This is NYC's challenge. The city **cannot** function at any capacity without the subway system. Literally can't. Individually people can improvise. But there's simply no way for the scale of commuting to happen. https://twitter.com/juliakmarsh/status/1266373139786641408

2/ Just a limited illustration. TPM has about 15 employees in NYC. The office is in Chelsea in Lower Manhattan. Almost all of the employees live in Brooklyn. I wld estimate that few if any own cars. That's not mainly a money. They're mostly young. They're not rich. But the ...

3/ key issue is that for many people a car in NYC is as much a burden as a thing of value because for most things in the city, certainly anything you're doing in Manhattan, driving a car is a hassle. It's either super expensive to park or hard to find a space and maybe both.

4/ Even if in theory everyone in the outer boroughs had a car, at scale there isn't remotely enough space in manhattan to put all the cars that would be necessary to bring everyone into manhattan. Obviously it would be ruinously burdensome financially for people to take a ...

5/ cab or an uber to work everyday. But the key point is that even setting aside the expense there aren't enough cabs or ubers to get those people where they need to go. Could you walk? Sure. You might be able to do that on a given day. But that's obviously isn't remotely ...

6/ practical on an on-going basis. Each of these points is a different permutation of a simple fact: the cities urban geography and economy are all premised on the ability to move lots of people around quickly on the subways and the buses. Individuals can improvise.

7/ There's no way to improvise your way out of that problem at scale. I shld add that this is a theoretical issue for TPM. We are not going to start using our NYC office again until subway use is definitively safe. Not until the office is safe too. But the subways are the issue.

8/ BUT THERE'S MORE! I'm sure some of my cyclist followers will say the obvious answer is bikes. And in a very general way that really is the one semi-viable approach. But even here there are REALLY big problems. The most obvious of which is most people don't own a bike.

9/ A bike is not that pricey compared to a car. But it's not nothing. The city also lacks the infrastructure for storing hundreds of thousands of bikes. Not everyone is physically capable of cycling. They're not really all weather vehicles. The city wld be much better if ...

10/ with more cycling (and rule following). And the direction of public planning is moving in that direction. But for the economy restarting in 2020? Not viable at scale.