For any major city, transportation is an unavoidable challenge.

Having lived in Shanghai, a city of 20 million people, I vividly remember the daily grind during rush hour—a time when being stuck in traffic was simply the norm. On weekends, when the roads were clearer, a journey that might take 30 to 40 minutes could easily stretch to an hour and a half during peak times. And this was in Shanghai, where the traffic situation is relatively manageable; in cities like Beijing, the numbers could be even more staggering.

Shanghai boasts a network of elevated expressways as intricate as a spider’s web, but no matter how many multi-level traffic systems are built or how many roads are widened, traffic jams always return as a “new normal” after a while. I recall frequently discussing a theory by a certain scholar, which essentially stated that the more roads you build, the more vehicles will appear to fill them—an inevitable consequence of urban growth. I’ve read numerous analyses of traffic issues in mega-cities, all suggesting that such problems are an inescapable, almost endemic condition.

However, my visit to Tokyo this spring made me realize that this conclusion might have been premature. In Tokyo, traffic jams are virtually non-existent, a fact that is nothing short of astonishing. As I learned, this isn’t just due to Tokyo’s extremely advanced rail system—although Shanghai’s rail system is no slouch either—but more importantly, it’s about the city’s approach to urban planning. Most cities are divided into residential, commercial, and industrial zones to preserve real estate values and minimize the impact of industry on daily life. But this also forces people to commute between these zones for work. In contrast, Tokyo allows for a more natural blend of different functional areas. While I’m not sure how they address the potential concerns of residents regarding environmental issues, this somewhat laissez-faire approach seems to have its advantages.

New York feels more like Shanghai, though not entirely. Manhattan’s road traffic, much like Shanghai’s, is plagued by congestion everywhere you look. Many streets are lined with parked cars, making the driving lanes even narrower, although most streets here are one-way, which helps somewhat. Manhattan’s extensive network of one-way streets is made possible by its incredibly dense road layout—there’s practically a street every ten meters, with almost every building flanked by roads on both sides. If you’ve seen a map of Manhattan, you’ll understand. It’s hard to imagine how the city’s planners managed to design such straight, uniform streets in a grid-like pattern, as if the city sprang up overnight from a blank canvas, leaving no trace of the passage of time. In contrast, the streets of Shanghai resemble the winding paths carved by the flow of history, twisting and turning in such a way that walking along them can make you lose your sense of direction as if drifting in the currents of time. However, Shanghai was established as a port city one or two centuries later than New York.

After spending three or four days in Manhattan, I concluded that if you’re not familiar with the area, it’s best not to drive. First, GPS navigation may not work well here, especially in areas surrounded by towering buildings, where the signal is often blocked, causing your location on the map to drift erratically. The dense road network in New York makes it hard for GPS to determine exactly which street you’re on. On the day we left Manhattan, we found ourselves completely lost on the map. But thanks to Manhattan’s logical street-naming system, we never truly got lost. The streets are numbered sequentially—1st Street, 2nd Street, all the way down to 50th Street, and so on—in both north-south and east-west directions. So, as long as you know which street you need to reach and where you currently are, you can easily navigate this grid-like city to find your destination. If this was the intention of the city’s original designers, it’s truly remarkable.

Similarly, we managed to avoid getting lost in Manhattan’s antiquated subway system thanks to the street-naming system. New York’s subway was built over a century ago, and the trains are incredibly old, with no electronic displays to indicate the current or next stop. The screeching noise between the trains and tracks is deafening—perhaps another sign of outdated infrastructure—making it hard to hear station announcements. As first-time visitors, we found riding the subway quite unsettling. Fortunately, the stations are named after the streets they are located on, and since they are numbered, it’s easy to spot them at a glance on the walls, which helped us avoid getting completely lost.

