I guess "improving the roads" has been decided to be impossible. Whether it is or isn't, it sure would be a great way to increase congestion, if that was your desired outcome. You might then expect them to use the money to improve roads instead of giving to an unaccountable city controlled subway monopoly.
They tried nothing else for the better part of a century, but the traffic just kept getting worse: the more you subsidize driving, the more people choose to do it.
The underlying problem is basic geometry: cars are the least spatially efficient form of transportation in common use - you need something like 140 square feet to transport on average just over one person, plus a similar amount of space for storage. That can work somewhere unpopular but the math just doesn’t work in a city core where you don’t have that much space unless you bulldozed all of the buildings. Even if they did something phenomenally expensive and unpleasant like creating multilevel streets those would fill up quickly because if traffic ever improved, more people would start driving all the way in.
This is so confusing. If you create bigger roads, it usually doesn't solve the issue, as:
1) More people start to use the road, which can actually increase total commute time (Braess's paradox).
2) It removes room for the actual city. The city becomes more spread out, and people have to travel farther to get to their destinations!
Think about this: do you want to be encouraging other people to create more traffic along your commute? No way! You want everyone else off your roads, somehow get them to start biking or take the subway. And the best way to do that is to replace a couple lanes with bus/bike/streetcar lanes.
Add more lanes and parking. Since there's no more vacant land, bulldoze some buildings. Due to real estate prices it'll be cheapest to raze a poor neighborhood after seizing it with eminent domain. We can make the GW Bridge a triple decker but hell no to any train tracks or HOV lane! /sarcasm
It's a baffling bureaucracy there in NYC.