Peter also needed a ride. I’ll admit it’s a harsh meme

Depends on what part of queens. Apparently he canonically lived at 20 Ingram St, which is a 15 minute walk to the E and F subway station. There’s also a bus that’s a little closer, and connects to the L train, but I’ve never taken it. 15 minutes is a little long, but still quite doable. (Assuming google maps’ walking time is correct. I usually go faster than it says)

He issues the permits maybe

I grew up in NYC during the early 1980s and left it in 2001. In the 1980s the buses and subways ran frequently enough that a car wasn’t necessary, and in all honesty was a luxury when you considered the fact that car insurance was higher in NYC than upstate, and it cost $ just park the damn thing. During the 1980s through the early 1990s traffic was horrible. Gridlock bumper to bumper type shit. I went back to visit family 2 weeks ago, and the traffic is way better than it used to be. I saw more people riding bikes than I saw people driving, although I was up by 103 and Amsterdam. NYC has implemented protected bike lanes, which were not a thing when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s. As a kid, I used to take the subways and buses to the Bronx Zoo and Botanical garden, or to Co-Op city to go shopping at the big mall there. I’d take the subway to go hang with friends in Astoria (Queens,) or Bedford/Stuvesant, (Brooklyn.) There are Path trains you can take out to NJ. When I was in college, I managed to land a summer internship outside of Philadelphia, and on the weekends I would Take the SEPTA train from Philly into Trenton, take a bus from Trenton to Newark, then in Newark catch the Path train into NYC. There are also a separate set of trains that go out to Long Island, and another set of trains that go into Westchester, Putnam, duchess counties and Connecticut. (There was a big mall in White Plains, NY - Westchester county, and I would take the train up there too.) Yes, there are lots of people that live outside of NYC that commute to the city for work, especially in the business district below 61st street. People commute from lower Connecticut, Orange County, Westchester County, Long Island, Putnam County, and Dutchess County. NYC also implemented congestion pricing. Congestion pricing began on January 5, 2025. It applies to most motor vehicular traffic using the central business district area of Manhattan south of 61st Street, known as the Congestion Relief Zone, in an effort to encourage commuters to use public transportation. The tolls from that program are being used to improve public transit. I would say the congestion pricing has helped the traffic situation a bit.

Depends on where are you specifically in the city.

I believe on-street parking is usually packed because there’s a lot of people and cars take up a lot of space. Like, you have an apartment building that’s long enough to have five parking spaces in front of it. Cool, but 200 people live in that building. That’s part of why car focused culture is trash: it doesn’t scale well at all. Cities can’t and shouldn’t do sprawl where every person has their own parking spot. We shouldn’t be building massive parking decks that could be used to house people instead.

A couple friends of mine here have cars, and they’ll leave it parked on the street for days because they don’t need it. If it wasn’t for the “you need to move your car for street cleaning”, it might stay there for even longer. For most things here it’s easier to walk or take transit.

The bridges can get not only slow but outright difficult to use for an inexperienced driver on a bad day. That’s probably the main thing that really stands out in the lore

Like anywhere, it really depends on what part of town you are in and the time of day. Most drivers know not to go anywhere near Times Square if they can help it and many of the streets there are blocked off to cars anyway, but sometimes you have no choice but to drive down Canal Street in Chinatown which is always packed.