What you do to solve that problem is you cross those ped oriented thoroughfares with some higher capacity auto roads, so that the plumber doesn't have to make a long trip from the high capacity road to the property on the low capacity one - instead most of their journey is on parallel roadways and they can turn onto a ped superhighway at the last possible moment. Classic road hierarchy design stuff, just one more level of abstraction down than mostly currently in place in NY. It works fine in European supercities, Tokyo is also a good example.

Also, the plumber won't always be making calls to pedestrian superpaths. Keep in mind how I pointed out that a wide 15mph pedestrian superhighway as described is a maximalist idea - but there are many equally maximalist auto superhighways in the city aren't there? (A key difference being no one wants to live near those) In much the same way as smaller auto roads are more permeable to peds than superhighways, smaller ped oriented roads can be more auto-permeable, with say a 25mph limit and limited street parking. This should constitute the bulk of the city. Then finally at the other end of the scale you have the 35mph avenue/boulevard, then the 45mph auto road, then the 65mph superhighway. They can all live in harmony servicing different kinds of traffic at different speeds, a diverse set of path weights creating beautiful overlays of separate cycle, pedestrian, and road traffic networks, something the Netherlands is really good at in particular.

New York is not all skyscrapers - sort of the opposite actually by land area and population. (Approximately 78 percent of New Yorkers do not live in Manhattan) I live in a part of Brooklyn, where there is certifiably plenty of street parking, I never have trouble finding a spot in front of my place. There's a street nearby maybe 5 minutes walk away where I park when I'm pulling a trailer because there's always enough room for it. That street is where tractor trailers park with 53 foot trailers too - if multiple 53 foot trailers can legally park next to my vehicle with a jet ski on a trailer, next to a public park, that is not a scarcity of parking in my eyes. Keep in mind it is these kinds of predominantly residential medium density places, where most people live, where I want to delete parking spaces. Skyscrapers are just not relevant to the urban environment where most people live in NYC. For example it's perhaps a 40 minute walk to the nearest skyscrapers for me, and I'm not even that far out into Brooklyn.

In Manhattan where the very tallest skyscrapers are? That's a whole other ballgame of scale, I agree. It's just the top of the density pyramid of the overall city though and thus occupies a relatively small overall area of it -- I don't think our citywide urbanist strategies should revolve solely around this area - it requires distinct strategies for the absolutely densest core to keep things moving. It should all just be commercial parking only basically. That's hard to actually enforce in practice, so I think the best strategy is to do a congestion charge set at the right level to reduce the number of single occupant commuter type vehicles in the area and correctly price in that cost of doing business in the densest part of the urban core as a charge rather than a fine. As a bonus traffic should improve as well - I'm eager to see what the upcoming lower Manhattan congestion charge pilot does for my blood pressure when crossing Manhattan in a vehicle using Canal street.