Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times
The view from Third Avenue in Brooklyn toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on Wednesday morning. With most mass transit out of service, many commuters had no choice but to drive. More Photos »
With commutes that took hours, half-mile lines at suburban gas stations and city buses stuffed beyond capacity, the transportation systems in most of the region slowed to a crawl on Wednesday, amid promises that some subway and commuter rail services would be restored by the Thursday morning commute.
On Wednesday night, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared a transportation emergency and said all fares on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's commuter trains, subways and buses would be waived on Thursday and Friday.
Beginning at 6 a.m., some service will resume on 14 of the city's 23 subway lines, but several critical lines — the No. 3 and 7 trains and the B, C, E, G and Q trains — remain entirely dark. Many trains will have gaps in their routes, including the No. 4 train, which will have no service between 42nd Street in Manhattan and Borough Hall in Brooklyn.
And if New Yorkers want to try their luck at driving into Manhattan on Thursday, most will require company: Beginning at 6 a.m., the city planned to bar private vehicles carrying fewer than three people from entering Manhattan over most major bridges, like the Robert F. Kennedy, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges.
But on Wednesday, as many businesses resumed normal operations for the first time since the storm, commutes were a mess.
"I left at 8:30 this morning and got here at 11:30," said Eddie Malae, 29, who drove from Forest Hills, Queens, to the salon on Lexington Avenue near 77th Street where he is a stylist. "And I did tricks, shortcuts."
Mr. Cuomo said that the goal of the fare waiver was to help alleviate the kind of traffic that clogged city streets on Wednesday.
"The gridlock was dangerous, frankly," Mr. Cuomo said.
Joseph Lhota, the chairman of the M.T.A., said that roughly half of the commuters who take Metro-North trains would see regular service starting Thursday morning. The Harlem and the New Haven lines will both be running normal schedules to Grand Central Station, he said.
The storm damage had a synergy of its own. Efforts to pump floodwaters from subway and automobile tunnels were slowed by electrical shortages. Hastily arranged car pools became bogged down on highways and city streets clogged with other commuters. Many gas stations, without power to operate their pumps, could not open for business, eerily evoking the fuel crisis of the 1970s.
Only bicycles seemed to be rolling.
The delays were "the equivalent of a subway strike with several of our major tunnels closed," said Samuel I. Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner known as Gridlock Sam, who said he could only recall one instance — when there was a powerful storm during a transit strike in 1980 — when traffic had been as bad.
City buses, the only piece of the mass transit network operating in earnest on Wednesday, often bypassed waiting commuters, unable to take on more passengers. Those who did make it on board often got off well before their stop, reasoning that they could walk faster.
"Maybe when it turns green, people will start moving," Abraham Riesman, 26, said as he rode an M10 bus stopped at a red light along Central Park West. Then the light turned.
"Nope."
Eric Bourne, 27, waited 30 minutes for the M4 bus at 138th Street and Broadway before he realized there was a path of less resistance: walking to his job at Parsons Dance in Times Square, where he is a modern dancer. Woe was to the less fit.
Parking garages filled early, with lines of cars in front of some gates before they opened near dawn. Diego Trilleras, the manager at a Manhattan Parking Group garage at East 56th Street, said he had not seen such a business boom since before the economic downturn. Some customers, he said, would probably have to wait an hour to get their cars out again. "They understand," he said hopefully.
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