From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):
By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that that flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be — perhaps forever — an area in which transportation — getting from one place to another — would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.Everyone calls the book The Power Broker, of course, but I think the subtitle deserves emphasis.
And the population today: 23,500,000.
Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Pinboard)
[The Pinboard link does a search — no account needed.]
comments: 2
As the prophet said, the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.
Say, visionary Jane (her Death and Life of American Cities was condensed by Readers Digest) Jacob's last book, Dark Ages Ahead, documented deliberate attempts, North American wide, to discourage public transit including trolleys.
Yes — that’s a sad American story. Jacobs was a great thorn in Moses’s side. (I have a couple of older posts with passages from that book.)
Post a Comment