The next time you’re in Midtown Manhattan on a weekday afternoon, I encourage you to try a little game: Take a brisk crosstown walk, and look around.

For starters, it’s a nice way to take in the city while getting some exercise. It will also give you a sense for one of New York’s pressing problems. If you watch the vehicles around you, you will probably notice that you are traveling faster than some of them.

Despite having internal combustion engines — which I’m pretty sure are more powerful than your body — the vehicles will crawl forward at a few miles an hour. Then they will stop and wait for a light to turn green or a gridlocked intersection to clear. Meanwhile, you will keep moving. When I’m walking across Manhattan, I often find that I can outrace a car.

The average vehicle speed in Midtown today is just 4.7 miles an hour. That’s 28 percent slower than five years ago. Given that most people can walk up to 4 miles an hour, the human body is sometimes Manhattan’s fastest mode of transportation.