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Quite a few of our transit problems today are actually because of the choices Robert Moses made. However, he certainly is responsible for the rapid growth of th

Quite a few of our transit problems today are actually because of the choices Robert Moses made. However, he certainly is responsible for the rapid growth of the transit system and did a great job consolidating power and getting stuff done. * He had the chance to buy the land and put transit along many highways in queens and Long Island but said that people would prefer to drive so he passed on the opportunity. Acquiring those rights today would be unaffordable and likely impossible. * Moses didn’t want black people going to Jones Beach (his pride and joy). To prevent them from visiting he built the overpasses on the highways that go to the beach lower so that buses from the city couldn’t fit. I highly recommend the book The Power Broker which is a deep dive on the history of Robert Moses. The book is very long and can be a bit dry at times. But I learned a lot about the history of New York and why some things that we enjoy and suffer through today are the way they are.

steveBK123 3y ago
I'm well aware of his history, and it's always interesting to me how few bad things people can point to that he actually did.. when weighed against all the transit/bridges/tunnels/highways build under his watch. I mean the first thing is a crime of omission, made in basically every other city of the country - where have we seen land be purchased along highways to build transit done anywhere in this country? Even new bridges built by allegedly progressive administrations continue to neglect putting in train tracks. The second one is obviously morally wrong, though even that is in dispute. Many "parkways" built at that time had similarly short bridges, look to the Merritt Parkway in CT for example. Also, you can presently get there by bus - https://new.mta.info/guides/beaches/jones-beach https://new.mta.info/guides/beaches/jones-beach In fact, it seems it was accessible by bus when it opened, including having bus drop offs advertised in the opening story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-moses-and-his-racist-parkway-explained https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...
- timeon 3y ago
  So what do you think about Jane Jacobs?
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    I think she was a moderating force against Moses, and you need that tension for you to have progress. Unfortunately the Jacobs camp has won completely, and the idea of an inertia-less city frozen in amber is somehow the defacto good standard now. The city has insufficient development for its rate of population growth, and anemic transit infrastructure building. So Manhattan becomes a playground for the rich only.
- wan23 3y ago
  The linked Bloomberg article actually says that buses served Jacob Riis Park (not Jones Beach) at its opening, and that it is in fact true that the Southern State Parkway has lower clearances along the route to Jones Beach than other similar roads around the region from that time.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Chicago and DC notably built a lot of median subways during the 50s and 60s.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  > I'm well aware of his history, and it's always interesting to me how few bad things people can point to that he actually did.. when weighed against all the transit/bridges/tunnels/highways build under his watch. Nixing the Staten Island tunnel is a pretty bad one[1]: you could argue, not unrealistically, that Staten Island would be a far denser and better integrated borough with mass transit access had that project gone through. As a native UWSer, I'd also argue that the Henry Hudson Parkway was a pretty bad call on his part: it was an "obvious" highway to build, but it more or less permanently froze the expansion of a major rail line underneath it (the West Side Line) and means that one of the most beautiful parks in the city is semi-separated from the neighborhoods that are closest to it. Moses' legacy can also be measured in part by the graveyard of projects that were too obscene even for his own time: his desire to build a bridge and highway over Battery Park, for example, or to divide Washington Square Park with an expressway. Edit: I didn't even mention the CBE; Moses is arguably directly responsible for the generations of economic and environmental blight that accompanied that particular highway. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/nyregion/staten-island-subway-dreams.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/nyregion/staten-island-su...
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    See these are better examples! But also, it's easier to find fault in the actions of someone who takes action. And especially to judge them based on the values of our time rather than theirs. It's hard to fault anyone since for bad major road/transit/bridge/tunnel projects because there really haven't been any! And we look at things like projects NOT built by Moses and ask - if they were so good, so obvious, and Moses so bad not to build them, what has the city been doing the last 70 years and how many people are as bad or worse to not have built them?
