I just finished reading “The Power Broker” by Robert Caro, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography about Robert Moses (doing a lot of train/plane traveling on vacation certainly helped finish this monster of a book). It was a very good book, and one that was much easier to read than its length would suggest.
The central tenet that New York would have been a very different place if not for Bob Moses is quite true, and there was much evidence of that during my recent visit. A prefect example is the Second Avenue Subway, which was desperately needed back in the 1950s, still desperately needed when the book was written in the 1970s, and just getting underway in this decade: had money been put for this project back when Moses was in power, New York would be much different.
Although the book doesn’t take explicit sides, in my opinion, the good that Moses did at the beginning of his career with parks came to be greatly overshadowed by the destruction he caused later in his career with his single-minded focus on cars and the infrastructure to support them (seeking a place in history, he wanted to build great suspension bridges that would outlast him by centuries, not subway tunnels that no one could see). But even his early accomplishments had their downsides, such as the parkways that had bridges that were deliberately built to prevent buses from being able to use them, thus sparing his precious parks from being overrun by poor people who did not own cars.
The thing that probably struck me as most interesting, though, did not have to do with Moses at all. Rather, it was the fact that traffic generation, the idea that building roads encourages more travel and more congestion, not less, was well known more than 50 years ago. It was my admittedly ignorant presumption that the somewhat counter-intuitive notion of traffic generation was a more recent discovery, but in fact it was clear to engineers generations ago. It certainly makes the argument for highway expansion even less defensible.
The necessity of transit, and the folly of focusing only on roads, is the main message I took away from this book. Not that I didn’t believe that before, but this book made it all the more imperative. Moses did not care for transit one bit, and as a result, he built roads known mainly for their congestion, cost, and destruction of the community more than anything else. Instead of extending subway lines to newly-developed areas, he just built expressway after expressway, bridge after bridge, even when building the next new highway made congestion on the older highways that much worse. Roads do not have the capacity that mass transit does: as one blogger calculated, the subway moves a couple hundred people into Manhattan’s Central Business District every second, a far cry from what highways can do.
Robert Moses was clearly a genius, and the title “Master Builder” does suit him well, even if many of the artifices he built turned out to be solutions to the wrong problem, or not solutions at all. Nevertheless, after an early bout with idealism that led to nothing but disappointment, he was able to figure out how to manipulate the levers of power to get things accomplished. I’d like to think that there must be a happy medium between the abuse of power for the wrong ends that typified Moses’ later career and the paucity of improvement that took place afterward (remember that Second Avenue Subway?) If there is, though, the book doesn’t shed any light on how to make that come about.