IF BEDFORD AVENUE IS ONE OF THE GRANDDADDIES OF NEW YORK’S streets, the four-mile-long Grand Boulevard and Concourse, originally designed to connect the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, is barely a teenager.
The clearest inspiration for the Concourse was Paris’s Champs-Élysées, which is shorter but wider than the Grand Concourse; at its widest point, north of 161st Street, the Grand Concourse is “only” 180 feet from curb to curb. The Champs-Élysées has occupied the same Parisian acreage since the 1600s, but the Grand Concourse is very much a nineteenth-century creation. Like the Good Roads Movement, it was a child of the 1890s, one of America’s purest examples of what came to be known as the “City Beautiful” movement, a reformist crusade marketed as a Progressive answer to the evils of late-nineteenth-century cities: tenements, slums, and corruption.
Which was, as it happens, also how Progressives saw the automobile itself.
Like other tributes to the reform-minded movement, such as the World’s Columbian Exposition that dominated the Chicago skyline in 1893, Washington’s Capitol Mall, and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, the Grand Concourse featured extremely wide roads, including a central thoroughfare fifty feet wide, two thirty-five-foot-wide access roads, eight-foot-wide medians, and twenty-foot-wide sidewalks, all of them heavily planted with gardens. It also shared with them a common history of replacing poor neighborhoods by the simple expedient of moving their occupants, well, anywhere else.
Whatever its built-in contradictions—the most beautiful cities, it turns out, aren’t always the most livable, and roads wider than a football field aren’t what you might call pedestrian friendly—the City Beautiful movement, like the Grand Concourse itself, was unashamedly urban. Construction on the Grand Concourse began in 1894 and finished fifteen years later, in 1909. By the 1930s, with a subway line running under the boulevard, the three-hundred-plus neo-Tudor, Art Deco, and Art Moderne apartment buildings that lined it had become an extremely attractive place for immigrant families that had graduated from entry-level neighborhoods like the Lower East Side or Bensonhurst. Half my father’s family that emigrated from Poland between world wars ended up in the area.
Even the Great Depression couldn’t destroy the Grand Concourse. The authors of the 1939 WPA Guide to New York commissioned by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration wrote, “The Grand Concourse is the Park Avenue of middle-class Bronx residents, and a lease to an apartment in one of its many large buildings is considered evidence of at least moderate business success. The thoroughfare . . . is the principal parade-street of the borough, as well as a through motor route” (emphasis added).
The “through motor route” description, and the date it was made, are both significant. In some ways, it has always seemed to me that the 1940s—the “Big Bad Forties”—marked a transportation revolution for New York, and the entire country, that was as big in its way as the introduction of the car itself. It was the architect who designed the Grand Concourse, an émigré railroad engineer named Louis Risse, who called for building “the most magnificent thoroughfare in the world,” which
will include not only a wide speedway, but a double boulevard for common pleasure driving, broad walks, promenades, cycle paths, all intersected by nine transverse roads, passing underneath the same, for the accommodation of railways and heavy traffic. . . . It will be a drive of extraordinary delightfulness and practical convenience, and will offer the peculiar attractiveness arising from the sense that one may drive for miles without encountering an interruption in the road or a change in its character.
The miles of uninterrupted driving Risse described were, in 1897, intended for horse-drawn carriages; that is, a bridle path. By the time the Concourse opened, in 1909, the automobile age was well begun. By the 1940s, America was embracing it like nowhere else on Earth. That’s when another “through motor route” transformed the borough for which the Grand Concourse had been emblematic into a shorthand proxy for urban decay, and became an enduring symbol of the conflict over the ownership of America’s roads. The intersection between the north-south Grand Concourse and the east-west Cross-Bronx Expresswaya would come to represent not just one battle over the City Beautiful, but a rallying cry in a decades-long war.
The story of the Cross-Bronx began in 1945, six years after the publication of the WPA Guide to New York City. The Depression had ended; millions of American troops had gone to war and returned to a very different country. The differences they found in the New York metropolitan region were largely the work of a single man: Robert Moses (who had not yet started his epic battle with Walter O’Malley over Brooklyn baseball).
When Moses died, in 1981, virtually every obituary used the nickname he earned in life: the “Master Builder.” If anything, it probably understates his accomplishments. Between 1924 and 1968, he built thirteen major bridges, including the Triborough and the Verrazano-Narrows, the longest suspension bridge in the world when finished. (Not a single Moses-built river crossing had tracks for either trains or streetcars, even though every major bridge built in New York City prior to 1910 was “tracked.” On his last bridge, the Verrazano, he didn’t even put a walkway or bike path.) Also the St. Lawrence power project and Lincoln Center. Also more than two million acres of parkland, 416 miles of parkways, 658 playgrounds, 10 gigantic public swimming pools, the Central Park Zoo, and the 1964 New York World’s Fair. His vision of the model city of the future was dominated by towers, highways, and beaches, all of them designed to be accessible by automobile, even at the price of putting them out of the reach of pedestrians.
(His résumé doesn’t just include an embarrassingly long list of projects, but an even more embarrassingly long list of titles. At one point, Moses occupied a dozen different positions simultaneously, including chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, New York State power commissioner, and chairman of the State Council of Parks, and he was both New York City construction coordinator and parks commissioner.)
Moses’s plan for a six-lane expressway running east-west right through the middle of the Bronx was part of an even more grandiose proposal for one hundred new miles of highway construction in the New York metropolitan region. The plan had been gestating since 1941, when a “Bronx Crosstown Highway” was endorsed in writing by the New York City Planning Commission:
an express crosstown facility across the middle Bronx is an essential part of a desirable highway pattern. Topographical conditions, high land values and heavily built-up areas make the construction of such a highway very difficult. However, its great importance would justify the expense involved. This highway would provide the only adequate means of east-west travel through the middle Bronx. It would connect New Jersey via the George Washington Bridge, connect with New England via Westchester County highways, and afford very essential relief for local cross-Bronx traffic. The Borough President of the Bronx has estimated that the cost of this improvement would be $17,000,000.
It took four years and the biggest war in human history to delay the plan, which had Moses’s fingerprints all over it. He had built existing parkways on either side of the borough, and could see no better way to connect them than with a limited-access highway. By 1945, he had his chance.
For reasons of history and topography, the project was a brutally difficult engineering problem. As planned, the six 12-foot-wide lanes of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (plus another 10 feet on each side for shoulders) had to cross more than a hundred streets, half a dozen expressways and parkways, and six mass transit lines, five of them elevated trains and one a subway. It required bridging (or, in some cases, changing the flow of) three separate rivers and avoiding a thousand sewer, electrical, and water lines. If that weren’t enough, Moses was determined to make the Expressway aesthetically pleasing as well, with parks, landscaping, and playgrounds along the right-of-way. I’ve met some of the men—yes, they’re all men—who built the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and every one of them was hugely proud of the technical achievement it represents. They should have been. Not only did they lace a 100-foot-wide thread through a needle’s eye that was only a 101 feet in diameter—a subway line runs above the Cross-Bronx and below the Grand Concourse—but they did it without touching the existing girders that held up six densely populated miles of apartment buildings and factories. Ernest Clark, the Expressway’s designer, says they “took the stuff out with a teaspoon.” He also calls it “one of the most challenging highway projects that had been constructed . . . one measured in inches and tenths of inches.”
