This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.
At around 4 a.m. on a recent Saturday, a 37-year-old software engineer named Greg Miller left his apartment in Astoria, Queens, and headed to Borough Park, Brooklyn, to get an early start on the week’s 20-mile walk.
As the sun climbed in the sky, it was largely quiet. Birds could be heard chirping, and so could the shh of tree leaves swaying in the breeze. Occasionally the beeps from a garbage truck pierced the silence, as did the rumble of a subway train passing overhead.
Many New Yorkers find the simple act of being a pedestrian in the city a challenge. So much noise. So much traffic. The sidewalks themselves can be an obstacle course, jammed with dining sheds and e-bike riders, people walking six dogs at once, people paying more attention to their phones than to the people around them.
And then there’s Miller, who walks not simply to get where he’s going, not simply for the fresh air, but to meet a wildly ambitious goal: to walk all the streets in every borough. All 8,000 miles of them.
And while he’s at it, he’s able to experience the city differently from the rest of us.
“It’s almost like being a tourist over and over again,” Miller said. “But you’re not going to the tourist traps, you’re going to some, you know, really quaint streets in the middle of the borough.”
He is not the first person to attempt this peculiar feat of endurance. More than a decade ago, a fellow named Matt Green took on the same challenge, encouraging other walkers to get out and explore.
Miller, who is originally from San Francisco, set out to walk more during the coronavirus pandemic, when he felt he had become too sedentary. He initially walked the route of the entire subway system — above ground, of course. That took six months. At first, he walked just five miles each week. Eventually, he was able to do 20. He then set his sights on walking long streets in the city, including Bedford Avenue, the longest one in Brooklyn.
“Then I ran out of long streets to walk,” Miller said. “I just started making maps on Google Maps, just zigzagging across the boroughs trying to come up with a unique 20-mile walk, and my plan was basically just to make walks on streets I’ve never seen before.”
Since 2021, he has walked more than 2,400 miles of the city’s streets. He now travels 20 miles every Saturday, starting at sunrise, as long as it’s not raining.
Miller, who wears a propeller hat and New Balance sneakers during his jaunts, plans to walk in Brooklyn throughout the summer after spending the spring in Staten Island and the winter in the Bronx.
“I’m trying to get the entire city at once, which is really fun,” Miller said. “It’s like you have this fog of war, where it’s like, I’ve never been here before, so I can’t imagine this part of the city.
“But then as you start to explore more parts, now I can just throw a dart at the map and remember what that neighborhood feels like, remember what I saw there,” he added.
Miller at times listens to audiobooks or podcasts but often is alone with his thoughts and the scenery.
He is partial to walking in Brooklyn, which he described as “just more stimulating, there’s just more interesting architecture, more businesses to discover,” than some of the other boroughs.
Staten Island, on the other hand, he said, was “not the most thrilling borough to walk through,” because it was mostly residential and because it was “more hostile” to pedestrians, with cars speeding and not necessarily looking out for walkers.
Miller said sidewalks sometimes disappeared in both Staten Island and Queens, and that cars weren’t as deferential to pedestrians there as in Manhattan, for example. But there were obstacles in Manhattan too, including bags and other goods splayed out on sidewalks by sellers and grease-slicked streets near restaurants.
In Queens and the Bronx he has seen lines of cars that appear to have been broken into and abandoned. He’s noticed carwash operations and Tupperware filled with food for hungry cats.
On his recent walk, Miller passed a black cat that scurried underneath a nearby car and looked out at the humans passing by, perhaps searching for one of those food stations. He walked past police cars parked illegally on the sidewalk near a precinct. He had to weave around garbage bags that had yet to be picked up.
Near Bath Beach, Brooklyn, he skirted sprinklers that were dampening the sidewalk as they watered a home’s pristine patch of grass. Outside a window supply store, large stacks of plywood and metal bars narrowed the walkable path on the sidewalk.
But that’s par for the course. He shares what he sees both on and around the streets with a community of like-minded walkers on Reddit, where he also learns about different approaches to walking the city, such as taking on one neighborhood at a time. He has even emailed with Green, who gave him some walking tips.
On Miller’s recent outing, after walking through Sunset Park and admiring the unobstructed skyline and then heading up to Industry City, he finished his walk around 12:30 p.m., about 22 miles in all.
“Overall,” he said, it was “nice to see Brooklyn again.”
New York’s Century of Congestion
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who recently pulled the plug on New York’s congestion pricing plan, may have failed to address traffic in the city, but she is by no means the first. People have been promising — and failing — to ease the congestion in Manhattan for the past 100 years. Plus ça change and all that!
In 1926, Frederick Wright, a representative of the city’s bus and streetcar services, wrote for The New York Times that “New York’s traffic problem is by no means a hopeless one,” and proposed a solution: “Stop the storage of empty cars on congested thoroughfares and the traffic problem will be more than half solved.” He further argued that if drivers of private cars were not able to park in the city, they would be less likely to drive into it. Sounds familiar!
Two years later, a Times article began, “We are confronted with traffic conditions which are almost intolerable.” Later that year, a piece titled “Cures for Congestion” stated that “buses, trolleys, subways, traffic lights, parking restrictions and street widenings — these alone will not suffice.”
By 1930, things were apparently just getting worse. “Congestion Is Realty Menace,” a Times headline blared.
In 1945, Robert Moses proposed widening streets, running expressways through buildings (“feasible from an engineering standpoint”) and roof parking. We currently have some buildings above highways — including the F.D.R. Drive and the B.Q.E. — but somehow traffic has not been eradicated.
By 1947, a “flood of cars” was “swamping cities”; in 1948, New York was dealing with “the high cost of traffic jams.”
In 1952, a Times reporter summed up the city’s traffic problem thusly: “Everyone looks at the traffic problem in terms of his own experience. Some want all curb parking eliminated. Others insist that they must park at the curb. Truck drivers want passenger cars out of the way, cabbies would like the trucks out of the way, the passenger car driver wants them all out of the way and the poor pedestrian feels that he is in the middle.”
Solutions — alleged solutions — came and went. In 1970, Mayor John Lindsay attempted to ease the congestion in Lower Manhattan by ordering a ban on parking in a 50-block area below Fulton Street; in 1977, Mayor Abraham Beame was ordered by a federal court to ban parking in Midtown Manhattan to cut air pollution, but complained that the plan would “make a ghost town of the area from 59th Street to the Battery.” Manhattan’s ghost town never quite materialized, but traffic congestion persisted.