Being in a car in the city mostly sucks. Driving itself is actually fine. A nice lonely highway drive with like 5 or 7 great things to listen to is awesome, but staring at brake lights is the pits.

Carl wrote: Glad you enjoyed NYC.

Frankie99 wrote: Thu Mar 26, 2026 7:16 pm I wonder if NY peeps take it for granted and I wonder if people from outside marvel and envy it as much as I do.

I'm traveling through the Midwest for work this week and am looking forward to being back in a community not designed around the automobile. (Thanks to the MTA, I have lived without owning one for the past decade and do not miss it.)

Have lived in NYC for 33 years. Grew up in and around Philadelphia before that. Don't have a license, much less a car. Seems like a huge hassle.

I'm immensely thankful for the MTA, although I prefer to walk when I can, and the agency has certainly had its ups and downs over the decades. Sometimes it seems like the greatest thing ever, other times it seems like a black hole for funding, oftentimes it's both at once, if that makes sense.

The subway is all right, albeit sometimes unreliable and/or filthy. But it's fairly rare for me to need a taxi or a car service unless I'm heading to the airport at an odd hour, deep into Queens where there are no train lines, or coming home from some party in Brooklyn at 4am, absolutely obliterated and not fit to wait forever on an outdoor elevated train platform.

I will say that more and more people, especially younger ones moving here, seem keen on taking Ubers and Lyfts everywhere. Even for short distances across Manhattan, when the train will do. Much more so than in the past. Which is baffling to me b/c those services cost a fortune here.

Compared to say, Philly, mass transit here is paradise. It's also 24 hours, which is cool and mitigates the relative lack of efficiency and niceties compared to some of the world's great transit systems. At the same time, wow, could NYC learn a thing or two from systems like those in Tokyo or Taipei. (And I'd love a more direct, faster connection to the three major airports. It's a drag that it takes about an hour and a half, sometimes way more, from downtown Manhattan to JFK.)

Still, the subway here is a way older system (never mind all the intricacies of state and local bureaucracy w/which to contend), so it's much tougher to update. And its history adds a little to the charm. It's generally more than serviceable for me, and I couldn't imagine living in a city where I'd have to drive everywhere.