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      > And especially to judge them based on the values of our time rather than theirs. More than a few of Moses' projects were egregious, even for his time. What made Moses a great (as in powerful) urban planner was his ability to mold policy decisions to his values, not the values of the neighborhoods that he bulldozed, much less the values of the elected officials who represented those neighborhoods. > how many people are as bad or worse to not have built them? This requires us to think counterfactually: we just don't know how the city could have turned out, because the political energy, financial capital, and plain old physical space that could have gone into mass transit systems went into highways instead.
- res0nat0r 3y ago
  > The second one is obviously morally wrong, though even that is in dispute I don't really think this one is in dispute honestly: Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by busses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low - too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouraging long and arduous. - The Power Broker, pp 318
  - jahewson 3y ago
    That's the quote that is disputed.
- twright0 3y ago
  > how few bad things people can point to that he actually did.. I'd encourage you to read The Power Broker, if you haven't. Some examples that aren't "policy decisions" we can disagree with given our knowledge of how it turned out (eg, building or not building public transit in a given place), but rather things that were clearly morally wrong at the time: - repeated wholesale destruction of low-income neighborhoods through a variety of bridge, park, and highway construction projects - evicting farmers and poor rural landowners through opaque legal methods to build highways and parks atop their land - running a "slum clearance" program that primarily evicted people from slums and demolished them without providing any real place for the humans to go afterwards - funneling vast sums of money into the pockets of collaborators, friends, and, in the end, himself The Power Broker paints a nuanced picture, but he did some pretty terrible things in his time.
- jprete 3y ago
  > Also, you can presently get there by bus - https://new.mta.info/guides/beaches/jones-beach https://new.mta.info/guides/beaches/jones-beach That route is absolutely awful. For a typical NYC resident - not even "typical working-class" but anyone - going one-way is 75-100 minutes, two transfers, and around $25-30 per person, while carrying everything you need for the beach. Only the last 20 minutes are actually by bus.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Compared to what? I mean.. what good beaches can you get to from NYC, even by car, in 75-100min? That's like how long it takes me to drive to Jones Beach, from Brooklyn, on a good day.
    - spopejoy 3y ago
      Amazing how many NYCers miss out on Rockaway Beach. Much shorter drive. Accessible by subway. Just a better beach than Jones -- far superior food and entertainment at the concessions, and way way bigger.
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        Sure, I've been there. But even living in North Brooklyn, my travel options there are - 59min drive or 75min trains&walking. People make these grand statements like we've purposely made it impossible for poor people to get to the beach by bus, but everything in NYC is impossible to get to for everyone, all the time. Anyway, if you are in Manhattan, the real play is LIRR to Long Beach. Frequent trains, extremely clean, lots of space, long boardwalk, rental bikes, lots of food & restaurants, clean restrooms (amazingly rare at US beaches).. $15/person (kids under 13 free, and I think theres a family pass) to enter beach.
bradleyjg 3y ago
Moses didn’t want black people going to Jones Beach (his pride and joy). To prevent them from visiting he built the overpasses on the highways that go to the beach lower so that buses from the city couldn’t fit. This is a true and interesting factoid, but I don’t see how it ties back to any transit issues. Unless you think buses having access to the northern and southern state would meaningfully improve regional transit?
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  They are some of the fastest roads around. There are commuter express buses, but often they are restricted to the Interstate (there is one for the entirety of Long Island’s millions of people) or the arterial roads with traffic lights
  - bradleyjg 3y ago
    Long Island bus has been privatized and never carried many people to begin with. They were never going to be competitive for east/west transit against the LIRR.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      I mean, there are also commuter buses in NYC, where the parkways make up most highway mileage. And why shouldn’t private buses be able to use the parkways either? Plenty benefit the public, like the Chinatown buses.
- USB5 3y ago
  Moses' career only existed to serve specific class interests. If Moses had pursued imroving public transit, he would have been out of a job.
- jahewson 3y ago
  It's actually not even true. It's become something of a popular myth. The original quote claimed "poor and lower-middle-class families" who in 1929 New York would have been predominantly white. That quote itself is disputed too, though it may well be accurate. Funnily enough a factoid is something that is false but sounds plausibly fact-like.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
Where's this bus going? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnE08Dvx-Cg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnE08Dvx-Cg
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
_boffin_ 3y ago
Just have to say that I love seeing that book mentioned. Such a fantastic book.