The biggest challenge in building the Cross-Bronx Expressway wasn’t shifting dirt and rock, though. It was moving people.
In 1952, plans for the middle section of the Expressway produced the first substantial protests Robert Moses had encountered in nearly thirty years of building. The original route, which ran through the relatively poor East Tremont and Morris Heights neighborhoods, required demolishing nearly 160 apartment buildings and relocating 1,400 families, most of whom didn’t want to be relocated. The political leaders of the Bronx proposed rerouting the Expressway three blocks to the south, through the northern portion of a park, which would have removed six buildings housing nineteen families. Moses refused, providing a laundry list of reasons, from unacceptably steep grading to the loss of the Third Avenue bus depot.
(As pointed out by Robert Caro in his biography of Moses, “It was out of character for Moses, who had no prior interest in helping mass transit, suddenly sticking up for the preservation of a bus station. Decades later . . . the truth came forward: Moses’ friends owned vacant property or shares in the Third Avenue bus depot.”)
As he had for four decades, Moses succeeded in steamrolling any opposition. In 1963, the final stretch of the Cross-Bronx Expressway was completed, ten years late and at a cost at least three times its original $40 million budget. As a reminder of how the federal government had become essential even to road building within cities, the last third of the Expressway couldn’t have been built at all without a very healthy contribution from the Highway Trust Fund, for which it qualified after a few hundred yards were shoehorned into the plans for Interstate 95. It was, along with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Master Builder’s last great success, and his swan song. By the time it opened, any notion that the Cross-Bronx Expressway would revive the Bronx specifically, and be a model for urban renewal generally, was the punch line to a joke. The Expressway hadn’t just destroyed East Tremont. Despite all the care Moses and his engineers lavished on keeping the Grand Concourse as grand as ever—the Concourse, unsurprisingly, with its 180-foot-wide streets and monumental architecture, was very much in the Moses style—it was already sliding into a vicious cycle of poverty and crime.
Though there are many reasons for the decline of urban centers in the 1960s (city centers had trouble retaining their appeal even without limited-access highways crisscrossing them), the Cross-Bronx Expressway had made a dozen middle-class New York neighborhoods less and less desirable as places to live, and by the 1970s the Bronx had become a poster child for urban blight in America. The Grand Concourse’s already narrow medians—eight feet wide, and barely able to support a single line of trees—were slashed by diagonal “sleeves” to permit easier movement from the access roads to the central roadway and back. If pedestrians needed another reason to avoid strolling along what had become of Risse’s “broad walks, promenades, and cycle paths,” the chance of being killed by a car moving at high speed from one portion of the Concourse to another definitely offered one.
To those of us in the business of transportation, the best thing to be said about the Cross-Bronx Expressway is that it is a really good cautionary tale. Even on its own terms—moving cars efficiently from one point to another—the Expressway remains a disaster. It is an overbudget, destructive, and ugly corridor that actually increases the congestion it was built to relieve. The portion that runs from Baychester Avenue to the Major Deegan Expressway has the distinction of being the most congested corridor in the entire country.
Looking back, though, it might be that the most enduring legacy of the Cross-Bronx Expressway was the template it created for organizing resistance to roads that are built for cars rather than for people. In 1953, the East Tremont Neighborhood Association, a tenant group formed to oppose eviction, had promised to block what they called the “Heartbreak Highway.” They failed, of course, but it was their failed revolt, not the “successful” Expressway, that put its stamp on the future.
Ground zero for what exploded into a national and then an international highway protest movement was San Francisco, California. At the same time that Robert Moses was bulldozing the middle of the Bronx, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was preparing to do roughly the same thing to their own city. The 1951 and 1955 San Francisco Trafficways Plans contain designs for half a dozen freeways that would have crisscrossed the City by the Bay. They had names like the “Crosstown Freeway,” the “Mission Freeway,” the “Golden Gate Freeway,” the “Park Presidio Freeway,” and the “Central Freeway.” Only parts of the last two would ever be built. Even as most states and cities were frantically chasing money from the federal government’s Highway Trust Fund, others were joining the same figurative barricades that had been built by the East Tremont Neighborhood Association.
The biggest (or, at least, the best remembered) was the so-called Embarcadero Freeway Revolt.
Construction on the Embarcadero Freeway, formally State Route 480, which would have connected the Golden Gate Bridge with the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge via a route that ran along San Francisco’s waterfront, began in 1958. Almost simultaneously, more than thirty thousand San Franciscans signed petitions protesting it. The San Francisco Chronicle called “freeways that barge along in an unyielding straight line, knocking down everything in their path, or that stride along as huge ugly elevateds, or that slash great gashes through residential business districts [are] a crime that cannot be prettied up.”
Not subtle rhetoric, maybe, but effective. California law provided that no street or road could be closed until approved by local authorities, and this gave the San Francisco Board of Supervisors a de facto veto over any freeway construction within the city. They got the message their constituents were sending. On January 27, 1959, they passed Resolution 45, expressing opposition to the un-constructed portion of the Embarcadero/Golden Gate Freeway. And they didn’t stop there. They formally opposed seven out of the ten freeways described in the 1955 Trafficways Plan they had approved four years earlier, calling for an end to “the demolition of homes, the destruction of residential areas, the forced uprooting and relocation of individuals, families, and business enterprises.” In doing so, they planted the seed for what is today one of America’s most vibrant and prosperous cities.
By then, Lewis Mumford wasn’t the only voice raised against building transportation systems that gave priority to the automobile. After the Embarcadero Revolt, the movement against limited-access highways really started to get traction everywhere from Australia to the Netherlands. In April of 1960, an article entitled “New Roads and Urban Chaos,” by a Harvard professor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan, argued that the Interstate Highway System was “bringing about changes for the worse in the efficiency of our transportation system and the character of our cities. . . . It is not true, as is sometimes alleged, that the sponsors of the interstate program ignored the consequences it would have in the cities. Nor did they simply acquiesce in them. They exulted in them.”