In many bustling cities around the world, subways are key to alleviating traffic congestion and improving efficiency. But in Manhattan, the subways are surprisingly emptier than I think, while the streets above are packed with cars—a curious sight. I can understand why people might prefer not to take the subway: the platforms are narrow, dark, and lack air conditioning (making them stiflingly hot in the summer), and the noise level is painfully high. My children couldn’t bear it and had to cover their ears. I also heard that the New York subway is not safe, with a high crime rate. We didn’t witness anything of the sort, but we did see several young people jumping turnstiles to avoid paying the fare. We also noticed that everyone stood close to the walls, perhaps due to the notorious stories of people being pushed onto the tracks.

In contrast, I was quite impressed with Manhattan’s bus system. Almost every street has a bus line prefixed with an “M,” named after the street it runs on, which gives you an idea of how dense the bus network is, mirroring the street grid. The buses in Manhattan are new and clean, with air conditioning, and most have advanced displays that clearly indicate the current stop and how many stops remain until your destination. Paying the fare is also convenient—you can use a regular credit card to tap and pay, and within two hours, transfers are free no matter how many times you board. One credit card can be used for several passengers, which made it easy for our family to travel together. The buses are fairly punctual, with only about a five-minute discrepancy from the scheduled time.

Given this level of comfort and convenience, you’d expect more people to take the bus, but they aren’t very crowded, and there are almost always empty seats. We stayed in Manhattan from Saturday to Tuesday, and there didn’t seem to be much difference between weekends and weekdays. If you’re wondering where all the people are, the emptiness of the buses compared to the bustling streets suggests that perhaps everyone is simply walking to get around.

Speaking of walking, we mostly relied on our feet during our three or four days in Manhattan. Although we took the bus for longer trips, most destinations were within a 10-15 minute walk. Despite logging nearly 20,000 steps each day, which left us exhausted, the prospect of waiting for a bus when the destination was just a short walk away often didn’t seem worth it. It’s actually a great way to stay active. This also highlights the density of Manhattan and the abundance of shops and facilities—everything you need is within a kilometer!

Another praiseworthy aspect of New York’s streets is that despite the dense, busy roads, the space allocated to pedestrians (sidewalk width) is just as generous as the space for cars. By my rough estimate, the sidewalk width is nearly equal to that of the car lanes. I once heard that a good city is a “walkable” city. Shanghai is like that, Tokyo is like that, and New York is like that too —compared to these cities, Toronto falls short. —This makes the city design more “human-centred,” serving people rather than cars.

However, in Manhattan, even with streets designed with pedestrians in mind, the relationship between people and cars is competitive, much like in other mega-cities. I originally thought that all of North America would be like Canada, where everyone follows traffic rules, and cars and pedestrians coexist with mutual respect—but I was wrong. In Manhattan, hardly anyone waits for the pedestrian light to turn green before crossing the street. Traffic lights seem almost invisible to pedestrians and cyclists, who ignore them altogether. Many cars honk at intersections to alert pedestrians, adding to the already noisy streets. I even witnessed a car nearly hit a jogger who ignored a red light at a crosswalk. This made me worry about how to teach my children road safety, fearing they might pick up these “bad habits” and ignore traffic lights when we return to Canada.

Moreover, dedicated bike lanes are rare in Manhattan—probably because the streets are too narrow to accommodate them—but electric bike rental stations are everywhere. So you’ll often see cyclists confidently riding in the middle of the road, as if the streets were made for them, not for motor vehicles. In comparison, the relationship between pedestrians, cyclists, and motor vehicles in Shanghai seems simpler: most red-light running happens among cyclists, while pedestrians generally pay attention to traffic lights, and cyclists don’t ride in the middle of the road.

But compared to Tokyo, both New York and Shanghai might pale in comparison. In Tokyo, although pedestrians often cross streets without traffic lights freely, and cars don’t yield as cautiously as they do in Canada, you would never see people or cyclists disregarding traffic lights where they do exist.

It’s fascinating to realize that Tokyo and New York are like two sides of a mirror—both world-class cities, yet they seem to exist in different worlds… (To be continued..)