What makes driving a truck in New York so terrible?  Let me count the ways. 1) Much of it is very congested with local car and truck traffic, parked vehicles are all over the place, and the bicycles and the pedestrians (who evidently cannot read anything above their shoulders, like traffic signs and such) all seem to have a death wish. 2) Many of the streets were not built with tractor trailers in mind - they are too narrow, there is not enough room to turn corners, buildings are too close to the street.  I remember one delivery for which I had to circle the block and approach the target building the wrong way on a one-way street in order to be in position to try to back into the loading dock located inside the building. I had to avoid the parked cars, telephone poles, street signs and a fire hydrant, swing the cab up on the curb, jockey back and forth to miss the door frame with the trailer and the brick wall with the cab, and then get lined up with the loading ramp on the dock which I couldn't see because my head was out in the daylight and the dock was inside a deeply-shadowed building. But I did it.  I admire those truckers who do that kind of maneuvering every day. 3) Many of the major streets and highways look and feel as if they were imported from Bosnia after the bombing was over.  There are bumps and patches, ridges and potholes.  Sometimes there are ridges on the patches on the potholes.  4) Low overpasses, I think.  I mean, it is hard to tell because New York uses a unique method of measuring the height of an overpass.  They get a tall road crew worker to stand under the overpass, put his arm up straight, and have another worker guess how far it is from his fingertips to the bottom of the overpass....I guess.  The first time I encountered one of those signs, reading 12'7", with me in a truck that measured 13'6" high, I immediately swerved onto an exit ramp.  As soon as I did it, however, I remembered that the signs may not be accurate, so I figured that I would cross the street at the end of the ramp and take the opposite ramp back down to the highway.  Wrong! The other ramp was blocked off for construction.  I spent the next two hours wandering through the streets of Queens trying to find my way back to the highway. 5) Many of the warehouses that get truck deliveries are located in undesirable neighborhoods and the truck drivers have to be on guard against the panhandlers, the drug addicts, the crooks and the gangs that prowl the areas.  Luckily, I have never had that kind of trouble, but I've heard horror stories from drivers who have.

Other than that, New York City is a neat place.  I am amazed at the way every available nook and cranny is occupied by a business of some sort - restaurants, diners, snack shops, ethnic food stores, clothing stores, auto parts stores, and on and on.  It is fascinating to go through the different ethnic neighborhoods - Jewish, Pakistani, Italian, Korean, Hasidic - each with their specialty stores and non-English signs.

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Queens neighborhood from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE).

Brooklyn neighborhood from the BQE.