>Providing a reliable connection between the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn by rail will provide more direct trips within and between these boroughs than either the subway or bus networks can do today. Buses make up 43% of transit ridership in these three boroughs, but buses operate at an average speed of 8 mph as they fight the city’s heavy traffic.
It's amazing to see New York City suffer almost half a century after Robert Moses's decline.
One of the worst consequences of Moses's 600 (or was it 700?) miles of highway is how residential areas outside of Manhattan developed: Because he built the city around highways and hence commuting by car, residential areas outside of Manhattan developed into thinly spread suburbs, making it near impossible to create an efficient network of trains. To New York City's credit, they've made a laudable comeback with subways: After all, it's the city you can live without owning cars in the United States. Yet, our generation continues to pay the price of Moses's ego and lack of foresight.
RM is a humbling reminder that getting wrong stuff done so effectively has grave and lasting consequences.
I grew up for half my childhood in a 19th century farmhouse in Queens and did a lot of research about the area. As early as 1900 the pattern of development that you see in Queens was well underway. The farms around my childhood home were mostly sliced up before the formation of greater NYC. Queens Blvd was a big driver of traffic and medium density development.
Brooklyn was even more different -- the Moses parkways were specifically built there to feed the Bridges and tunnels -- the road and transit network had mostly built out Brooklyn already.
Moses's early works, especially the Long Island Parkways and the Triboro Bridge were seen as solutions to traffic problems initially -- people didn't understand that more roads generates more traffic.
Moses was a flawed man ultimately corrupted by he power he accumulated. He became inflexible with time and many of his ideas were stuck in a 1920s perspective. But he wasn't pure evil, and excoriating his ideas in hindsight doesn't really tell the story. More than most other metropolitan areas in the US, NYC has a really balanced transit infrastructure -- it's a positive thing too. He also built out the pretty amazing NYC and NYS park system, all things that left a positive, multi-generational legacy.
New York City and State had the first real regional highway network because of Moses ability to innovate. The country learned a big lesson from that. If you want to critique highway planners, point the flames at the anonymous architects behind shitshow regions like Boston, Los Angeles and Atlanta, which are hopelessly and permanently car-dependent regions.
"like Los Angeles...which are hopelessly and permanently car-dependent regions"
LA is doing an enormous amount to get away from car dependency: a brand new rail line that just opened last week (Expo 2), another line that opened a few months ago (Gold line foothill extension), two rail lines under active construction and a $150B transportation plan (including several rail lines and even a huge rail/highway tunnel) that's going on the ballot in November.
It's really slow, difficult, expensive work to completely re-engineer a city, but it's far from hopeless.
The story of Robert Moses is a fascinating one and hugely relevant to the shape of NYC, but I'm not sure he really had much to do with the specific issue under discussion. With some relatively small exceptions the city was highly developed and dense before Moses and the car came along, and while he did ram highways through it, he didn't have the effect of making it less dense.
This proposal discusses connecting well populated inner city areas laterally, where are these thinly spread suburbs you mention?
The issue described here is that the rail transit system is highly Manhattan centric, which well predates Moses.
There were inter-borough light rail lines, specifically streetcars between Brooklyn and Queens, which died of malign neglect in the Moses era (though I don't know how much he personally had to do with that).
While the issue started and was establish before Moses, it was his control over nearly all the transportation budget that prevented any new growth. If he had been friendly to mass transit, nyc would have far more subways options.
As public sector unions appears and pay & conditions improved, the only way that NYC mass transit has been remotely sustainable has been by consolidating the Moses empire into the MTA. The tolls provide the cash flow to sustain the system.
It's impossible to self-sustain the current subways, and the perpetual near-bankruptcy of NYC throughout most of the 20th century wouldn't have allowed for subway construction at all.
Moses's genius was getting the state government to give a shit about NYC and create the authorities to bond his projects.
Perhaps. But on the flip side the Moses era ended by the mid-1960's, which by now is over fifty years ago. There are a lot more reasons than Moses for why the idea of building new subways in NYC basically collapsed and still to this day hasn't been revived in any meaningful way.
For example there are reasons why the new 7 extension doesn't stop at 42nd street and 11th avenue despite that making perfect sense, and they don't have anything to do with Moses. The reality is that the entire process is just completely dysfunctional.
Most of the outer boroughs, especially Brooklyn and the Bronx, were developed in the pre-automobile era around subways. And many of the suburbs beyond were developed around railroad lines. Moses did indeed emphasize highways at the expense of transit for a generation— but the outer-borough subways nearly all still work as originally planned, and the rail lines to suburbs beyond would be far more effective if modernized to 'regional rail' rather than being operated as 'commuter rail' operated to haul suburbanites from park-and-ride lots to Midtown around a 9-5 schedule. e.g.: http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/07/17/regional-rail-...
Boston has the third lowest car ownership of US cities, with 63%, compared with New York's 44%. But that understates the difference. NYC contains suburban areas and Boston proper doesn't. Manhattan (population 1.6M) has just 23% car ownership, far lower than Boston, population .6M. So while over 200k people live carless in Boston, over 1.2M do in Manhattan alone.
Anecdotally, the people I work with in Cambridge, who live in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville and Arlington own cars, but don't use them to get to work. The cars are for the weekends and vacations because there's a lot of leisure activities in the area that are out of reach of the T. I know a lot of people that don't ski and don't even dig their car out after the first big snowfall - They just let it sit from December until March.
