Driving in New York means stringing together expressways, parkways, bridges and tunnels that were built for far less traffic than they carry today. I-278 is the backbone, running as the Staten Island Expressway, the Gowanus and the BQE through Brooklyn and Queens, and on to the Bronx over the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. The Long Island Expressway crosses Queens from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the Cross Bronx carries I-95 between the George Washington Bridge and New England, and the Major Deegan follows I-87 up the west side of the Bronx toward Yonkers.
Manhattan has its own rhythm. The FDR Drive and the West Side Highway run along the rivers, crosstown streets crawl, and parking is mostly in garages with tight ramps and low ceilings. In Queens, the Van Wyck and the Grand Central Parkway funnel traffic toward JFK and LaGuardia, and the Belt Parkway wraps along the southern edge of Brooklyn from the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Queens. Parkways bar commercial vehicles and have low overpasses, which affects which routes a service van can take.
For a mobile mechanic, the challenge is less the distance than the curb. Alternate-side parking, hydrants, bus lanes and double-parked trucks shape where a repair can happen, and a mechanic plans the visit around legal space to work. The upside is that most New Yorkers can take the subway, a bus or the Staten Island Ferry to work while the car is fixed where it sits, instead of losing a day driving to a shop in another borough.