3 ms·

Tangent: Each time I visit New York City, how incomprehensibly many cars there are flowing through this alleged pedestrian mecca at any time is striking.

• jfengel 5y ago
  As many cars as there are, there are far, far more people. There's a lot of cars, but not 8.4 million of them. Of those cars, a fair few are mass transit: taxis and ride-sharing. NYC is a pedestrian mecca, but it's still not perfect, and so cars are still the best way to get medium distances. You walk shorter distances, and the subway is faster for long ones, but for that common middle range, a car is going to be faster and easier. It's just increasingly rare for you to own one. A lot of the remaining cars are commuters, who would rather pay a ton of money move about with the Great Unwashed. It's slower, too, because the bridges and tunnels are jammed. But they own cars in the burbs, and the alternative still involves driving to the mass transit station, so they might as well keep going. Electric cars really don't change that one way or the other.