Moynihan was on to something. Municipalities and neighborhoods protested highway construction in Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, and Illinois. In New York, where it really began, Robert Moses found himself unable to overcome opposition to his proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have run through Chinatown, Little Italy, and Soho, or to his Mid-Manhattan Expressway, which would have bisected Manhattan at 30th Street. In fact, New York City is the only major city in America without an Interstate highway running through its central business district. I often say we have Robert Moses to thank for saving my hometown from at least some of the costs that a fifty-year-long mistake in transportation infrastructure imposed on the rest of the United States. He activated the Jane Jacobses and other anti-highway activists of New York City a decade before the Interstate system funding was in full swing.
The protests became associated with the civil rights movement, since the most at-risk neighborhoods tended to be the poorest and blackest; in Washington, DC, a black militant group handed out flyers demanding “no more white highways through black bedrooms.” In April of 1962, President Kennedy sent a message to the Senate and House of Representatives on “The Transportation System” that called for a long-term program of federal aid to urban mass transit, whose riders were becoming increasingly poorer, blacker, and more Hispanic; in October he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962.
Also in 1962, a marine biologist named Rachel Carson published a denunciation of the use of pesticides on the environment. As much as any book ever written, Silent Spring changed the world. But even before it inspired the modern environmental movement—the Environmental Defense Fund, which opened its doors in 1967, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which was created in 1970, are direct consequences, as was my own embrace of the environmental movement—Carson’s book changed transportation. Less than a year after the book was published, the Bureau of Public Roads announced that, starting in 1964, states would have to certify that any federally funded highway project had to take into consideration possible effects on fish and wildlife.
In 1965, in a telling bit of symbolism, the Embarcadero Freeway was removed from the Interstate Highway System.b Between 1968, when construction completely stopped, and 1973, when the first resolution was passed to tear down what remained, I completed my studies in the graduate program in engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
After four years studying math and science at a very fast-track high school, and physics at Brooklyn College, grad school engineering was, well, different. My brother Brian, whose idea it was for me to study transportation engineering, says I was going from using perturbation theory to calculate the eigenvalue of an electron in a magnetic field to “We have two hundred feet in a parking garage; where do we paint the white lines to fit in ten cars?” He has a point. Anyone who studies physics knows that physicists never solve an equation with numbers; they do it all with letters. Numbers are beneath them. Problems that can be solved with numbers are jobs for the engineers. You know: the guys who weren’t good enough for physics and had to settle for second place.
I went from being a mediocre physicist to a star engineer. I won the Institute of Traffic Engineers Mid-Atlantic Student Paper Award for a treatise I did using calculus to explain how people parked inefficiently. I remember being handed the award by an old-timer who said he couldn’t make hide nor hair of my complicated equations. I felt like patting him on the head. Thanks to Brian’s advice, I was going to be part of a new generation of traffic engineers able and eager to use advanced math and science to solve the traffic problems of the future.
What I didn’t realize, at first, was that advanced math and science—and, for that matter, engineering—weren’t all that much help in identifying those problems. They’re still not. Professor (later to be Senator) Moynihan sadly got it about right for engineers-past when he wrote, “Nothing in the training or education of most civil engineers prepares them to do anything more than build sound highways cheaply. In the course of doing this job, they frequently produce works of startling beauty—compare the design of public highways with that of public housing,” and Moynihan showed no compunction about invoking the authority of engineers when I worked with him briefly, unsuccessfully, to ban tandem trucks from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. However, he continued, quoting John Howard from MIT, “It does not belittle them to say that, just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so highways are too important to leave to the highway engineers.”
But if you can’t trust the engineers, then who? The usual answer is “politicians.” After all, most people figure that getting a four-way stop sign installed, or a bridge built, is essentially a who-you-know phenomenon. And God knows we’ve poured a lot of concrete over the years in places that made sense only after you found out which pols’ well-connected pals were making money out of the deal. That said, corrupt though the political process can (sometimes) be, it’s not the worst way to make investment decisions in transportation. The business of balancing different interest groups is messy and irrational, and often enough puts people in jail, but at least it doesn’t delude anyone about objective fairness. For that, you need an economist.
Simple economics—simple common sense, really—suggests that we ought to invest in projects where the benefits outweigh the costs, and avoid those that don’t. Transportation engineers can usually fill in the cost side of the equation with a lot of precision (though not always accuracy, as the history of cost overruns on everything from the Via Appia to the Cross-Bronx reminds us). This many man-hours, that much reinforced concrete, and presto: a budget.
Benefits are different. What is the value of widening a road? Installing raised pavement markers? From the time I entered grad school at the University of Pennsylvania to today, engineers have estimated benefits by calculating two things: increased speed and improved safety.c
Speed first. If a new bit of construction lowers estimated average travel time, it has positive value. Calculating how much value is a little more complicated. The term that engineers use is appropriate travel time unit cost values for each trip category. What that means in plain English is that benefits are larger for business trips than for social travel. Technically, there are more benefits in saving a corporate executive an hour on her commute than a teacher in his. Saving an hour on a once-a-week trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco is therefore worth more than saving ten minutes on a daily trip from the San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica. A passenger can do productive work while traveling, even at the risk of carsickness. Drivers can’t, which makes the time a passenger spends on any given trip less costly, and generally worth less, than driver time.
If you add up the number of driver-hours that engineers estimate will be reduced by a new lane on the Interstate, and multiply that by their average hourly earnings, you get the speed benefit. Of course, you have to trust that those estimates have some basis in reality, which is—I’m being nice here—a leap of faith. No one, up to and including Robert Moses himself, predicted that traveling the nine miles of the Cross-Bronx Expressway at rush hour would take forty minutes, at a peak average speed of fourteen miles per hour.
As with speed, so with safety. It’s relatively simple (or at least practical) to build a model that will estimate how many collisions might be prevented by building a pedestrian bridge over a dangerous intersection, or eliminating a too-sharp curve in the road. But what’s it worth? That is not a simple calculation at all. Fifty years ago, an economist named Thomas Schelling came up with the idea known as the “Value of a Statistical Life,” or VSL,d which promised to measure the monetary value of saving one life. There are a couple of ways to do this. The “human capital” approach uses market productivity over the remainder of the saved person’s life, in which saving the life of a cardiac surgeon is worth more than saving the life of a librarian, or saving a twenty-five-year-old is worth more than doing the same for a seventy-year-old. Or you can use a “comprehensive” or “willingness-to-pay” system: calculating the number of lives that would be saved by requiring side airbags in vehicles, for example, and dividing by the cost that such a requirement would add to an average vehicle’s selling price. Then there’s the “dead-anyway” effect, in which people with terminal illnesses value their lives a little, well, perversely: “I have a brain tumor; I think I’ll cross against the light.” Just to give you a sense of just how imprecise this system is, equally reliable estimates can set VSLs anywhere from $500,000 to $7 million each. The calculation, though, remains the same: estimate the number of VSLs saved by building that pedestrian overpass, and if it’s greater than the cost, start breaking ground.
