Photo from

Streetsblog NYC

.

Short of

congestion pricing

, there's really nothing you can do to make driving a more pleasant experience in dense city centers. There's not enough space to accommodate the incredible demand there, and there's no way to expand supply short of paving over the sidewalks and buildings, which would defeat the whole purpose of having a city in the first place.

What you

can

do is make transit better

—buses, in this case—by turning over certain high-traffic lanes to bus-only use.

Of course, it's never that simple. The reallocation of road space can be a rancorous process, and proposals to convert any road space to a specialized use (bus, bike, pedestrian plaza) are inevitably met with cries of "War on Cars!," complaints about "moochers" who "don't pay their fair share," etc. The shift toward multi-modal travel is still a relatively recent phenomenon in many parts of the country, and there's a great deal of convincing left to be done. We should start where the job is easiest: corridors on which transit users already outnumber drivers.

Two examples that come to mind are Fanshawe Street, in Auckland, New Zealand, and Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles.