new york city
This wasn’t my first time in New York. I was fourteen the last time, and what I remember was a lot of people and a lot of noise. I remember being amazed at the scale of it — the giant electronic billboards at Times Square, and the immense and expansive view of the city from the top of the Rockefeller Center. At fourteen, I experienced NYC as a typical tourist, hitting all the major attractions and, generally, doing what everyone else was doing.
I’ve lived another fourteen years since then, and the things I seek out when I visit a new place are very different from back then. These days, I find myself avoiding the touristy spots and seeking out the places that embody what it feels like to live in the city — the hidden gems and the subtle design elements that make a place great. Despite knowing that my perspective has shifted, I was still expecting a similar experience to when I was fourteen: loud and a little overwhelming.
Peaceful. Probably one of the last words you might think of when describing downtown Manhattan, a place that is world-renowned for being a centre of gravity. And yet, when reflecting on my experience, this word just kept coming back to me. Somehow, in all of the chaos, the city captured me, and it’s this sense of peacefulness that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
I didn’t expect to leave this place being able to see myself living there. And I didn’t expect the sense of longing that I experienced when my train to DC left the station. Let me take you through my experience of the Empire State.
a city of movement
Many people think of New York as being packed with tourists. Sure, in some parts, this is definitely the case. But let’s not forget that New York is one of the most populated cities in the US. Over 1.6 million people, just on the island of Manhattan alone. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the entire country of Estonia packed into a landmass just 20 kilometres long and about 3 kilometres wide.
That’s a lot of people that need to get around in a tight space. In a city with this kind of density, moving people efficiently becomes incredibly important. There is simply no room for everyone to drive. But for many years, the streets of New York were built for cars — and it showed. If there’s one thing many people associate with New York, it’s the crippling traffic congestion and incessant horn-honking.
These days though? It’s obvious that the city has embraced sustainable transportation. Millions of people use the subway every day (about 4 million, to be precise). Bikes are absolutely everywhere. And the car has become much less dominant.
just build it
With a population density of 23,000 people per square kilometre, New York is a giant sandbox. Anything they try in New York has a huge impact, and that impact is felt almost immediately. So how have they gone from being overrun by cars to being one of the most bikeable cities in the US?
It starts by using paint and temporary materials to get a network in place quickly and cheaply. A lot of the bike infrastructure I saw in New York was definitely not perfect. But it doesn’t have to be perfect. At first, it can just be well-connected and pretty good. I think we often get bogged down trying to get everything right. Especially when we don’t have highway money. We can’t just wipe out an entire area and rebuild it from the ground up to get the facilities we want.
We need to work within the constraints that we have, whether those are physical, political, or financial. That sometimes means making sacrifices to achieve a connected network. Maybe that means removing a left turn lane or a travel lane (even if the traffic model says it “won’t work”). Or maybe that means the bike lane needs to be sub-standard or not wide enough to allow passing. If you have the space and the money, by all means, make the facility better. But at this point, the most important part is creating a functional network.
bike share
Of course, it’s easy to bike everywhere when you don’t need to worry about owning a bike. Or storing it. Or parking it without it getting stolen.
New York’s bike share system (citibike) has both electric and non-electric bikes, at docking stations placed in intuitive locations. If you see someone biking in New York, there’s a good chance they’re on a citibike. It’s not the cheapest thing in the world, and it probably wouldn’t replace owning a bike if you lived in the city, but it would definitely add to the convenience factor for occasional trips (and it was great as a tourist).
For cities that have developed the bones of a functional bike network, bike share is the logical next step. These systems encourage more people to bike, which makes more people receptive to bike infrastructure projects, which encourages more people to bike — and thus the cycle continues.
There is some debate about the loss of convenience when using docking stations, but I think that when spaced correctly, they are actually more convenient, as you always know where to go to find or return your bike. And you don’t get bikes dumped all over the sidewalks.
let’s talk about modelling
On the topic of creating functional bike networks, let’s take a second to reconsider our reliance on the historically dominant practice of traffic analysis and modelling, a practice that can often hinder efforts to reallocate space on our streets. In this industry, we will sometimes get the results of the traffic analysis and be told that a certain configuration “doesn’t work”, that the expected delay for vehicles is not acceptable, or that an additional travel lane is “required”. This type of language makes it seem pretty cut and dry — well, damn, I guess we’ll have to come up with another way to fit this bike lane in. Or maybe it renders the project infeasible altogether.
But when you think about it, there’s an assumption baked in to this that we didn’t necessarily sign up for. It’s the assumption that the delay of vehicles over a certain point is unacceptable. First of all, who decided this? And secondly, do we even believe that these models are predicting outcomes accurately?
Well, let’s explore it. The best analogy I’ve heard on this topic is that we often treat traffic in the same way we treat water flowing through pipes. We often think that there is a fixed amount of traffic, and reducing capacity of a given street will just divert the traffic to another street. And this is the behaviour the models attempt to predict. But this idea is rooted in a belief that human behaviour is fixed. And we certainly know that this is not the case, that people change their behaviour based on the conditions they encounter. Have you ever tried to leave early to beat rush hour? Or made any decision because of the traffic conditions? This is the type of behaviour change that is very common but not reflected in our traffic models.
This is known as ‘reduced demand’ or ‘traffic evaporation’, and is the phenomenon where reducing road capacity doesn’t cause traffic chaos like many people might believe. It actually just goes away. It doesn’t just get shifted to other streets — it just disappears. People change their behaviour. Maybe that means they’re going in to work an hour early, choosing to work remotely a couple days per week, or taking their bike or the train instead. It could be any number of reasons, but the key message is this: human behaviour is much more dynamic than we once thought when it comes to transportation, and we’re seeing more and more that traffic actually acts more like a gas than a liquid, expanding and contracting to fit in whatever space we give it.
I often hear people say, “well, not everyone is going to ride their bike”, and I absolutely agree. But there simply isn’t enough space for everyone to drive. We’ve tried that experiment, and it hasn’t worked. So giving people convenient alternatives to driving is absolutely essential for managing growth within our cities.
Fundamentally, how we decide we want to allocate the limited space we have on our streets is not an engineering problem that can be “solved” by a model. The allocation of street space is a reflection of the city’s priorities. And understanding the dynamic nature of human behaviour can free us to allocate this space in a way that aligns with our goals.
Let’s not forget, we can also induce demand in the modes we want to incentivize by giving it the space it deserves. New York seems to get this, and it shows in the number of people that bike, walk, and take transit in the city.
broadway
Let’s take the example of Broadway in Manhattan. The city made waves back in 2009 when they banned all vehicles along the two most congested sections of Broadway. The results speak for themselves. Looking back, they found that this project reduced crashes and speeding, improved travel times on neighbouring streets, and had a positive impact on local businesses. Since then, they’ve closed even more sections of Broadway, and today it’s a vibrant hub of human activity, loaded with outdoor dining spaces, and one of the most comfortable biking experiences in the city.
So what happened to all that traffic? It didn’t just shift to the neighbouring streets as feared by all the critics. It simply went away. Most of you reading this have probably heard about induced demand. It’s the effect where increased road capacity leads more people to drive, filling up all that new capacity. But some of you may be surprised to hear that it works in reverse too.
congestion pricing
A blog post about New York would not be complete without a brief mention of congestion pricing. The city has had a lot of publicity about it, and the results are in. It’s been incredibly successful, with about 80,000 fewer cars entering the city centre in March 2025 than in the previous year, and travel times cut in half.
If you haven’t heard of the idea of congestion pricing, it’s essentially a toll applied to vehicles entering certain areas (in New York, this is known as the congestion zone). The toll intends to reduce the number of people who drive in the most congested areas of the city, and uses the funds for improvements to more efficient modes like transit and active transportation facilities.
Philosophically, I see congestion pricing as a way to more closely align the cost of driving with its actual cost to society. The truth is, driving is expensive — whether it’s physical costs like road building and maintenance, broader economic costs like commute times, healthcare and impacts on the environment, or even less tangible costs like our mental health and wellbeing. All of these costs are spread across the entirety of society, including those who don’t drive, whether they like it or not.
amazon gets it
A key part of a delivery company’s business is maximizing the efficiency of their operations. That means they are selecting the mode of transportation that will be the cheapest and most convenient way to get around so they can increase their bottom line. While people’s priorities may not be quite the same as a delivery company when it comes to their transportation decisions, it’s really not so different. When it comes down to it, we’re all just trying to get around conveniently and cheaply.
Exploring the streets of New York, it doesn’t take much time before you see an electric-assist Amazon delivery bike wizzing by. It just makes sense. Although they still use delivery vans, it seemed like these cargo bikes were Amazon’s go-to, at least in Manhattan. And it isn’t just Amazon. It’s food delivery companies, grocery services, and even laundry companies.
the lights
One thing I absolutely loved about New York was the night. The streets are alive, even when they’re not full of people, illuminated by the neon signs of restaurants and bars and movie theatres. But not in a way that’s overwhelming. It’s a warm glow that feels safe and welcoming, like an invitation to roam the streets. Like there’s a community looking out for you.
Feeling safe walking around at night is a hugely important part of living in a city. No city has perfected this, but New York streets give you the sense that you’re not alone, even when there’s nobody around.
a new era
You could say that not every city is like New York, that not every city has the density to support this type of transportation system. And to an extent you’d be right. Where we are now, when it comes to many cities across the US and Canada, the way we’ve chosen to distribute our land use is simply not compatible with the levels of walking, cycling, and transit use that you see in Manhattan.
And it shows in our mode share statistics. Based on 2023 Canadian census data, almost 16 million of us commuted to work that year. Out of all of those people, over 13 million commuted by car. That’s a lot. But it’s not the fault of the people commuting. I would wager that a very large chunk of people who commute by car would rather walk or bike to work if they had the opportunity. And many of our cities have little pockets of greatness within them, where you can walk and bike to local shops, and take the bus or metro to work. But for the past century, our cities have been built for cars. Who is benefiting from this?
We didn’t create car-dependent cities by accident. We can do better, and New York shows us the path forward. They’ve done the pilot project. Now it’s time to implement.