The problem with all of this isn’t the obvious one. Once you get past the cold-blooded creepiness of it, you can see why we need to put a value on incremental lives saved. Human life is priceless, but that doesn’t mean that it has an infinite dollar value. If that were literally true there would be no reason to ever stop adding safety features to cars, streets, airplanes, and so on. Pretty soon, the cost would become ridiculous—cars armored like Abrams tanks, or airfares costing millions of dollars each. The real problem is that VSL calculates only the benefits that can be easily measured. Because it’s hard (some might say impossible) to measure the value of a pleasant walk versus an unpleasant one, neither engineers nor economists are capable of giving it any value at all.
This problem—speed is quantifiable, livability isn’t—infiltrates every aspect of transportation engineering. Consider the concept known as level-of-service, or LOS. Ever since 1965, two of the bibles of traffic engineering, the Highway Capacity Manual and Geometric Design of Highways and Streets, have given letter grades, from A to F, to roads according to level-of-service for a given hour (usually the most congested one of the day). A road with an LOS of “A,” for example, allows all traffic to flow at or above speed limit, spaced twenty-seven or more car lengths apart.
The only place this kind of spacing happens in real life—that is, not at 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning—is in those television commercials where the one thing on the entire Pacific Coast Highway is you and your Audi.
From there, level-of-service grades are all downhill. “B” and “C” both have relatively free and stable traffic flow, and are the practical goals of road designers. By the time you get to a “D,” cars are about eight lengths apart and flow is becoming unstable. An LOS of “E” is already unstable: like water at 32°F, about to solidify into ice. At this level of congestion, any disruption—a driver missing his cup holder and spilling coffee all over the front seat of his car—causes a shock wave that can catch hundreds of cars in a sudden traffic jam. Even that is still “better” than LOS “F” in which every car is unable to move until the car directly in front does so first. See “Expressway, Cross-Bronx; rush hour.”
LOS was at the heart of the discipline when I first studied it, a heritage of the 1950s and 1960s, when the only concern about roads was congestion, and the only responsibility of transport engineers was relieving it via expansion. For a lot of engineers, it still is today, when—supposedly—the cost of being stuck in traffic is estimated to be $115 billion a year in the United States alone.
The idea behind LOS, like a lot of transportation engineering, seems sensible enough when you first encounter it. But it depends on the premise that the only function of a road is getting from point A to point B in the least amount of time. This turns out to be a pretty limited view of transportation. For one thing, it measures vehicles, not people; thirty people on a bus make just about the same contribution to LOS as a single driver. Because states and municipalities have hundreds of statutes on the books that require fees to be paid by any development that causes a drop in the average LOS, they also promote development in the least crowded neighborhoods, providing another unneeded impetus to suburbanization. An engineer and urban planner named John Fruin even went to the trouble of developing an LOS standard for pedestrians, in which a sidewalk with an “A” level-of-service is one where no one walks at all. “A” for absurd.
However, I shouldn’t scold my fellow engineers. I might have ended up accepting a lot of this myself if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have, as my academic adviser at the University of Pennsylvania, Vukan Vuchic.
Professor Vuchic was still in his mid-thirties when I met him for the first time (he had only been at Penn for a couple of years himself when I started). This was a good thing, since I was part of the generation that was raised on not trusting anyone over thirty. An émigré from Belgrade, Professor Vuchic had traveled all over the world and seemed to know what was going on just about everywhere. I can still recall him comparing transit in the United States with systems in European countries. He talked of the chandeliers in the subway stations of Moscow and the efficiency of its trains.
More than anyone I’ve ever met, Professor Vuchic opened my eyes as to how cities can be transformed, for better or worse, through transportation. The decline of the American city was front-page news in my college and grad school days. The murder rate climbed each year, population declined, buildings and even whole blocks were burned out (perhaps hardest hit of all was my birthplace, Brownsville). I pined for the good old days my older siblings talked about and which even I had tasted: Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park before there was a Disneyland, Ebbets Field (for nearly sixty years I’ve carried in my wallet a very worn photo of me on the field with Brooklyn Dodger pitcher Sal Maglie in 1956), seeing the birth of rock-and-roll at the Paramount or Fox theaters on Flatbush Avenue, or the carefree days playing stickball on 83rd Street.
Sam “the Kid” Schwartz with Sal “the Barber” Maglie, August 12, 1956, at Ebbet’s Field in Brooklyn. Samuel I. Schwartz.
Professor Vuchic explained how the decline of the American cities was inextricably linked to decisions the cities had made about transportation. We compared modal share—that is, the percentage of people traveling by car, transit, or on foot—in London, Paris, and New York. We then compared New York to other cities in the United States. Through his eyes we saw European city centers staying vibrant while many of our center cities were dying. We learned what a mistake it had been for US cities to get rid of most of their streetcars at the same time streetcars were going strong in Continental Europe. We saw the movement to create a sense of place in towns and urban centers through good design of streets. The crowds filling European plazas were testimonials to the value of such design. More than anyone else, Professor Vuchic transformed me from a student of traffic engineering (this is what it was still called) to a thinker about a much broader subject: transportation. I was already a lover of cities. Under Professor Vuchic’s supervision, I became a lover of urban transit systems. I mourned the loss of streetcars as I learned what had become of them. I envied the European cities that still had them.
It was more than just an inspiring teacher, of course. By the time I arrived at Penn’s campus in South Philadelphia, the environmental movement had become mainstream; the Environmental Protection Agency was established in my second year. Cars were bigger polluters per capita than buses, which were bigger polluters than trolleys or trains. They were less democratic, too. Transit wouldn’t just clean America’s air but cure what ailed America’s cities and restore American democracy. When I graduated with a master of science in transportation engineering I was ready to return home, and get a job working for the New York City Transit Authority, the public agency responsible for running the world’s biggest urban transit system.e
Unfortunately, they weren’t ready for me.
Ever since 1953, when the Transit Authority had acquired New York’s three separate subway systems, two bus networks, and what remained of the city’s streetcars, almost all of its transit professionals had been former conductors, train engineers, and bus drivers. A graduate degree from an Ivy League school didn’t even merit a response. So I floundered a bit. My first wife and I moved into a tenement on a rough street in a heavily black neighborhood in Brooklyn that was barely a stone’s throw from the Ebbets Field Apartments and Prospect Park. No suburbs for us, not even after my wife got mugged on the Flatbush Avenue bus and her parents offered to pay us to move. I drove a cab to support us while sending out résumés, and after a few months I was offered a job at the Department of Traffic as a junior engineer. In March 1971, I showed up for work.
Unlike the Transit Authority, the Department of Traffic was used to college types. My colleagues were mostly graduates of the traffic engineering program at Yale, which had been turning GI Bill students into Interstate Highway System engineers for fifteen years. College was pretty much the only thing we had in common. The department’s other engineers were car people, secure in the knowledge that their only job was moving cars faster. After two years studying the downside of the automobile, I felt like a traitor. I wasn’t feeling a whole lot better about it when, twenty-one months after I started work, I got a lesson, though not the one I expected, in the practical consequences of overdependence on cars.
