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How car-free is New York City?
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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Shockingly, residents of a city with extensive, reliable, and affordable public transit, choose to use it.
Except the people in Queens for some reason. It’s not even geographically isolated the way Staten Island is, I wonder what’s up with that.
In Queens and Staten Island there is substantially more parking available for free, they're neighbourhoods with more standard American detached homes and driveways.
In NYC itself, owning a car is pointless as you can get anywhere faster by either walking, cycling or metro, and you won't need to play the "drive around for an hour game" to find a parking spot. The richest New Yorkers will tend to live in newer buildings which have underground carparks and a space associated with them, or the option to rent one.
While I'm certainly in favour of transit, I think this shows the opposite: households with the money for a vehicle have a vehicle; households without do not.
Queens is perhaps less dense, making ownership of a vehicle (parking etc) more feasible.
Manhattan is obviously the richest borough but people largely don't drive there because it's expensive and annoying to find parking, and there's the congestion charge, and there's always a subway station within a five minute walk.
There might be several reasons for that connection. For example, if you rarely need or use a car it is natural that only those with fuck toy-money would prioritize buying one. They buy it because they might as well, not because they have to.
If public transport was insufficient, or it was easier to use a car, those numbers might look very different.
Busses suck. They are inconsistent and rarely go where you need. Usually it is just easier to drive, as much as I hate to admit it.
Edit: The busses on the outskirts of Queens suck then. I don't know how they can be fixed honestly, just have complaints. They need to run more frequently and more reliably and to more places. They aren't comfortable and they're usually cramped. The roads are often unkind to the busses as well. I'm often looking at a 10 minute drive versus planning half my day around a grocery store trip. There is a reason that my area is called a transit desert. Most things are geared towards only going into Manhattan and to not within queens itself or even to Brooklyn.
Busses don't suck, if busses are stuck, traffic planning sucks. Busses have higher capacity in a well working system than cars. If you have capacity issues on the road, you needed bus only lanes. That would not reduce but actually increase street capacity, while removing the brakes from the busses.
Sorry, I should have been specific. The busses in Queens suck, not the concept of busses itself. I added more to my comment with specific grips. I think the city has more important things to tackle at the moment than a mostly functioning bus system that sucks.
I just got back to the US from two weeks in Rome and Milan.
Buses are fucking great! Run everywhere, take you anywhere you want to go, skip traffic jams with the bus-only lanes and especially much faster than finding a parking spot.
It’s my first time having a completely car-free vacation and I loved it. Too bad I had to come home to bad civic planning and drive everywhere again
Busses themselves don't suck. Busses are fantastic when they are planned properly and have the infrastructure built to support them.
If your local bus system sucks, then it's a poorly implemented system that needs to be fixed.
@Crankenstein @xelareko
And if they are noisy, full of vibrations and stinky, that too has been fixed.
Electric buses are available.
I should have been more specific. The buses in Queens suck not necessarily that the concept of busses suck. I hate driving so much. I would much rather take the train or subway or anything really. The city has a lot more important things to tackle than a functioning but kind of shitty bus system though.