steveBK123 3y ago

I'm well aware of his history, and it's always interesting to me how few bad things people can point to that he actually did.. when weighed against all the transit/bridges/tunnels/highways build under his watch. I mean the first thing is a crime of omission, made in basically every other city of the country - where have we seen land be purchased along highways to build transit done anywhere in this country? Even new bridges built by allegedly progressive administrations continue to neglect putting in train tracks. The second one is obviously morally wrong, though even that is in dispute. Many "parkways" built at that time had similarly short bridges, look to the Merritt Parkway in CT for example. Also, you can presently get there by bus - https://new.mta.info/guides/beaches/jones-beach https://new.mta.info/guides/beaches/jones-beach In fact, it seems it was accessible by bus when it opened, including having bus drop offs advertised in the opening story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-moses-and-his-racist-parkway-explained https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-mo...

timeon 3y ago
So what do you think about Jane Jacobs?
- steveBK123 3y ago
  I think she was a moderating force against Moses, and you need that tension for you to have progress. Unfortunately the Jacobs camp has won completely, and the idea of an inertia-less city frozen in amber is somehow the defacto good standard now. The city has insufficient development for its rate of population growth, and anemic transit infrastructure building. So Manhattan becomes a playground for the rich only.
wan23 3y ago
The linked Bloomberg article actually says that buses served Jacob Riis Park (not Jones Beach) at its opening, and that it is in fact true that the Southern State Parkway has lower clearances along the route to Jones Beach than other similar roads around the region from that time.
bobthepanda 3y ago
Chicago and DC notably built a lot of median subways during the 50s and 60s.
woodruffw 3y ago
> I'm well aware of his history, and it's always interesting to me how few bad things people can point to that he actually did.. when weighed against all the transit/bridges/tunnels/highways build under his watch. Nixing the Staten Island tunnel is a pretty bad one[1]: you could argue, not unrealistically, that Staten Island would be a far denser and better integrated borough with mass transit access had that project gone through. As a native UWSer, I'd also argue that the Henry Hudson Parkway was a pretty bad call on his part: it was an "obvious" highway to build, but it more or less permanently froze the expansion of a major rail line underneath it (the West Side Line) and means that one of the most beautiful parks in the city is semi-separated from the neighborhoods that are closest to it. Moses' legacy can also be measured in part by the graveyard of projects that were too obscene even for his own time: his desire to build a bridge and highway over Battery Park, for example, or to divide Washington Square Park with an expressway. Edit: I didn't even mention the CBE; Moses is arguably directly responsible for the generations of economic and environmental blight that accompanied that particular highway. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/nyregion/staten-island-subway-dreams.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/nyregion/staten-island-su...
- steveBK123 3y ago
  See these are better examples! But also, it's easier to find fault in the actions of someone who takes action. And especially to judge them based on the values of our time rather than theirs. It's hard to fault anyone since for bad major road/transit/bridge/tunnel projects because there really haven't been any! And we look at things like projects NOT built by Moses and ask - if they were so good, so obvious, and Moses so bad not to build them, what has the city been doing the last 70 years and how many people are as bad or worse to not have built them?
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    > And especially to judge them based on the values of our time rather than theirs. More than a few of Moses' projects were egregious, even for his time. What made Moses a great (as in powerful) urban planner was his ability to mold policy decisions to his values, not the values of the neighborhoods that he bulldozed, much less the values of the elected officials who represented those neighborhoods. > how many people are as bad or worse to not have built them? This requires us to think counterfactually: we just don't know how the city could have turned out, because the political energy, financial capital, and plain old physical space that could have gone into mass transit systems went into highways instead.
res0nat0r 3y ago
> The second one is obviously morally wrong, though even that is in dispute I don't really think this one is in dispute honestly: Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by busses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low - too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouraging long and arduous. - The Power Broker, pp 318
- jahewson 3y ago
  That's the quote that is disputed.
twright0 3y ago
> how few bad things people can point to that he actually did.. I'd encourage you to read The Power Broker, if you haven't. Some examples that aren't "policy decisions" we can disagree with given our knowledge of how it turned out (eg, building or not building public transit in a given place), but rather things that were clearly morally wrong at the time: - repeated wholesale destruction of low-income neighborhoods through a variety of bridge, park, and highway construction projects - evicting farmers and poor rural landowners through opaque legal methods to build highways and parks atop their land - running a "slum clearance" program that primarily evicted people from slums and demolished them without providing any real place for the humans to go afterwards - funneling vast sums of money into the pockets of collaborators, friends, and, in the end, himself The Power Broker paints a nuanced picture, but he did some pretty terrible things in his time.
jprete 3y ago
> Also, you can presently get there by bus - https://new.mta.info/guides/beaches/jones-beach https://new.mta.info/guides/beaches/jones-beach That route is absolutely awful. For a typical NYC resident - not even "typical working-class" but anyone - going one-way is 75-100 minutes, two transfers, and around $25-30 per person, while carrying everything you need for the beach. Only the last 20 minutes are actually by bus.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Compared to what? I mean.. what good beaches can you get to from NYC, even by car, in 75-100min? That's like how long it takes me to drive to Jones Beach, from Brooklyn, on a good day.
  - spopejoy 3y ago
    Amazing how many NYCers miss out on Rockaway Beach. Much shorter drive. Accessible by subway. Just a better beach than Jones -- far superior food and entertainment at the concessions, and way way bigger.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Sure, I've been there. But even living in North Brooklyn, my travel options there are - 59min drive or 75min trains&walking. People make these grand statements like we've purposely made it impossible for poor people to get to the beach by bus, but everything in NYC is impossible to get to for everyone, all the time. Anyway, if you are in Manhattan, the real play is LIRR to Long Beach. Frequent trains, extremely clean, lots of space, long boardwalk, rental bikes, lots of food & restaurants, clean restrooms (amazingly rare at US beaches).. $15/person (kids under 13 free, and I think theres a family pass) to enter beach.

