As the strike was threatened late last week, many companies put contingency plans into action to allow workers to telecommute, share rides to work or take company-provided private transportation to get to their offices.
Many workers used ride-sharing resources on Web sites such as Craigslist.com to offer or seek rides as the city's subways and buses stopped running.
'Probably like most companies in the securities industry, we have very robust contingency plans,' said Selena Morris, a spokeswoman for Merrill Lynch & Co., which has about 9,000 workers in the city. By the time the strike began early Tuesday morning, Merrill Lynch had rented private shuttle buses and set up routes to pick up workers and bring them to its offices in lower Manhattan while also making arrangements with many of its workers who have been telecommuting since the strike began, she said.
The strike, which has been accompanied by frigid winter temperatures, has forced employees to walk to work in subfreezing temperatures, she said, but overall, operations have been unaffected.
'I would say it's business as usual,' Morris said.
During the strike, only cars with at least four passengers were allowed into Manhattan from 5 a.m. to 11 a.m., according to the city, making it almost imperative for commuters to find others to share rides.
Peter Rose, a spokesman for securities firm Goldman Sachs & Co., said workers who are able to telecommute have worked out arrangements with their managers, while others are getting into work on private buses hired by the company.
Also helping employees are special Web sites set up by Goldman Sachs to organize carpooling and to provide the latest information on the strike and on alternative transportation methods, including ferries that serve Manhattan, Rose said.
The company, which has about 9,000 workers in the city, also arranged special storage areas for employees who have been riding their bikes into work, he said.
Toby Usnik, a spokesman for The New York Times, said the newspaper's approximately 2,500 employees have also been getting rides to and from work on special shuttle buses provided by the company, while some workers are telecommuting if possible.
'It's been working very smoothly,' Usnik said. Because the paper is covering the news of the strike, many workers, including reporters and editors, must get into the office and into the city to do their jobs.
'Managers have been as accommodating and flexible as they can be,' Usnik said.
Mark Martin, chief financial officer at Makovsky & Co., a 40-person public relations and investor relations firm in midtown Manhattan, said the company's management talked to employees as the transit strike loomed so they would know their options to do their jobs.
'It's imperative for employees to know where they stand,' Martin said. 'Our policy was if you live in the outer boroughs, it was definitely OK for you to work from home.'
The company took lessons learned from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and provided remote access capabilities for workers to obtain access to their work e-mail and other systems in the event of emergencies, such as the transit strike.
Some 4.5 million riders daily use New York's subways on an average weekday, for a total of about 1.4 billion rides a year, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which operates the city's 26 subway and bus routes. The subway system has about 6,200 subway cars operating through 468 stations, which is only 35 fewer stations than the combined total of all other subway systems in the country.
The MTA has about 4,500 buses that carry about 2.4 million riders a day, or about 740 million people a year over 207 local and 36 express bus routes, according to the agency.