Banning is equivalent to an infinite price. Better off setting a very high price, such as the revenue is far higher than the negative externality

For practical reasons I guess you want to be able to move furniture etc. That is about the only time you need a motor transport in dense cities?

Banning means you don't need to maintain the infrastructure. You can let people walk all down the street. The pavement doesn't need to withstand thousands of pounds of vehicles. And so on.

>The pavement doesn't need to withstand thousands of pounds of vehicles.

It has. It'd be illegal and extremely dangerous to design a city without properly functioning infrastructure for emergency services, garbage disposal, physically impaired accessibility. Also very inconvenient to not include commercial deliveries and public transit into that list of essential road use scenarios. Most of the vehicles performing these services are heavy.

For the most part only private ICE cars are light enough to be a drop in a bucket on the road maintenance. Private EVs, and especially EV SUVs, are likely making an impact on the maintenance schedule though.

I sorta hope they find some streets or avenues to convert to bike lanes. I do sorta feel like having a congestion fee without much added ways to get around for pedestrians leaves the typical person unchanged from this.

You can't ban private vehicles because it's difficult to get to the rest of NY without transiting through Manhattan.

You would essentially be cutting most of NY off from the rest of the world.