Unfortunate — for a city with as much transit and density and NYC, driving a car there is definitely something that should be treated as a luxury.
Have you been to Queens a lot? There are essentially only two subway trunks for what is the largest NYC borough by area. Plenty of neighborhoods in Brooklyn are supplied only with bus service that gets incredibly sparse at night and on the weekends. For Staten Island residents, driving a car is as much of a daily event as in the rest of Anytown USA, plus they get to pay tolls every time they venture outside their borough. Manhattan is just the smaller part of NYC (that contains most of the money.)