Famously dead cities, London, Paris and Tokyo.
But take a look at a map - how do you get to Brooklyn from New Jersey without going through Manhattan? That's the difference.
Those other cities have vastly different geographies. The congestion is about protecting the city center, but Manhattan traffic is quite different.
And to push this conversation further into antagonism, why should the people of Manhattan prioritize people going from New Yersey to Brooklyn by car? The person doing that trip would prefer it if all of Manhattan were completely flattened and turned into a collection highways and bridges, but people live there. If anything, the current state of NY and it's surroundings is precisely the result of attempting to do precisely that.
In the cities I mentioned you have the same situation. If someone lived in Croydon but needed to get to Wembley or Edmonton, you're not gonna find a highway connecting those two places. But you will find a train that or tube that gets you there, faster than if you'd driven.
That said, NYC needs to get better at thru-running trains across jurisdictions to make metro area crossing journeys easier
we street-park a car here most of the year - if i use the car to visit them the travel time is shortest (20m walk -> 1hr 5m drive)
but i feel very lucky to have a bunch of non-car options - if the weather is nice or i'm off-peak i can ride my bike to NYP in manhattan (8 miles), take my bike on the nj transit train to their stop, and ride the last three miles to them (~2h)
otherwise i can take the subway -> path -> nj transit (~2h 50m, but if schedules were more sensible it could be closer to 2h 20m)
and you might be like "the car is the obvious answer, look at how well you've proven my point!"
but that neglects the time requirement and responsibilities of keeping a car in NYC that i think should be factored into this - either 90m of your time once a week to move it for street parking, or a $65 ticket most of the time. if i'm returning to the city finding a spot can take 25-60 minutes and is often a 15-20m walk from my apartment.
there's a meaningful transaction cost each time the car is used AND in storing the car. and that's with free street parking once you've found a spot, which i don't think nyc should have in the first place!
This will eventually happen, just a matter of time. All cities worth their salt are calming traffic. Manhattan is expensive right now, despite it being ghastly polluted by ice cars, it will be 10 times more when it's actually a nice, calm outside environment. The regional economy will not suffer, it will bloom even more.