On Saturday morning, December 15, 1973, the forty-year-old West Side Highway, which runs along the Hudson River and connects the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel with the Henry Hudson Parkway—both built by the unstoppable Robert Moses—collapsed under the weight of a truck carrying more than thirty tons of asphalt. It was as if someone had opened a concrete trapdoor, fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, dropping the dump truck and a passenger car to the street below, and flipping the truck on its back. Fortunately, no one died, but at first glance it looked as if we had just built a new exit ramp to the street below. A day later, the road was closed indefinitely (ultimately meaning “forever”) “pending engineering studies.” The long-term studies—What caused the collapse? How should the highway be repaired?—were given to others. The immediate problem—What to do with eighty thousand cars a day that would have to find an alternate route?—fell to me.
I would love to take credit for coming up with a brilliant solution that saved the city, but the truth is both more mundane and a lot more interesting. The predicted traffic disaster never appeared. Somehow, those eighty thousand cars went somewhere, but to this day we have no idea where. Or how, two years later, twenty-five thousand more people were getting into Manhattan’s Central Business District.
What made this interesting is that it was a nearly perfect example of what the economist Anthony Downs named the Law of Peak-Hour Expressway Congestion and which another economist, Gilles Duranton, called induced demand. Boiled down to the basics, induced demand is what happens when the supply of a good increases and more of that supply then gets consumed: when a host puts out more cheese and crackers, her guests eat more cheese and crackers.
What this means in road (and bridge, and tunnel) building is not just obvious but as well documented as anything in transportation engineering: “If you build it, they will come.” If you build more lanes on the expressway, more cars and trucks will use it. If you’re lucky, congestion remains as bad as it was before you spent $50 million trying to relieve it; if you’re not, it gets worse. It’s like the Red Queen from the other side of the looking glass, who tells Alice, “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”f
The West Side Highway collapse was like that, but backwards: the counterintuitive phenomenon known as disappearing traffic. Nearly everyone, including most engineers, assumes that a constricted traffic artery behaves like a garden hose: reduce the diameter from one inch to one-half inch, and pressure increases. But drivers aren’t water molecules. When a road’s capacity is reduced, congestion doesn’t necessarily increase. In fact, the biggest and best study of reduction in road capacity shows that lane closures not only cause traffic to decrease on the road’s remaining lanes, but only half the decrease reappears anywhere else. This means that if two lanes are closed on a four-lane boulevard, it might carry only 60 percent of the cars it did before the closure; but if you look at every alternate route, you’ll be able to account for only half of the “missing” drivers. In an urban setting, with alternate routes or public transit options—that is, one with at least some commitment to smart street design—20 percent of the boulevard’s traffic will just disappear. “If you unbuild it, they will go away.”
This wasn’t obvious at the time, but unbuilding a replacement for the West Side Highway was a huge financial boon to the cash-strapped city, and not just because we avoided spending tens of millions of dollars in construction costs. The usual rule of thumb is that for every dollar spent on capital investments like bridges, roads, and highways, another 3 percent will be incurred on annual maintenance (or, at least, it should be). Moreover, well within their predicted lifespans, those bridges, roads, and highways need replacing; a highway deck lasts no more than forty years, twenty in regions with severe winter weather. Roads may last forever, but that also means that they consume resources forever, too.
It was gratifying to see the real world behave in a way that fit in with what I’d been studying for the past three years, which was that building more roads was the exact wrong way to improve transportation systems. And it was frustrating when the real world collided with the slightly unreal world of politics. When I began work at the Department of Traffic, John Lindsay had just finished his fifth year as New York City’s mayor, and while he’s remembered today mostly for a series of disastrous transit, teacher, and sanitation strikes, he also was environmentally conscious enough to recognize, earlier than most, that the last thing that the thirteen-mile-long island of Manhattan needed was easier access for cars. Even before the West Side Highway collapse, one of the first projects I worked on was a plan to ban cars from Midtown. We were just weeks away from implementing what became known as the “Red Zone” plan when the mayor got cold feet. To this day I still have one of the signs we made.g
An actual sign manufactured but never installed. In 1971 Mayor John Lindsay proposed banning cars from the heart of Midtown Manhattan bounded by Third Avenue on the east, Seventh Avenue on the west, 37th Street on the south, and 57th Street on the north from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays. Samuel I. Schwartz.
In 1974, Mayor Lindsay, who was a true environmentalist, was succeeded by Abe Beame, who wasn’t. One day, I was called to Deputy Commissioner Sam Hochstein’s office along with a few other engineers. Were we there to discuss how to improve mobility for millions of New Yorkers? The best way to address the deteriorating bridges and tunnels on which the city depended? Whether to invest in new buses? In a pig’s eye. We were there, Hochstein told us, because Mary Beame, the mayor’s wife, had been stuck in a traffic jam on Fifth Avenue.
It’s not that I was a complete naïf. I knew that policies weren’t always, or even mostly, the result of rational debate about objective facts. Even so, this was pretty infuriating, not least because the reason for Mrs. Beame’s distress wasn’t a failure of the city’s transportation network, but one of its successes. Early in the Lindsay administration, Central Park (along with Prospect Park) had been closed on weekends, and then, after a few successful years, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day from late spring to Labor Day. Mary Beame got caught in a summer closing.
New administration, new priorities. Sam Hochstein’s engineers were given our marching orders. Or more accurately, our vehicular orders. We were charged with coming up with a justification for reopening Central Park to traffic twenty-four hours a day on weekdays. As director of traffic research at the time, it was my job to produce the report that would get the job done. I protested. I enjoyed playing hooky during the daily closings in another Olmsted masterpiece, Prospect Park, and had even met my wife Daria during one of them, as we both walked our dogs. Roy Cottam, a veteran Traffic Department engineer, tried to calm the assembled group, explaining this upstart kid by saying, “Sam’s not like us, you see. He rides the subway.”
He had no idea. I had gone to grad school with a predisposition in favor of walkable, traditional cities. By the time I left, I had replaced it with something even stronger: a first-rate education in the kind of transportation networks that made the cities I loved possible in the first place. I had learned the history of the “battle over right-of-way” and calculated the costs of building all those limited-access highways through America’s urban neighborhoods. I didn’t hate cars; still don’t. But I wasn’t very eager to make the city even more car friendly than it already was. This made writing the how-to-open-Central-Park report a sickening task. Sickening enough, in fact, that I went off the reservation. Instead of a justification for reopening the park, I produced a report showing that for the most part the closings of the Central Park loop to cars had little impact on Fifth Avenue traffic. The only hour when I found a measurable impact was between three and four in the afternoon. I knew, however, I had to come up with something more or I’d be bypassed in the process. So I proposed that we should open the Sixth Avenue entrance to the park but only as far as 72nd Street. Essentially the park would remain car-free north of 72nd Street and on the entire West Drive. I produced a rigorous report and it worked. The park remained closed from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (we lost the 3–4 p.m. hour) and the Sixth Avenue entrance remained open (a vestige that remains today).
