Traffic officials in famously fast paced New York recently trumpeted the success of new rules barring vehicles from turning off certain Midtown blocks. Traffic on the straight-only streets, they said, is now bolting across town 33% faster than before – at a blistering 5.3 miles an hour.

Everyone knows how frantic life is in the Big Apple, that sleepless metropolis of rapid transit and the New York minute. A psychologist at California State University, Fresno who has studied the pace of life in different places, Robert Levine, found that New York ranks among the fastest-paced American cities and might have finished first except that some of the pedestrians he timed here were slowed by an improvised street concert, an attempted purse-snatching, and an unsuccessful mugging.

Mr. Levine’s findings – about not only the hurrying of New Yorkers, but also the obstacles they face – illustrate an essential paradox about the place, which is how long everything here seems to take. The snail-like pace of so many things in such an impatient city may account for an awful lot of Gotham’s legendary collective anxiousness.

New Yorkers, for example, have the longest average commutes in the country. The Census Bureau said city residents trek an average of 38.4 minutes to work, compared with a national average of 24.4 minutes. For suburbanites who work in the city, an hour each way is routine and two hours not uncommon.

One reason may be all that “rapid” transit. “Many city buses move at a maddening crawl,” a staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, Gene Russianoff, said.

His advocacy group co-sponsors annual Pokey Awards for the slowest routes. One Pokey winner last year was the B63 in Brooklyn, which barely broke 5 mph meandering between Bay Ridge and Cobble Hill.

Congestion and regulation – the one perhaps tending to breed the other – will always slow things down, and New York has both in spades. New Yorkers thus find themselves having to wait in line for nearly everything, a fact of city life that became a frequent plot device in the quintessential New York sitcom, “Seinfeld.”

My friend Albert Mellinkoff, who recently moved to Southern California from Manhattan, was glad to escape the interminable checkout lines that had made New York supermarkets such an ordeal. “It just doesn’t seem to happen in Los Angeles,” he said.

New Yorkers must wait, and wait, for public services as well. While the administration of Mayor Bloomberg has made some progress toward efficiency – with the 311 telephone system, for instance – some aspects of local government remain glacial. Getting a building permit can be so slow and difficult that an entire profession of “expediters” has sprung up.

New York also has the distinction of having the nation’s slowest federal jurist, a district judge in Manhattan who, as of December, had not yet ruled on 289 motions in civil cases that had been pending for more than six months.

In Albany, meanwhile, which exercises considerable influence over city affairs, the state budget is late year after year.

Relieving congestion can take longer than coping with it. Planning for the badly needed Second Avenue subway, the local version of Godot in a city of characters who may well feel consigned to an absurdist play, began in the 1920s, and the first sections of tunnel were started in the 1970s. But the train is still years away, at best.

In some ways, New York is uniquely slow. It is practically the only place in America, for instance, that does not permit right turns on most red lights, making circling the block an extended sojourn even when the streets are deserted.

New York’s housing market, marinated in decades of regulation, is slow as molasses, albeit far less sweet. Buying a home in New York can take more time because so many dwellings are listed exclusively with a single broker rather than in shared multiple-listings databases, as is typical elsewhere. Finding a place often means shuttling from agent to agent, though that still beats spending years on a waiting list for a subsidized or rent-regulated unit.

All that helpless waiting could make anybody crotchety, and even more impatient. Consider a study of negotiators by two management professors at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Gregory Janicik and Sally Blount found that “fast-paced negotiators who encountered slowdowns experienced more negative emotions,” and that “impatient responses to delay can lead to self-handicapping behaviors, including increased contentiousness and sub-optimal value-claiming tactics.”

I know just 8 million people who fit that description. For all of them, it would seem, the message is clear: The best way to negotiate New York is not to be in such a hurry.