When the gates opened at noon Thursday for the 2026 NFL Draft, some suburban Pittsburgh Regional Transit park-and-ride lots were already full from the onslaught of fans commuting to Downtown and the North Shore.
By late afternoon, though, space was still available at select lots, according to Adam Brandolph, a transit agency spokesman.
“There are plenty of parking spaces available throughout the county,” Brandolph said.
In Monroeville, PRT was able to add spaces to increase capacity beyond the 140 it had already secured.
The Ross park and ride, with 480 spots, was at 75% capacity around 1 p.m. South Hills Village, with 2,000 spaces, was less than half full, as was Wilkinsburg, with 700 spots, according to Brandolph.
Castle Shannon’s lot has 507 spaces and was at 50% capacity just before 1 p.m.
Football fans are pouring off the T by the hundreds at Gateway Station in Downtown Pittsburgh. @TribLIVE pic.twitter.com/rJ7Z56uUsL
— jack troy (@jacktroywrites) April 23, 2026
“We’re getting hit a little bit earlier than expected, but it’s nothing we can’t handle,” Brandolph said.
The actual draft doesn’t officially start until 8 p.m., but Acrisure Stadium and Point State Park opened hours earlier.
“We didn’t know what to expect or when people would come down,” Brandolph said.
Several park-and-ride lots were already full by lunchtime, he said.
Those included Washington Junction, with 300 spaces, Dormont with 165 and Mt. Lebanon, with only 24.
McCandless, with 350 spaces, was nearly full by 11:30 a.m., Brandolph said.
PRT does not expect to have actual ridership numbers for bus or T service for about a week, he said.
There were no reports of any service problems.
PRT’s special, free Football Flyer routes started at 10 a.m. Thursday and are running every 15 minutes from areas north, south, east and west in the city.
Those shuttles were getting large numbers Thursday morning, Brandolph said.
At University Boulevard, the Football Flyer park-and-ride lot in the north, with 660 parking spaces, was at 50% capacity, Brandolph said.
In Clairton, where there are 440 spaces for the 99S Football Flyer, the lot was half full around 4:15 p.m.
“It seems like more of the outer lots are filling faster,” he said.
Brandolph suspects people are leery of getting stuck in traffic the closer to the city that they get.
A spokeswoman with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation referred traffic questions to Visit Pittsburgh. A message left there was not returned.
“People are parking further away and trusting us to take them the rest of the way,” he said.
PRT has volunteers at most of the park-and-ride locations to help direct visitors, Brandolph said. The goal is to make the trip easy.
“Nobody talks about how easy it was to get somewhere,” he said. “We want to make it that the bus and rail service is seamless.”
As the draft starts to wrap up Thursday night, Brandolph said, PRT will stack several two-car trains at Allegheny Station to head directly to North Side Station completely empty to help with the expected volume of travelers heading south.
Each car can hold 450 people.
Additionally, at that time, there will no longer be a 7½-minute frequency for the train there, as they will likely be running every few minutes.