The Central Park incident was a reminder that New York had a less environmentally conscious executive running things. Though the Clean Air Act of 1970 required the city to reduce pollution, and the state and city, under Governor Nelson Rockefellerh and Mayor Lindsay, had agreed to a plan to limit automobile traffic by placing tolls on the bridges that led from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx into Manhattan, Mayor Beame didn’t believe in it. Though the plan had advocates everywhere from the federal government to the nonprofit environmental groups like the Sierra Club, they couldn’t figure out how to get around the obstacles that the mayor (who was nothing if not a savvy bureaucrat) put in their way.
I showed them how.
To this day, Steve Jurow, who was then working as an engineer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, calls me his “Deep Throat.” At a series of secret meetings in Brooklyn—some with Steve, some with a friend at the US Environmental Protection Agency, Gerard Soffian—I shared documents showing that the predicted massive traffic jams at the East River bridges were a fantasy. Others showed that overall traffic congestion wouldn’t increase in Brooklyn (where the mayor had his strongest political base) but would actually improve.
My leaking worked—sort of. The now suspiciously well-informed Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental activists were able to get a federal judge to order the city to put the tolls on the bridges. Only an act of Congress could stop it, but, unfortunately, that’s just what happened. Two of our most progressive elected officials, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, got a law passed that allowed the city to substitute the tolls with something else that would have the same beneficial environmental impact.
NRDC licked their wounds, and tried to figure out what the “something else” could be. That’s when I surreptitiously developed a plan and delivered it to Soffian (things were getting hot then), who then passed it along to Jurow. A series of proposals set out in that plan were then submitted by NRDC to the US Environmental Protection Agency. They included, among other things, exclusive bus lanes on Madison Avenue and a ban on parking in Midtown and Downtown.
In one of my (many) acts of municipal sabotage, I erased an existing road that cut through a corner of Prospect Park. The statute of limitations has expired, I think. David Smucker and Ranjani Sarode (Sam Schwartz Engineering) and Prospect Park Alliance.
And it worked. The EPA approved it, which allowed a federal judge to order the city to implement the “NRDC” plan, which had been anonymously written by yours truly. I kept my mouth shut when I heard my colleagues at the Traffic Department complain about those damned feds in Washington who were dictating to us in New York what we should do on our streets.
What I thought, though, was (as they used to say in Brooklyn), “the noive.”
Throughout the Beame years, I engaged in low-level sabotage of the Traffic Department’s plans. I would widen a sidewalk to a decent size here. Eliminate a parking lane there. One time, a road that linked Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to Parkside Avenue mysteriously disappeared from the city’s plan. No one in government noticed as grass grew from asphalt.
Nothing lasts forever, though, and the Beame administration lasted less than most. In 1978 Ed Koch became mayor and appointed a new commissioner of transportation, a career engineer and Democratic clubhouse regular named Anthony Ameruso. Koch also named, as the deputy commissioner, David Gurin, the founder of an organization with the revealing name Transportation Alternatives. Gurin knew that his entire department was filled with the guys I’d met when I started in the Traffic Department seven years before—the ones whose dream was to pump as many cars into Manhattan as possible. He asked Steve Jurow, “Who can I trust?” Jurow told him: “Sam Schwartz.”
In the spring of 1978, I was named assistant commissioner, Plans and Programs, for the Transportation Department. When I started at my new job, I took thirty top engineers from the old Traffic Department with me. I couldn’t stop the car people from trying to bullshit me, but now the best of them were going to be working for me.
If my time at Penn had been an education in the theory of moving people from place to place, the next twelve years in the Department of Transportation were an education in the craft of the thing, and sometimes in getting them to move at all. In 1982, when I was appointed traffic commissioner, the city was issuing more than one hundred different kinds of special parking permits. Manhattan alone had more than two hundred different signs granting parking privileges to the, ahem, privileged. I managed to get many of the parking spaces back from the New York Police Department, the City Council, and even the mayor. My first meeting with Rudy Giuliani, then US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was over my agents ticketing and towing his agents. The worst violators were the diplomats assigned to UN embassies and foreign consulates, whose unpaid tickets amounted to something like $50 million a year in free parking. Often enough, the diplomats chose to accumulate tickets rather than walk from their apartments on the East Side of Manhattan to their offices on the East Side of Manhattan, three or four blocks away.
When I announced that the only place they were going to get free parking in the future was in a game of Monopoly, I managed to anger not only the diplomats but their hosts in the US State Department. I was even asked to justify myself at the UN Secretariat, and I did, in front of scores of foreign dignitaries at the head of one of those horseshoe tables that are everywhere at the UN. I managed to unite all of them, for the first and last time, in a single cause: attacking me.
In 1982, parking in New York was an international outrage. Four years later it was a municipal disgrace, the biggest scandal to hit the city since the days of Tammany Hall. It began like the cold-open from some television cop showi when, in January 1986, the borough president of Queens, Donald Manes, slashed his wrists in what he claimed was a carjacking attempt, and later admitted was an attempted suicide. Over the next eight weeks, it came out that Manes had been financing his political empire through kickbacks from the city’s Parking Violations Bureau. And he wasn’t alone. The Bronx Borough President and the Democratic Party leaders of the Bronx and Brooklyn were sent packing off to jail. In March, Manes finally succeeded in killing himself, plunging a kitchen knife into his heart while on hold during a telephone call with his psychiatrist.
The headlines were all about Manes, of course, but nearly every major figure in the Department of Transportation was implicated, including the commissioner, Anthony Ameruso, and several deputies and assistant commissioners. I visited the traffic bureau’s parking chief in the hospital; his face was a pulpy mess. He claimed he’d been hit by a car, but it looked a lot more like he had taken a vicious beating. George Aronwold, an administrative law judge in the Parking Violations Bureau, was murdered by the Colombo crime family.
The only part of the department untouched by scandal was the Traffic Bureau, my bureau. I was hastily appointed acting commissioner, then first deputy commissioner of the entire DOT, as well as its chief engineer. Almost overnight, I was responsible for, and had authority over, New York City’s highways, bridges, and parking violations. Ferries? Mine. General aviation? Ditto. And I was still head of the Traffic Bureau, which included two thousand uniformed traffic agents. If it ran over, or parked on, a New York City street, it was part of my job. The scandal—or, rather, the mayor’s desire to clean up the scandal—had put me in a position to write the city’s traffic laws, enforce them, and even adjudicate them.
