Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” – the biography of the 20th-century builder of New York, Robert Moses – had a big impact when I first read it in the 1970s. (A must-read for any aspiring urbanist or anyone fascinated by New York City – or cities, period). So I’m always alert to references, particularly if they have contemporary relevance.
This post in The Walking Bostonian has both.
First, an illustrated analysis of how Moses’s highway projects may have been the first powerful proof of “induced demand” – where the construction of new road capacity generates its own demand, well beyond anticipated growth. From Caro:
The new parkways solved the problem for about three weeks. “It wasn’t more than three weeks after they opened that I decided to go out to Jones Beach on a Sunday,” Paul Windels recalls. “I got on the Interborough and by God it was as jammed as the Southern State ever was.” Moses announced that he had the solution: build forty-five miles of new parkways […]
Some city planners noticed that the traffic pattern on Long Island had fallen into a set pattern: every time a new parkway was built, it quickly became jammed with traffic, but the load on the old parkways was not significantly relieved. If this had been the pattern for the first hundred miles of parkways, they wondered, might it not be the pattern for the next forty-five as well? [p. 515]
Then, an important distinction between a road viaduct and an elevated transit line:
The El had brought people through Third Avenue on their way to and from its stations. The parkway did not. Moreover, although the El had been a huge, gloomy structure, it was, as Cathy Wylde puts it, “one that people from the neighborhood relate to; they traveled on it, they were familiar with it.” […]
“The highway was something different,” Miss Wylde says. “It was noise, dirt, accidents, not lighted, a garbage dump, drag races along it in the night, wild kids, something totally negative. It was a tremendous psychological barrier. In a way you could say the people feared the highway.” […]
Once the avenue had been a place for people; Robert Moses had made it into a place for cars. And as the avenue’s roadway became more crowded, its sidewalks began to empty. [p. 523]
