New York does not hate cars. If it did, cars would be gone.

What New York actually hates is deciding who gets space and who does not. So instead of choosing, it lets everything coexist badly, then charges people for surviving the mess.

That is why driving here feels hostile. Not because the city is anti-car, but because it refuses to be honest about what kind of city it is.

Every driver knows the feeling. Tickets stacked like receipts. Rules that flip by block, by hour, by season. A legal spot today becomes a violation tomorrow. Cameras you didn’t notice. Loading zones that vanish when you need them most. It feels personal. Like the city is daring you to exist with four wheels.

That feeling is real. The reason behind it is not ideological. It is spatial.

New York is a city built on inches. Inches between buildings. Inches between people. Inches between profit and collapse. In a place where a few feet can decide whether a business lives or dies, private cars are the least efficient use of public space the city allows at scale. Instead of confronting that reality head-on, New York chose a more familiar move. Allow the chaos. Monetize the fallout.

Cars here are not banned. They are invited, tolerated, depended on, and then punished. That contradiction is the entire system.

Here is the uncomfortable truth most people miss. Cars in New York are heavily subsidized first, then aggressively monetized. The majority of curb parking across the city is free or wildly underpriced relative to demand. That is not neutral policy. That is a subsidy. The city gives away some of the most valuable real estate on earth and pretends this is normal.

Predictably, demand explodes. Drivers circle. Double park. Block hydrants, bike lanes, buses, sidewalks. None of this is surprising. It is designed behavior. Then enforcement steps in. Not redesign. Not planning. Enforcement.

This is where drivers feel hunted. The city creates conditions that make violations inevitable, then treats those violations as personal failures instead of system failures. That is not hatred. That is monetized dysfunction.

New York City issues millions of parking tickets every year, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. This is not accidental. It is baked into the budget. Once revenue becomes predictable, the incentive changes. The goal is no longer to fix the problem. The goal is to manage the chaos without killing the cash flow.

If New York truly hated cars, it would remove them efficiently. If it truly cared about drivers, it would design clearly for them. Instead, it keeps the curb ambiguous, underprices space, underbuilds loading zones, overcomplicates rules, and punishes people for guessing wrong.

That is why driving here feels like a trap.

Congestion pricing exposed this contradiction in public. After years of political delay, it went live in January 2025 for vehicles entering Manhattan below 60th Street. The logic is brutally simple. There is not enough space. That is not ideology. That is geometry.

Here is what makes everyone uncomfortable. Congestion pricing is one of the most honest car policies New York has ever implemented. It admits scarcity. It does not pretend there is room. It says plainly there is not, and here is the price.

The problem is not congestion pricing. The problem is that everything around it remains dishonest. You cannot charge people to enter Manhattan while pretending the curb is infinite. You cannot talk about safety while designing streets with nowhere legal to load. You cannot moralize congestion while relying on fines generated by predictable failure.

That hypocrisy is where the anger comes from.

Now add small businesses, because this is where policy stops being theoretical. If you run a restaurant, a shop, a catering company, or any business that moves physical goods, cars are not optional. They are infrastructure. Inventory does not teleport. Staff does not arrive by magic at five in the morning.

The city knows this. And still treats commercial driving as an enforcement opportunity instead of an operational reality. Trucks double park because loading zones are insufficient or nonexistent. Businesses rack up tickets because compliance is structurally impossible. Repeat offenders are labeled bad actors instead of predictable outcomes.

Rather than redesigning the curb, the city optimized collection.

Outdoor dining proved this was a choice. During the pandemic, flexibility appeared overnight. Streets opened. Rules bent. Survival mattered more than perfection. When the emergency ended, flexibility vanished. What replaced it was a permanent program layered with permits, fees, inspections, renewals, and enforcement. Restaurants now pay for space that sat empty for decades.

Same curb. Different priorities.

Drivers say they already pay enough. Insurance. Gas. Tolls. Tickets. Cameras. Permits. That frustration is valid. What makes it unbearable is not the cost. It is the unpredictability. You never know if the city wants your car there or is daring you to try.

A city that truly hated cars would choose. It would ban them aggressively or price them transparently. New York does neither. It allows them, depends on them, resents them, and profits from the tension.

That is why everyone feels screwed.

A functional approach would be boring. Price the curb so spaces turn over. Build loading zones based on real delivery volume. Stop using tickets as a substitute for planning. Give small businesses predictable access instead of constant fines. Be honest and say Manhattan is full.

New York does not hate cars.

New York hates choosing.

So it charges everyone for the tension and calls it policy.

Until the city stops pretending space is infinite and violations are accidental, nothing changes. Not the traffic. Not the anger. Not the tickets stacked under your wiper like receipts for existing.

This city does not run on cars or bikes or buses alone.

It runs on space.

And in New York, space is never free.

Like this? Explore more from: