It's time to ban cars from Manhattan?

Unfortunately, New York City was built at a time when people rode horses, and its streets reflect that. And you can't just widen a street, certainly not in a city like NYC. You would have to destroy every building on one side of a street, and build new buildings, all for a gain of a few feet.

Large megapolises like NYC need to start exploring the concept of 3D streets. Instead of having a single street level, on the ground, start building skyways between skyscrapers, where both cars and pedestrians can move. Take 45th Street. You could build a second street 20m above the ground, straddling the buildings on the eastern side of the street. You build ramps at both ends, and you build your aerial street through the buildings. This would require heavy modifications, if not outright reconstruction, of the buildings in question, but this is the way of the future for large, dense cities in this millenium. Our current approach to city design is primitive, and quite frankly medieval. We still build cities the way we built them in the Middle Ages: independent of one another, standing next to each other. But as NYC's traffic woes show, this is not enough anymore. If you want to reduce traffic in large cities, without restricting car ownership, then you need to make way for more cars.

Or you could go underground. But I don't know if that's a viable option in a city with a subway, and straddled by rivers. You would need to protect your underground highways from water infiltration. And you can't hollow the ground below your city too much, lest the millions of tons of steel and cement and glass above the ground start collapsing.

Tl;dr we need to start building Coruscant.

How would you get cars up to the roads 20m above the ground? How would you handle maintenance of buildings connected to suspended roads? Are there seismic safeguards for structures like this?

All real questions, I'm fascinated by this idea but clueless as to how it could be implemented.

> without restricting car ownership

Why? This seems like an unnecessary optimization in a city like NYC where the population density already makes it largely unnecessary to own a personal vehicle.

I live in SF which is also among the densest cities in USA and in my 5 years here never have I felt like I'd need to own a car. They're inconvenient and expensive. Most of my day-to-day is easier to accomplish on foot because I'd spend longer looking for parking than it would take me to walk there.

Not having a car saves a bunch of money. Around $8,000/year according to a quick internet search on car ownership. That's a nice chunk of change.

Yes that means I have to get an Uber or rent a car sometimes. Especially for longer trips. About $2,000 last year according to my expense tracker.

Convenience and cost aside, optimizing for car ownership doesn't make sense from an environmental perspective either.

It seems pretty fortunate that New York was built in the way it has to me. Your entire premise is backwards bud.

Rem Koolhaus calls this thinking the “culture of congestion” in his 1978 book “Delirious New York”.

It’s fascinating, and these ideas have all been explored before. Have multi-level streets ever worked?