What would buy you much is mixed neighborhoods (aka: the 15 minute city - everything you need for your daily life is within 15 minutes walking distance), because this will eliminate many trips. But mixed neighborhoods work better with higher density - because a supermarket in a low density place cannot be within 15 minutes walking distance.
Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
No, that's called "lying by omission". A person working in an office park doesn't live in one particular housing area assigned to it. So you get a distributed flow instead.
And it's also why transit sucks (sucked, and will always suck): it's unlikely that there's a direct fast transit route between your house and your job. And each connection adds around 10 minutes on average to the commute.
> Also: This is about NYC. How would you even go about reducing Manhattens density to a level where no road is used by less than 2000 (or 4000) people per hour during rush hour?
Tax the dense office space like it's an industrial pollution.
This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
> This is on top of the rather fundamental geometry problem that cars present.
Yeah. They are waaaaay too good at allowing people to move, so urbanists wage an all-out war on them.
Transit has this inherent problem: it HAS to suck. You can't realistically build a fast public transit network allowing easy arbitrary point-to-point trips. It's just mathematically impossible. So transit does what it can only kinda-sorta do well: move people to Downtowns from dense living residential areas.