bradleyjg 3y ago

Moses didn’t want black people going to Jones Beach (his pride and joy). To prevent them from visiting he built the overpasses on the highways that go to the beach lower so that buses from the city couldn’t fit. This is a true and interesting factoid, but I don’t see how it ties back to any transit issues. Unless you think buses having access to the northern and southern state would meaningfully improve regional transit?

bobthepanda 3y ago
They are some of the fastest roads around. There are commuter express buses, but often they are restricted to the Interstate (there is one for the entirety of Long Island’s millions of people) or the arterial roads with traffic lights
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  Long Island bus has been privatized and never carried many people to begin with. They were never going to be competitive for east/west transit against the LIRR.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    I mean, there are also commuter buses in NYC, where the parkways make up most highway mileage. And why shouldn’t private buses be able to use the parkways either? Plenty benefit the public, like the Chinatown buses.
USB5 3y ago
Moses' career only existed to serve specific class interests. If Moses had pursued imroving public transit, he would have been out of a job.
jahewson 3y ago
It's actually not even true. It's become something of a popular myth. The original quote claimed "poor and lower-middle-class families" who in 1929 New York would have been predominantly white. That quote itself is disputed too, though it may well be accurate. Funnily enough a factoid is something that is false but sounds plausibly fact-like.

rufus_foreman 3y ago

Where's this bus going? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnE08Dvx-Cg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnE08Dvx-Cg

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

_boffin_ 3y ago

Just have to say that I love seeing that book mentioned. Such a fantastic book.