Certainly there are a lot more tech jobs within easy reach of public transportation within the city than there were even 20 years ago. Back then, the tech industry was almost entirely well outside the city.
And if you don't need a car to commute, it is weekends that are mostly the issue. Of course, people can always rent but that gets to be a hassle if it's every weekend or every other weekend. It also gets back to culture. As an adult, being that person in a group who always needs a ride gets old after a while.
Yes, lots of tech jobs have migrated from 128 to the city over the 10 years that I've lived here. There are still a lot of jobs on 128, and those companies run shuttles from the city out to the offices for people who live in the city.
I'm not sure it's so much that jobs have migrated but that a fair number of new startups and branch offices of firms tend to locate in Boston/Cambridge rather than the suburbs. Companies may continue to expand in the suburbs but new offices for both new and existing firms are more likely to be in or near the city.
You're also correct about the shuttle buses. Those were unheard of when I first started working at a computer company on 495 in the 80s. Boston and Cambridge, as well as attitudes about city living, have changed a lot in the past 2-3 decades.
When I first moved back to the area after grad school, some people I knew lived in the city but not many. It certainly wasn't the norm.
Yes. And some other cities as well. But there's really no US city other than [EDIT: parts of] NYC where not owning a car is widely viewed as typical and just part of the culture.
You can certainly live in Boston, say, without a car but many/most of the tech jobs are out in the suburbs as are, most likely, many of your friends. As a result, most people will find that not owning a car becomes limiting at some point.
(This is probably less true than it used to be. If nothing else, services like Zipcar make it easier to drive out to the suburbs for a party or whatever. And more people of a certain demographic are probably clustering in the city after school. But move forward a few years and most people will want the mobility provided by a car.)
> Because he built the city around highways and hence commuting by car, residential areas outside of Manhattan developed into thinly spread suburbs, making it near impossible to create an efficient network of trains. To New York City's credit, they've made a laudable comeback with subways: After all, it's the city you can live without owning cars in the United States.
Your assertions about the suburbs of NYC and the ease of transport into NYC with public transportation are very wrong.
1. There is a massive light rail system that is hugely important to NYC. The Long Island Railroad, Metro North Railroad and NJ Transit Railroads bring hundreds of thousands of people into the core of NYC every single day. You can get directly into midtown Manhattan - which is the most concentrated business district in America - from large parts of NJ, CT, Long Island and Westchester without having to drive. Right now, in the law firm in which I sit in midtown Manhattan, a full 2/3 of the partners commute from CT, NJ and Westchester.
2. A large percentage of people who commute into NYC by car are commuting to the boroughs - not to Manhattan.
3. The residential suburbs outside of Manhattan are comically crowded. We have millions and millions of people living within a 30 square mile radius of NYC. It is absurdly, laughably crowded. Virtually all of Long island is either at city-density or chopped up into 1.4 acre parcels. White Plains and its "suburbs" are super densely packed. Brooklyn - if you want to call it a "suburb" - is the fourth largest city in America. The counties surrounding NYC are all hugely populated: Rockland County (>300k), Westchester County (~1M), Nassau County(>1.3M), Suffolk County (!1.5M), Hudson County (>600k) (NJ), Bergen County (>900k), Fairfield County (~1M) (CT). The city itself is also crazy dense, with >8 million people over 5 counties: New York (~1.6M), Kings (~2.6M), Queens (~2.3M), Bronx (~1.4M) and Richmond (~470k).
So, your "sparsely populated suburbs" contain 6.6M - and that isn't including New Haven County, Essex, Passaic or Union County. I mean, want to talk about a city with sparsely populated suburbs? Look at Boston - or hell, look at Albany. You head out of the city for 20 minutes you are in farmland. It takes hours of driving to get out of NYC and into the bucolic country - unless you happen to come upon some loss-leader farm on long island.
Look, Moses was an autocrat and the decisions he made destroyed a lot of neighborhoods - highways running through residential neighborhoods are very hard to cope with. He was also pretty unapologetically classist and racist in his decision making process. There are many, many good reasons to take issue with Moses the man, his vision and his methods. However, the things you are saying about NY are just not true. The biggest problem we have now is that we need to make at least one more tunnel across the Hudson - probably two more - redo the Port Authority and move Penn Station. I can assure you, however, that our suburbs are about as densely packed as they come in America, and that NYC is, if not the easiest, one of the easiest cities in America to commute into downtown from the suburbs without driving.
I suspect that the expanse of the density around NYC is also a contributor to why people are less inclined to own cars there. As you say, 30 minutes from Boston can put you in, well, perhaps not farmland as such but certainly woodland areas and generally uncrowded areas of seashore. 45 minutes to an hour will put you in apple orchards and genuine farms.
And you can't get to most of those places easily using public transportation. Which makes not having a car you can hop into quickly more of a sacrifice than in NYC where driving out to "the country" is generally a bigger expedition.
It's amazing to see New York City suffer almost half a century after Robert Moses's decline.
One of the worst consequences of Moses's 600 (or was it 700?) miles of highway is how residential areas outside of Manhattan developed: Because he built the city around highways and hence commuting by car, residential areas outside of Manhattan developed into thinly spread suburbs, making it near impossible to create an efficient network of trains. To New York City's credit, they've made a laudable comeback with subways: After all, it's the city you can live without owning cars in the United States. Yet, our generation continues to pay the price of Moses's ego and lack of foresight.
RM is a humbling reminder that getting wrong stuff done so effectively has grave and lasting consequences.