Scandals will do that. But while it was a bribery scandal that got me a new office, there was a more costly one waiting for me when I got there, one that was a lot more revealing about transportation policy. The mayor, the public, and the Department of Transportation itself had been lied to about the condition of the city’s bridges.
Since only one borough out of New York City’s five is actually part of the mainland of the United States, nothing that affects the city’s network of more than two thousand bridges is ever trivial. In June, my assistant commissioner, a veteran and highly respected engineer named Arthur Asserson, came to see me regarding an alarming report about the Manhattan Bridge. The Manhattan, which opened in 1909, is a pure suspension bridge; all the weight of the bridge’s deck, including the traffic it carries, is supported by cables suspended from towers. And the deck of the Manhattan is big: seven motor vehicle lanes and four tracks for the subways, more than any other New York City bridge. In 1986, it carried about 350,000 people per day.
Despite my degree in civil engineering, I knew next to nothing about bridge engineering when Arthur and his team gave me the bad news. The cleaning crew sandblasting the bridge’s anchorage—the attachment point for the bridge’s cables—was, in the process, blowing it away. Half of what looked like steel was actually rust. Structural computations revealed that, at full capacity, with four subway trains on the bridge at once and motor vehicles filling the lanes—a normal rush hour—the Manhattan side of the bridge was mathematically in danger of collapse. That was enough for me. We immediately closed two of seven lanes carrying automobile traffic, and two of the bridge’s four tracks, for what became four years.
It was then that I began asking questions about the city’s other bridges. I learned that they were more complicated machines than I had realized, with loads of moving parts like bearing plates that allow the parts of the bridge to slide relative to one another, and rocker arms that let it respond to stress from different directions. And I learned my engineers believed the Williamsburg Bridge, which had been built in 1903, and now carried eight lanes of vehicles and two subway tracks, was in even worse condition than the Manhattan. The cables that supported its center span—each one nineteen inches in diameter, made up of 7,696 pencil-thin steel wires bound tightly together—were fraying. Hundreds of broken wires were visible at the north anchorage. Calculations showed that the wires were breaking or losing strength at a frightening rate, and that the bridge would start to sag and be at risk by 1995. My engineers proposed recabling the bridge, which had two problems. First, it had never been done before. Second, it would cost about $250 million.
The city didn’t have the money. Neither did the state. That left the federal government, which had agreed to pay for most of the cost.
Not everyone was happy about this. Some engineers, bridge enthusiasts, said it would be nuts to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to recable the bridge only to end up with a bridge that had been the state of the art in 1903. For the same money, they said, you could build a new bridge, one that would meet “modern” standards.
Meeting standards, I soon learned, since the enthusiasts were kind enough to share drawings and plans, meant a bridge with wider lanes and longer approach roadways. In order to accomplish this, the new bridge would mean condemning a whole lot of property on both sides of the bridge. You might see this as a cost, but the bridge builders saw it as an opportunity, since the neighborhoods on the Manhattan and Brooklyn sides of the bridge, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, respectively, were, in their minds, “blighted.” Knocking blighted neighborhoods flat and getting a new-and-improved bridge? Everyone wins.
I had to figure out the best course of action, and that meant I needed to take a long hard look at the information I had been given. And not just the information itself, but the premises (I don’t want to call them prejudices) that they were built on. I was determined not to authorize hundreds of millions of dollars based on a flawed analysis.
And it was flawed. The study that calculated that the bridge would sag by 1995 had used a computer model with a serious error. The cables had not ten years of useful life, but at least a hundred.j
But if the cables were better than expected, the structural steel was worse. Many of the twenty-foot floor beams that supported the deck were cracked and perforated. This type of corrosion was found to be the cause of the West Side Highway collapse. Similar cracks were found in just about every one of the steel columns that supported the trains and motor vehicles. During the afternoon rush hour on April 12, 1988, I got a call from my bridge inspectors to come out to the bridge immediately. With sirens and lights flashing I got there in 10 minutes. I hopped out and squeezed between a chicken shack (where chickens soon to become kosher dinners were housed) and a steel column. The column supported the subway to the north and the roadway to the south. It had split in the middle with a gaping gash the width of my hand. This was no crack; the steel column was now two beams, in effect, with no bracing, separating at a rate no one could calculate. But, eventually, maybe months, maybe days or hours, it would collapse, bringing the subways and roadway plummeting to the ground. It had to be closed immediately and completely, and that night I closed it down. It was the first time in history that one of New York’s major bridges had ever been closed to all traffic. The bridge remained closed until repairs—Band-Aids, really—were completed in August.
Simultaneously, to figure out whether the feds and New York State would come to the party, I needed to compare costs and feasibility of a new bridge with rehabbing the old one. I proposed assembling a panel of world-class bridge engineers who would participate in the evaluation, and the feds agreed to support the decision of the panel. I held an international competition for firms to submit new designs as replacement for the Williamsburg.
The decision couldn’t be made using traditional traffic engineering cost-benefit calculations. Though the original $250 million estimates for repairing or rebuilding were blown out of the water fairly quickly—they had nearly tripled, to more than $700 million—the “how much” wasn’t as important as the “who pays.” We needed federal money for either option. And the feds wouldn’t pay for repairing a “substandard” bridge.
But what made the bridge substandard? Its lane widths. The “standard” lane—on Interstate highways, on the Cross-Bronx Expressway—was twelve feet wide, but the Williamsburg Bridge had lanes that barely exceeded nine feet; at the bridge’s towers, the lanes were even narrower. The bridge had no shoulders or breakdown lanes, and had such low clearances that trucks couldn’t use the inner roadways. This meant that it wasn’t able to move the maximum number of cars into Manhattan as fast as possible.
But we didn’t want to move the maximum number of cars into Manhattan. And we sure didn’t want them going any faster when they got there. The bridge was still moving a quarter of a million people back and forth across the East River after eighty-five years, which seemed about right to me.
The Williamsburg Bridge debate revealed a fundamental truth about transportation, one that had never occurred to Robert Moses: the cost-benefit equations of traffic engineering, in which benefit number one was getting more drivers to their destinations more quickly, weren’t based on impartial and unbiased math. They were a set of blinders that left only a very narrow set of options visible at all. Before the Brooklyn Bridge had been “modernized” in 1948–1949 by having its trolley tracks replaced with additional automobile lanes—the engineer responsible referred to the trolley tracks as a “horse-and-buggy remnant”—it transported four hundred thousand people a day to and from Brooklyn. Afterward? A hundred and seventy thousand. Even if you believed in increasing capacity, the argument for a new bridge wasn’t especially persuasive.
It was the West Side Highway all over again. We could rebuild a bridge for $700 million, and leave the city with an ongoing maintenance bill of at least $20 million annually for the next thirty years in order to put more cars on the streets of the country’s most crowded city. You could say the costs of the bridge outweighed the benefits, if there had actually been any benefits. This was another seemingly sensible infrastructure investment that wasn’t sensible at all.
