NYC Marathon 2026: Street Closures & Getting Around on Race Day

The TCS New York City Marathon will be run on Sunday, November 1, 2026 — the first Sunday of November, as it has been for decades. This edition carries extra weight: it will mark the 50th anniversary of the five-borough course, first run in 1976 when the race left Central Park and spread across the whole city.

Expect it to be bigger than ever. More than 50,000 runners will start at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island (first waves around 8 AM), and over a million spectators will line the 26.2 miles through Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan to the Central Park finish. NYRR received a record number of drawing applications for 2026, so the field — and the crowds — will be at capacity.

For everyone not running, marathon Sunday is the single most complicated street-closure day on the New York calendar. One long ribbon of closed road threads through all five boroughs at once, severing north-south avenues in Brooklyn and Manhattan and taking four bridges out of service for much of the day. The good news: the closure pattern barely changes from year to year, so you can plan around it months out.

The table below is based on the annual closure pattern, which has been stable for years. NYRR and the NYPD publish the exact 2026 street-by-street times in the weeks before race day — treat these windows as the planning baseline, not the final word.

Four bridges carry the course, and their closures are the backbone of race-day traffic planning:

• Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge — the start line. Closes to all traffic around 7 AM, before the first wave, and both levels typically stay closed into the afternoon. This is the only full-day closure; Staten Island–Brooklyn traffic detours via New Jersey (Goethals/Bayonne) or the ferry.
• Pulaski Bridge (Brooklyn → Queens, mile 13) — closes mid-morning to early afternoon. The Greenpoint Avenue Bridge and the LIE remain the working alternatives between Greenpoint and LIC.
• Queensboro Bridge (Queens → Manhattan, mile 15) — runners take the lower roadway; expect the crossing to be closed or severely restricted through the middle of the day. The Queens-Midtown Tunnel and RFK Bridge carry the diverted traffic.
• Willis Avenue & Madison Avenue bridges (Manhattan ↔ Bronx, miles 20-21) — closed while the race loops through Mott Haven. The Third Avenue Bridge and the RFK remain open for Harlem River crossings.

Everything else stays open: the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, both East River tunnels (Queens-Midtown and Hugh L. Carey), the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the RFK, and the George Washington Bridge all run normally, with heavier-than-usual load as they absorb detoured traffic.

Manhattan gets cut twice: First Avenue closes from 59th Street up into the 100s for the mile 16-19 stretch, and Fifth Avenue plus the Central Park drives close for the finish. That severs the Upper East Side from the Upper West Side at street level for most of the day. Three workarounds matter:

• The Central Park transverses. The crossings at 65th, 79th, 86th, and 97th Streets run below the park's surface, so they typically stay open even while the park drives are closed. On marathon Sunday they carry nearly all east-west traffic uptown — expect them to move, but slowly, with the 86th Street transverse usually the busiest.
• The FDR Drive. It never closes for the marathon. North-south travel on the East Side belongs on the FDR, not the avenues — Second, Third, and Lexington stay open but crawl with diverted traffic and NYPD-controlled crossings of First Avenue.
• The subway. Full honesty: if you simply need to get across town at 1 PM on race day, the train beats any car, ours included. Surface traffic near the course is unpredictable; the 4/5/6, Q, and crosstown buses that reroute are all still moving underground and on open streets.

If you do need a car — luggage, mobility, a group, a schedule — the workable plan is a pickup point off the closed grid (east of Second Avenue, or west of Amsterdam above 72nd) and a route built around the FDR and the transverses. That is exactly how chauffeurs who have driven the last several marathon Sundays plan the day on our NYC Marathon car service page.

Yes — JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark all operate completely normally on marathon Sunday. No airport road, AirTrain, or terminal is affected by the race. The entire problem is the first mile: getting from a Manhattan or Brooklyn address onto a highway while the course is live.

The routing logic, by pickup area:

• East Side of Manhattan → LGA or JFK: FDR Drive to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel or the RFK Bridge. Neither crossing closes, and both avoid First Avenue entirely.
• Lower Manhattan or Brooklyn → JFK: Hugh L. Carey Tunnel to the Gowanus and Belt Parkway. The Belt runs south of the course the whole way.
• West Side → Newark: Lincoln or Holland Tunnel, both unaffected. The complication is only reaching them if your pickup is near the Central Park finish — chauffeurs stage west of the closures on Amsterdam or the West Side Highway.

Add 30-45 minutes of buffer to a normal Sunday airport run if your pickup is near the course, and note that marathon Monday morning is one of the heaviest outbound travel days of the fall as 50,000 finishers fly home. Our guide to how early to leave for JFK, LGA, and EWR covers baseline timing; flat rates from Manhattan are $170 to JFK, $150 to LaGuardia, and $170 to Newark — the same on marathon Sunday as any other day.

The five-borough arc gives spectators a genuine choice of scenes — and with planning, you can see your runner two or three times:

Straight answer first: the official transportation is the right choice for most runners. NYRR assigns each entrant either a Staten Island Ferry time from Whitehall Terminal (with shuttle buses from St. George to Fort Wadsworth) or a seat on official buses departing Midtown roughly 5:30-7 AM. Private vehicles cannot enter the start village, and the Verrazzano closes around 7 AM — there is no clever private-car shortcut into Fort Wadsworth itself.

Where a private car genuinely helps on the runner side:

• The 4:30 AM leg to the ferry or buses. Getting to Whitehall Terminal or the Midtown bus loading area before dawn is its own problem, especially from Brooklyn, New Jersey, or an outer-borough hotel.
• Supporters shadowing their runner. The family doesn't get official transport. A car moving them Brooklyn → First Avenue → finish area is the difference between seeing your runner three times and once.
• The trip home. After 26.2 miles, a finisher with a mylar blanket does not want to stand on a packed 1 train. A pre-arranged pickup on Columbus Avenue above 72nd — with dry clothes waiting in the car — is the single most-requested marathon booking we take.

Runner-specific logistics — start-line timing, gear-bag handling, expo runs to the Javits Center — live on the NYC Marathon car service page.