NEW YORK -- Relieved New Yorkers happily hopped on subways and buses Friday morning, drove into the city without carpooling and quit doling out wads of cash to taxi drivers as a strike of the nation's largest mass transit system ended.

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Video: Subways, Buses Up And Running
Videos: Full Strike Coverage
Images: Firefighter Struck | Street Brawl | Strike

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Rachael Staten, who waited for a downtown Manhattan subway on a mostly empty platform early Friday, said she had missed the trains during the three-day strike.

"It didn't feel like New York without it," said Staten, of Brooklyn. "I felt really excited when I swiped my (fare) card. I hadn't done it in a few days."

After three days of a bitterly cold commute, temperatures warmed to the high 40s and subways and buses returned to service smoothly for more than 7 million daily riders, transit officials said. NYC Transit said the traffic, on the Friday before Christmas, was lighter than a usual weekday.

The end of the first transit strike in the city in a quarter-century didn't resolve a bitter contract dispute between Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Union leaders agreed to a state mediator's suggestion to go back to work without a contract, although the mediators said the MTA may consider pulling a proposal to offer less generous pensions to its new employees in exchange for workers' increased contributions to health care. Union leader Roger Toussaint said the pension proposal was unacceptable and the major sticking point in the contract.

Negotiators have been ordered not to speak to the media about the contract until an agreement is reached; it wasn't revealed whether talks would continue this weekend or be postponed until after Christmas.

Transit workers, whose contract expired Dec. 16, were troubled by the uncertainty.

"We wanna know what we gained and what we have to give up," said bus driver Dady Halaby, behind the wheel of a bus traveling through the Upper East Side.

Also postponed was a court hearing that could decide whether the union will have to pay $3 million in fines levied by a Brooklyn judge. The transit workers will lose six days' pay for the strike because of a state law prohibiting them from walking off the job.

The three-day strike may have cost the city's economy as much as $1 billion according to the comptroller's office.

While holiday shoppers were back on the streets Friday night, merchants said they doubt they will make up the business that was lost. Florists reported that sales were off by 80 percent, while theaters may have lost as much as 20 percent of their normal business.

The hospitality industry was particularly hard-hit, with tourists canceling trips and diners canceling reservations.

Some small business owners are planning a class-action lawsuits against both the MTA and the Transit Workers' Union.

Commuter Marzena Gosk, of the Woodhaven section of Queens, blamed the union for the walkout.

"They created the problem," she said.

Gosk missed a day of work at an ophthalmologist's office because she couldn't board Long Island Rail Road trains going to Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station, then shelled out twice the normal cash to travel the suburban rail line.

Commuters crowded onto suburban trains, walked miles in subfreezing temperatures, shared cars with strangers to meet the city's requirement that four people travel in cars going to busier parts of Manhattan and paid taxi and livery car drivers well above the normal meter fare to get around.

"I walked everywhere," said Tony Wolken, of Hicksville, who works more than 20 blocks away from his LIRR stop at Penn Station.

Retailers may have paid the heaviest price in the strike; city officials estimated hundreds of millions of dollars were drained from the economy in lost holiday business, tourism and tax revenue.

And an off-duty firefighter remained in critical condition, a day after he was hit by a private bus while riding his bicycle to work.