LIRR ridership reaches record high during Knicks parade, U.S. Open
Fans of the New York Knicks attend a championship parade on June 18, 2026, celebrating the team's NBA Finals victory. Credit: Newsday/Alejandra Villa Loarca
The Long Island Rail Road faced a full-court press for last week’s Knicks parade and U.S. Open golf championship — and set a post-pandemic record of 369,482 rides and was 33% higher than the average Thursday, according to Metropolitan Transportation Authority statistics.
The record, set June 18 on parade day, beat the previous post-pandemic high of 315,054 from a day earlier, according to Joana Flores, a spokeswoman for the MTA, which runs the railroad.
The average ridership for a Thursday over the past year is 277,842, including parade day.
On June 18, tens of thousands of people crammed into lower Manhattan to fete the Knicks, who five days earlier won their first NBA championship in 53 years. That parade came on the same day as the first day of the U.S. Open golf championship at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton.
At the railroad’s meeting on Monday, LIRR president Rob Free cited the June 18 record as emblematic of how ridership has rebounded in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic slump.
“We have seen ridership recover in a big way,” he said.
The ridership record was set even though the railroad did not add extra LIRR trains for parade day.
And the LIRR’s ridership on June 18 also may have set an all-time record, though since the pandemic the MTA has tweaked how it tallies ridership, precluding a direct comparison. The highest weekday average in LIRR history, recorded in June 2019, was 332,647, according to a news release last year from the office of Gov. Kathy Hochul.
The city’s subway system, which the MTA also runs, didn’t set a record on parade day, but there were still millions who rode.
Subway ridership that day was 4,523,644; the post-pandemic high was on Dec. 11, 2025, with 4,65 million rides. An average Thursday, Flores said, has 4,213,812 rides.
Before the pandemic, daily ridership on the subway averaged 5.5 million.
Each of those subway statistics is still roughly three times the entire population — 1.5 million — of the city whose team the Knicks beat in the championship, the San Antonio Spurs.
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.
Where will Heuermann serve sentence? ... Prostitution, money laundering ring on LI ... Correction officer sexual assault ... Mets fire manager
Where will Heuermann serve sentence? ... Prostitution, money laundering ring on LI ... Correction officer sexual assault ... Mets fire manager
