts climbed 6% and foot traffic is up from the year before. Broadway had its highest-grossing season, raking in $1.89 billion.

The Trump administration has sued, as have other plaintiffs, including on Long Island, so far unsuccessfully, to end the toll, with the administration calling the toll "a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners."

Hochul has refused the administration's demand to turn off the tolling cameras. 

"Everybody who told me, from the president on down, ‘you're killing New York City, nobody’s gonna come, you know, traffic's down, cause the place is empty!’ Seriously? Have you been here lately? Because Manhattan has had some of its best years — the best year for Broadway, everybody!" Hochul said last Monday.

Broadway, which constitutes 41 theaters, including one at Lincoln Center, was shut down for the worst of the pandemic. Attendance was 6.73 million in 2021-22, and around 12.2 million the next two seasons, according to league statistics.

The latest survey, released in recent weeks, covers the first five months of congestion tolling but also the last seven months of 2024, before the plan was in effect.

In December 2023, the chair of The Broadway Association, which covers from just south of Madison Square Garden to Columbus Circle, fretted the toll would keep would-be theatergoers away, particularly those coming from the suburbs.

"This is just another impediment for people to come into the city — especially the bridge and tunnel people who are so important to the Broadway theaters," Cristyne Nicholas, chair of The Broadway Association, told WABC-AM's  "Cats Roundtable."

On Wednesday, Nicholas told Newsday she was never opposed to a congestion tolling program but thought the toll was initially set at "way too steep a price." The toll was originally set at $15, until Hochul first suspended its implementation in June 2024 and later ordered it reduced to $9.

"I think the fact that it was reduced to a more acceptable level has shown that it hasn’t been the burden that many people were fearing originally," said Nicholas, who caught the Broadway bug attending school trips to the Theater District while growing up in Lynbrook.

Personal car use is down 10.5% overall, the survey shows. It was 11.2% the prior season. In the 2024-25 season, about 34.2% of suburbanites came into the city by car; that figure was 37.9% in 2023-24.

David Banks, a University at Albany professor, is not surprised at the congestion tolling statistics, and he had expected the toll wouldn’t reduce attendance at Broadway. With fewer cars on the road, he said, it’s a quicker trip and parking is more available.

"Another $9 isn’t really a factor, I would say, for these sorts of big nights out," Banks said.   "Or, if you do go to a Broadway show a lot, you’re pretty well off. You can afford $9."

Policy analyst Charles Komanoff — who once headed the group Transportation Alternatives, which supports congestion tolling — said while it’s too early to see whether the program led to an increase in Long Islanders attending Broadway shows, the toll hasn’t led to any decline, much less the "doom-and-gloom" warned of by the toll’s foes.

"The Broadway doom-and-gloom and office leasing doom-and-gloom and the sales tax revenue doom-and-gloom and foot traffic doom-and-gloom," Komanoff said, "none of it has come to pass."