If You're Traveling Into New York...

Some helpful information from the Wikipedia:

40 million foreign and American tourists visit New York City each year. Major destinations include the Empire State Building, Broadway productions, scores of museums from the El Museo del Barrio to the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, the Bronx Zoo and New York Botanical Garden, luxury shopping along Fifth and Madison Avenues, and events like the Halloween Parade in the East Village and the Tribeca Film Festival. Many of the city's ethnic enclaves, such as Jackson Heights, Flushing, and Brighton Beach are major shopping destinations for first and second generation Americans up and down the East Coast.

New York City has 28,000 acres of parkland and 14 miles of public beaches. Manhattan's Central Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, is the most visited city park in the United States. Prospect Park in Brooklyn, also designed by Olmsted and Vaux, has a 90 acre meadow. Flushing Meadows Park, the city's third largest, was the setting for the 1939 and 1964 World's Fair in Queens.

New York's food culture, influenced by the city's immigrants and large number of dining patrons, is diverse. Jewish and Italian immigrants made the city famous for bagels and New York style pizza. Some 4,000 mobile food vendors licensed by the city, many immigrant-owned, have made Middle Eastern foods such as falafels and kebabs standbys of contemporary New York street food. The city is also home to many of the finest haute cuisine restaurants in the United States.

New York City is home to the most complex and extensive transportation network in the United States, with more than 12,000 iconic yellow cabs, 120,000 daily bicyclists, subway, bus and railroad systems, immense airports, landmark bridges and tunnels, ferry service and even an aerial commuter tramway. While nearly 90% of Americans drive to their jobs, only about 30% of New Yorkers do; about one in every three users of mass transit in the United States and two-thirds of the nation's rail riders live in New York and its suburbs. Data from the 2000 U.S. Census reveals that New York City is the only major city in the United States where more than half of all households do not own a car (the figure is even higher in Manhattan, over 75%; nationally, the rate is 8%). New York's high rate of public transit use and its pedestrian-friendly character makes it one of the most energy-efficient cities in the country. A study by the environmental organization SustainLane found New York to be the city in the United States best able to endure an oil crisis with an extended gasoline price shock in the range of US$3 to US$8 per gallon.

The New York City Subway is the largest subway system in the world when measured by track mileage (656 miles or 1,056 km of mainline track) and the world's fifth largest when measured by annual ridership (1.4 billion passenger trips in 2004). New York City's public bus fleet and vast commuter rail network are the largest in North America. The rail network, which connects the suburbs in the tri-state region to the city, has more than 250 stations and 20 rail lines. The commuter rail system converges at the two busiest rail stations in the United States, Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, both in Manhattan. Long-haul buses depart from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the nation's busiest bus station.

Three major airports serve New York City and its surrounding suburbs: John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and LaGuardia Airport, both in Queens, and Newark Liberty International Airport in nearby Newark, New Jersey. About 100 million travelers used these New York-area airports in 2005 as the metropolitan region surpassed Chicago to become the busiest air gateway in the nation.