I spent a yr in NY. The subway takes you everywhere you need to go. I used a taxi maybe twice the whole time I was there.
My grandfather was born (in 1909), lived, and died in Brooklyn. He never owned a car. Never even had a driver’s license his whole life. Never needed one. Always took public buses and trains. A taxi was a rarity.
Whenever I needed to go somewhere unfamiliar in Brooklyn (or anywhere else in the entire city) and didn’t know how to get there, all I had to do was ask Grandfather. He knew all the brooklyn bus routes like the back of his hand. He’d tell me which street corner to go to, which number bus to catch, where to get off to transfer to another bus, how long to ride that other bus, which street to get off, etc.
Right off the top of his head he’d tell me all that without so much as consulting a paper bus map. And even though he hadn’t ridden that particular route in a lot of years himself.