The daily commute was turned on its head during yesterday’s transit strike as millions of people were forced to find alternatives to the buses and subways that usually act as the city’s circulatory system.

For many in outer boroughs, commuting into Manhattan became a confusing and frustrating game of figuring out what their transportation options were and deciding whether it was worth the extra money and time to find taxis or stand on line for trains.

In the morning, thousands of commuters snaked through police barricades in the frigid weather at Jamaica Station in Queens, a major Long Island Rail Road hub. On the return trip last night, crowds packed Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal, where passengers who normally take buses and subways turned to trains. At different points in the night, both Penn Station and Grand Central were so full police had to temporarily stop people from coming in.

“It’s a journey,” a commuter from commuter, Abdul Mohammed, said as he tried to get to his job at a real estate company in Midtown Manhattan. “I had to walk here, now I’ve got to wait in this line, and then I’ve got to get on a train.”

The Brooklyn Bridge was clogged with pedestrians bundled in winter coats, hats, and gloves during the rush hours and cars circled near the foot of the bridge trying to pick up rides for $15 a head.

Uptown, cars trying to go below 96th Street, with the required four passengers, were stuck in standstill traffic for much of the morning when restrictions were in effect, according to news reports.

Ridership on Metro-North, Long Island Rail Road, and the Port Authority’s PATH trains – three of the four mass transit systems that were not striking – spiked drastically. Officials at New Jersey Transit said passenger figures were on par with the average for this time of year.

The number of passengers who took PATH trains more than doubled yesterday morning to 33,186 from the 16,579 passengers that take the trains on an average weekday. Part of that increase was due to special shuttle service the Port Authority was running between the World Trade Center site and 33rd Street, via New Jersey. The shuttle service will continue running for the duration of the strike, a spokesman for the agency, Alan Hicks, said.

Metro-North saw ridership jump by 149% yesterday morning and plans to add three new shuttles lines from points in the Bronx to Grand Central starting today at 5 a.m., a spokesman, Dan Brucker, said. The shuttles – which will run from a park-and-ride at Yankee Stadium and from Riverdale and Mount Vernon – will cost $4 a ride. LIRR added roughly 50,000 passengers to the average 100,000 it carries on an average weekday.

Like Metro-North, it will switch over to an alternative strike service schedule today. Six of its train lines will make more stops at designated “hub” stations during the morning and evening rush hours and bypass some of its regular stops. The service schedule is posted on the Internet at www.mta.info.

“The morning rush hour was unlike anything this city has experienced in 25 years,” Mayor Bloomberg told reporters at City Hall.

The mayor said the city was “functioning and functioning well, considering the severe circumstances that we are in.” He said the city’s contingency plan was working, but would be adjusted as needed. It includes closing down several major Manhattan cross streets and mandates four passengers in cars coming into the borough below 96th Street between 5 a.m. and 11 a.m.

Though traffic was heavy on the East River crossings yesterday, the spokesman at the Port Authority, Mr. Hicks, said the number of cars coming into the city through the Holland and Lincoln tunnels was down. Between midnight and 10 a.m., 15,858 cars came through the Lincoln Tunnel compared to 26,402 on an average day; 3,955 came through the Holland compared to 17,016 on an average weekday.

An attorney who lives on Long Island and was waiting at Jamaica Station yesterday morning, Christine Benda, said the chaos was manageable for a day. “I don’t mind it today, but if this goes on for another week it’s not going to be fun.”

Others used yesterday to plan ahead. The phones at Cobble Hill Car Service in Brooklyn were ringing all day with people trying to schedule pickups for this morning

“It’s only going get to worse as time goes on,” the owner, Vito Balsamo, said as he took a drag of a cigarette and pointed to stack of reservations slips.

Mr. Balsamo, whose company has a fleet of 40 cars, said while his drivers picked up carpools yesterday to go over the Brooklyn Bridge that traffic was backed up for an hour and half, which meant fewer fares.

“You can make $40 going over the bridge with four people or you can make the same $40 an hour, driving people back and forth from doctors over here and then you make your neighborhood people happy,” he said.

A construction worker, Rafael Romano, waited for three hours to find a taxi in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. When that didn’t work, his boss picked him up, he told The New York Sun in Spanish.

One Queens resident, Angelina Petito, who works in Manhattan, said she would pay for a cab tomorrow if she had to, but that it would eat into her holiday bonus.

“It’s unbelievable,” she said. Then she attacked the transit union, saying their expectations were out of line with reality.