This is when the feds brought up benefit number two: safety. Wider lanes were, obviously, safer than narrower ones.
Only they’re not. This time, the problem with the cost-benefit equation wasn’t a faulty premise, but the data itself. In order to test the wider-lanes-are-safer-lanes hypothesis, I studied every crash that occurred on the bridge over a three-year period and marked each one on a map. If that notion had been true, I reasoned, more crashes would have occurred where the lanes were narrowest, that is, at the towers. Just the opposite turned out to be the case. The towers, it turned out, were the safest places on the entire bridge; my explanation is that when lanes get very narrow motorists drive more carefully. Even though every traffic engineer in the country had been taught the gospel of wider lanes, the opposite appeared to be true: “grossly substandard lanes seemed to be the safest of all.” This was the traffic engineering equivalent of saying the Earth was round when the masses knew it was flat. Still, most engineers do not accept this fact.k
Even the feds couldn’t argue with that. The Williamsburg Bridge, narrow lanes and all, was saved. And so were Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which are today two of the most vibrant and prosperous neighborhoods in the entire country, yet another instance of smart streets promoting thriving communities. The lessons of the Cross-Bronx Expressway had been expensive, but we were finally learning them.
One lesson: an awful lot of the transportation engineering consensus from forty years ago, from LOS to cost-benefit analysis, is what happens when you know more about how to do something than why you’re doing it. But it isn’t the only lesson. It took a while to realize it, but the decisions made about America’s transportation infrastructure in the 1950s and 1960s came up short in other ways as well.
For another thing, for example, engineers and planners turn out to have been really, really bad at predicting the future, which is a big deal when you’re building stuff that is expected to last decades if not centuries. They consistently extrapolated future needs from past trends, instead of saying, “This is what would happen if past trends were to continue.” No one asked what would happen if the trends didn’t continue, much less whether they would have led to a desirable future.
Even worse, the big mistake about building stuff like the Interstate Highway System and the Cross-Bronx Expressway is that the engineers used a period of rapid change as the baseline. There’s no era in American history when car ownership grew faster than it did during the 1950s. And there’s no period when transit use declined so rapidly. Predicting the future transportation needs of the country using the 1950s and 1960s as a baseline was as helpful as projecting the future needs of the US Navy in 1945 based on a straight-line projection from the years 1941–1944.l This led to some incredibly jug-headed ideas: if the “demand” for parking in Philadelphia’s Central Business District had followed projections, there would literally have been no room for anything other than parking lots in downtown Philly.
By the time I left my last public-sector job in 1990, the profession of transportation engineering had learned at least some of these lessons. A much more sophisticated perspective had finally taken hold about the future of mobility—it didn’t hurt that so many of the 1950s-era engineers had retired—and a consensus had formed around the value of smart growth and multimodal transport systems (a fancy way of saying that the country needed a combination of heavy and light rail transportation, streetcars, buses, and cars). We engineers may have had tunnel vision, but we weren’t completely blind.
What we finally saw was that America’s transportation system was in crisis. We had spent the preceding forty years building thousands and thousands of limited-access highways to transport people from their homes to the places where they earned money and where they spent it. The average distance for both had been on an upward slope for decades. In 1960, when the United States had 64.6 million full-time workers, 9.4 million, or 14.5 percent of them, worked outside the county in which they lived; by 2000, 128.3 million were employed, and 34.3 million worked outside their home counties: 27 percent. Average commuting times inched up to more than fifty minutes a day. Because of induced demand, there was no engineering fix to this problem: no matter how many roads we built, or how well, people weren’t getting from point A to point B any faster, partly because points A and B were getting further apart, partly because we had reached the limits of what could be done to improve automotive speed and safety even using the limited definitions of an earlier era of engineering doctrine. Transportation had fallen into a vicious cycle in which more and more resources were being spent to less and less effect.
And if that weren’t enough, a transportation system that was almost entirely run on gasoline was clearly insupportable in the long run, given the obvious costs of a dependence on a commodity that was, more and more, found in some very dodgy parts of the world—and this was well before concerns about pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Samuel I. Schwartz (Department of Transportation).
It wasn’t that the problems were unpredictable. A hundred different studies, by a thousand different engineers, planners, and urban studies professionals, had forecast not merely that the United States was strangling itself on its own tailpipes, but even how long it could continue doing so before the costs became insupportable. We predicted the need for draconian regulation, and for dramatically increased support for alternative forms of transportation. In the 1980s I crafted a brochure showing angry cars filling up every inch of a city by the year 2000. It was captioned, “New York City Full: Use Alternate City.”
We predicted just about everything. Everything except the Millennials.
a In New York, parkways (except for Olmsted’s Brooklyn parkways and the Bronx’s Pelham and Moshulu parkways) and expressways are both limited-access highways with few if any crossings at grade, but parkways ban commercial traffic and expressways don’t. The first limited-access parkway—the Bronx River Parkway—was built in 1925; the first expressway—the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—was proposed in 1936 but was delayed by the Depression until 1939.
b What was left of the elevated highway on San Francisco’s waterfront was finally demolished after it was severely damaged by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The waterfront—the Embarcadero—was redeveloped with parks, plazas, a tree-lined boulevard, and public transportation. It draws millions of visitors a year.
c In the mid-1960s, the curriculum for engineering students and the practice of working engineers added the measurement of both fuel efficiency and pollution control.
d Schelling, a Rand Institute theoretician, also came up with the term collateral damage. The man was a phrasemaker.
e OK. New York’s system may not be the world’s longest subway—depending on how the measurement is made, London’s Underground has a claim—but it has, by far, the largest number of stations.
f Our old pal Pat Moynihan was on to this in 1960, when he wrote, “The number of automobiles increases to fill all the space provided.”
g Mayor Lindsay also proposed, and I worked on, a plan to close Times Square to cars. Thirty-five years later, in 2009, the car-free zone known as Broadway Plaza was opened by then-mayor Michael Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. More about this in Chapter 5.
h Malcolm Wilson, who became governor when Rockefeller was tapped by Gerald Ford to serve as Ford’s vice president after Richard Nixon’s resignation, was the signatory on the plan.
i A fictionalized version of the story is actually the plot of the pilot episode of Law & Order.
j Credit for this realization goes to the legendary Blair Birdsall, well into his seventies at that time, who called the initial study “hogwash.” He found a repetitive error in the very sophisticated computer model.
k Twenty years later, this was definitively proven in a study performed by the Transportation Research Board, which found that “there is no consistent, statistically significant relationship between lane width and safety . . . or increases in accident frequency” for automobiles traveling at intersections or in the middle of urban and suburban blocks.
l On December 7, 1941, the Navy had 790 ships; at the end of 1944, 6,084.
