If you want to see a similar visualization of what this means on the level of single street, check out this poster:

http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/9346/espaciocoches.jpg

It shows how much space it takes to move the same number of people using cars, bus, and bicycle.

That poster is inaccurate, it shows far too many cars, and far too many people on the bus.

You can fit 4 people in a car, but you can not load a bus completely full or no one will be realistically able to use it.

So the poster should have between 1/4 and 1/8 the number of cars on the screen.

I take it you don't ride buses. They are often completely full in rush hour, including people standing.

Meanwhile, most cars have only one person in it. Maybe an average of 1.5. You could have a carpool with 4 people in it, but I think that's rare compared to single passenger vehicles.

This assumes that people won't carpool, that people will keep driving their car filled with 1.2 people into downtown/midtown. All you need is a congestion tax, and lots more people will drive only up to (say) Newark to take the Path train in, or Jamaica to take the subway/LIRR in. And that's not even counting the throngs of people living in Hell's Kitchen / Chelsea / Kips Bay / Stuy Town / the Village / the LES / Battery Park City, who live and work in the CBD.

Even if you assume 4 people per car, cars still wouldn't work as well as the subway does for moving people. The original post is an interesting perspective on how important the subways are to NYC, nothing more.

Interesting mildly off-topic side-note (gathered from 'The World Without Us'): if the systems responsible for actively pumping water from the subway system were to shut down, the subways would be flooded in about 2-3 days (since they're well below the water table of the surrounding Hudson and East Rivers).

http://www.worldwithoutus.com/did_you_know.html

As much hate as the subway gets when they get shut down from the rain a little context yields a lot more understanding: "We move 13 million gallons of water a day when it’s not raining." Mind boggling that any of it works at all.

What? Does NYC subway really shut down because of the rain?

No, but they do, typically, operate at lower speeds. In really, really bad storms (like on 8/8/2007), the subway can shut down. On 8/8/07, 3 inches of rain fell in one hour, and a tornado hit Brooklyn, causing most subway lines to be severely delayed or completely shut down.

Rarely, yes. It takes a pretty serious storm, but I've seen service interrupted due to rain within this past year. This year has had record rainfall.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/nyregion/01hot.html

"One reason for the record-breaking low temperatures was the record-breaking rainfall and accompanying cloud cover. The deluge of more than 16 inches (twice the average amount) made it the second wettest June and July on record, edging 1928. The wettest June and July was 1975, with more than 19 inches."

(First reference I could Google up.)

No, I completely agree! I think that, for example, London has been more aggressive in removing the number of cars on the roads; even still, there are traffic jams galore.

There was a study about how building more than 3 lanes of highway did nothing to reduce congestion, because more people then just drove. (It's hilarious that you'd need as many tunnels into the CBD as West-East streets!)