As a New York commuter (Clinton NJ to Mid-Town), and a former Manhattan resident, I have also given lots of thought and come to the same conclusion - you can't get out, there's really no way.

Until you've experienced what it's like when, say ONE lane of Rt. 495 is blocked, or, say, ONE subway car looses a 3rd rail shoe, or ONE STREET is closed due to, oh, a steam pipe rupture, a water main break, or some such, you really don't know how incredibly sensitive the entire mass transit matrix is to disturbances, and more importantly, how incredibly fragile the entire transport infrastructure of New York really is.

There are only 3 direct connections to the mainland from the west, more from the north and the east, but to the east, you're talking about an island - a huge, crowded ISLAND.

For me the idea of a "Get Home" bag is, perhaps, a fantasy. If I was stuck on Manhattan Island, my "Bug In" is the office, a friend's place in Tribeca, or into Brooklyn. None of those places can be reasonably expected to be able to facilitate housing people for any length of time. So I'd have to consider an 80 mile walk home, through Jersey City, Newark and some less-pleasant places, hitch a ride on something, or perhaps steal a boat and head out somewhere south and then work my way inland.

What scares me about NYC in the event that, say, we loose TWO major roads in/out (Lincoln and Holland Tunnel come to mind, obviously, as the softest and least defensible targets), commerce grinds to a halt. It's fairly reasonable to expect that they would use any means needed to bring food and medical supplies into the city, including airlifts to Central Park, and the sheer volume of intelligent, well-heeled people in Manhattan will make things a bit easier to tolerate in a serious emergency.

Consider that on the 9/11 attacks, NYC told FEMA that it wasn't really needed, they had the resources they needed already, and in the blackout of 2003, while is was fairly miserable for some, anarchy didn't descend on the city. Heck, even in the Washington Heights and Thomkins Square Park riots, the rest of the city was too busy making money to notice.

So, in the end, I don't worry too much about NYC, beyond, of course, being hurt or killed in some random incident.

I'm more worried about keeping my heart healthy and blood pressure down, to be totally honest.