The Oil Drum

Eventually nuclear terrorism is going to make us shut down our cities and recycle the material to make new housing developments in the rural areas. Until then...
I'd make half the streets bus, truck, and taxi only. You want to drive your car around, buy a taxi medallion at 100,000 a pop. We WILL lose the subways in the next hurricane, so get ready now. Figure a five percent chance of losing the subways in any given year, assuming that a major volcano eruption doesn't shut down global warming before then. That or a major nuclear war provoked by global warming, of course.
Why five percent? Because global warming is making hurricanes stay strong farther towards the poles. Our data base includes only a few hurricanes that were good enough to flood the New York City electrical infrastructure and the last big one in 1938 missed the city by miles, but we are now in uncharted territory. We literally don't know what will happen this summer, except that it won't be as mild as last summer. The smart money says it's going to almost as bad as 2004 (which was as bad as 2005, except that we didn't hit New Orleans till next year).
But we know that hurricanes have tracks for different climate conditions, and now the tracks point at NYC and the temperature is up.
Historically it's more like 1% in any given year. But historical data has lots of cyclones and storms that hit NYC and don't flood because they aren't strong enough. So figure on just as many storms but kick them up a notch or two, which is why 5%.
Remember, New Orleans screwed up transportation, petrochemicals, and economics all over the south. Lose NYC and we will find out what happens to our imports instead of our exports like in New Orleans. Not to mention NJ is also a significant source of refinery products.