Bedford and Sullivan
I WAS BARELY OUT OF THE SECOND GRADE WHEN A TRANSPORTATION revolution changed my life.
It was 1954, and my best friend, Freddy Cohen, had announced that he was moving. And not moving a few streets from our block in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn—which would have been bad enough—but all the way to the other side of the country, to Los Angeles, California. No more buses and subways for the Cohen family. They were migrating to the most automobile-friendly city in the world.
It was a sign of things to come. The following year, my other best friend (you’re allowed up to six when you’re less than ten years old), Shelly Pepper, moved to Long Island. Barry Politik’s family hung in for a few more years: his family didn’t leave Brooklyn for Rockland County, a suburb north of New York City, until 1961. Then all three of my siblings moved to the ’burbs. By then, not only had Walter O’Malley torn the heart out of Brooklyn by moving the Dodgers to be closer to Freddy Cohen, but a team called the Los Angeles Dodgers had even won the World Series.
It was enough to make you hate O’Malley, along with Robert Moses, New York City’s parks commissioner, whose stubbornness over building a replacement for Ebbets Field, the crumbling but beloved home of Brooklyn baseball, gave the Dodgers’ owner exactly the excuse he needed to head west.a And he didn’t go alone. Horace Stoneham, the owner of the New York Giants, followed O’Malley to California, leaving the even-more-decrepit-than-Ebbets-Field Polo Grounds for Candlestick Park, just south of San Francisco. Huge transformations in America’s transportation infrastructure dominated all these decisions—not merely the lower cost of air travel, which made transcontinental road trips feasible, but the belief, shared by owners and fans alike, that driving a car to a ballpark was the best possible way to get there. In fact, that driving was the best possible way to get anywhere.
Although Dodger fans, more and more of whom had preceded the Peppers and Politiks to the suburbs of Long Island, could drive their cars to Ebbets Field, they couldn’t park them anywhere near the place. Shoehorned into a city block at the corner of Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place, it had no parking facilities at all. As early as 1952, O’Malley had hired the designer Norman Bel Geddes to design a replacement, one the New York Times called “grandiose” because of its—wait for it—“retractable roof, foam rubber seats, heated in cold weather . . . automatic hot dog vending machines, and a synthetic substance to replace grass on the entire field.” But all that was window dressing. The key to O’Malley’s vision was a parking garage adjoining the new ballpark big enough for seven thousand cars.
There was no way to put that kind of garage on the city block occupied by the old Ebbets Field. O’Malley proposed building the new stadium in a different part of Brooklyn. He was—so he said—willing to build the “grandiose” park himself, but he needed the land condemned. And that meant he needed the help of Robert Moses. Moses loved cars, but he had no time for sports. The feud between the two powerful and stubborn men played out over nearly three years, and people are still fighting over which one deserves more blame for the Dodgers’ exodus. Or whether the blame resided instead on a set of impersonal demographic changes that were remaking America in the mid-1950s.
Of course, my ten-year-old brain didn’t think in those terms, exactly. Mostly, I just hated Walter O’Malley. I was far from alone. The late Village Voice and New York Daily News columnist Jack Newfield tells a story of saying to fellow newsman and Brooklynite Pete Hamill, “you write on your napkin the names of the three worst human beings who ever lived, and I will write the three worst, and we’ll compare.” Each of them wrote the same three names, in the same order: Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley.
I was an adult before I realized we were both part of a revolutionary change in the way Americans lived, worked, and especially moved from place to place. Over the course of the next fifty years, the most important parts of the built environment—the streets on which we lived, played, and worked—were impoverished by the seemingly irresistible centrifugal forces of sprawl and suburbanization. My own block, 83rd Street between 19th and 20th Avenues, stopped hosting stickball games and the kid-run “83rd Street Olympics.” It no longer featured a daily lineup of kids sitting on curbs as if they were benches.
The phenomenon occurred in nearly every city that had been built before the advent of the internal combustion engine. Bedford Avenue, in its various incarnations, was already at least two centuries old before the first Ebbets Field was built. If you had a time machine that let you position a camera at the corner of Bedford and Sullivan, and if you set that camera to take a photo every fifty years or so starting in 1600, you’d see Native Americans on foot give way to horses and ox carts—first Dutch, then English, and finally American—only to be supplanted by streetcars, buses, and automobiles. You’d see farms replaced by houses of commerce and houses of worship. During the last fifty years of your time-lapse movie, you’d see the original entrance to Ebbets Field, at the corner of Bedford and Sullivan, transformed into Public School 375, better known as Jackie Robinson School.
The lesson of all this wouldn’t be just the obvious one: that change is constant. What that hypothetical stop-motion history of a Brooklyn intersection also shows is that while the modes of transportation change every few years (horse-drawn cabs give way to early internal combustion; streetcars are replaced by buses) and even the buildings themselves change every few decades, the intersection itself occupies the same space, the same latitude and longitude coordinates, as it did centuries ago.
Vehicles come and go. Buildings go up and come down. Roads last forever.
They even outlast revolutions. They were there through half a dozen revolutionary turning points during the fifty years before Walter O’Malley broke my heart. They were there for the epic of sprawling suburbanization that started after the Second World War, and pulled the Dodgers west. And most of them remain today, as another revolution is under way: the “Street Smart” revolution, which is the subject of this book.
Before you read any further, though, you should know what this book is not. It’s not a comprehensive look at all aspects of the business of moving from place to place. You won’t find anything in here about freight transportation, except insofar as it is making it lots easier to have trucks deliver goods to your front door than for you to carry them home from a store. Nothing about air travel, or—except for the occasional ferry—ships and boats. As a corollary, you also won’t find a lot about intercity travel, or rural life. Street Smart tells the story of a transformation in the common travel decisions made daily and weekly in the industrialized world generally, and the United States specifically. Its focus is a modest 9.72 miles—the distance of the average automobile trip, including work commutes and local shopping trips. Those kinds of journeys are what this book is about: about getting ourselves to work, to shopping, to social encounters, and to entertainment—how we’ve done so historically, and how we’re going to be doing so in the future.
The first four chapters of Street Smart describe the huge implications for cities and suburbs in a world in which the private automobile is a less and less dominant component of a modern transportation network—though I may as well say it here clearly: the private automobile isn’t going to disappear from the landscape of the industrialized world, and Street Smart isn’t a recipe for doing away with it. It wouldn’t be practical even if it were desirable, which it isn’t. A car-free future is a myth: seductive but unreachable.
A dozen other myths, plausible but misleading, pervade the world of transportation. It’s widely believed, for example, that building new roads parallel to congested ones will relieve congestion. Or that wider lanes are safer than narrower lanes. Planners and politicians regularly contend that the more lanes you add to an intersection, the more traffic it can handle; that moving a city’s traffic faster will make that city function better; or that closing a congested street or knocking down a highway leads inevitably to gridlock.
One of the most enduring myths, and probably the most disheartening, is the belief that America’s deteriorating transportation infrastructure needs trillions of dollars in investment. This one is especially troubling, because it has crept into the thinking of so many smart people at every point on the political spectrum. Replacing and “improving” deficient bridges, roads, and highways is hugely popular with some of the country’s most progressive and most conservative voices because, we’re told, it’s good for the economy, good for the environment, and definitely good for the future prosperity of the country. As we’ll see, though, the argument for a lot of those investments rests on foundations even shakier than the infrastructure itself.
If the first chapters of this book are descriptive, a history of the first decades of the automobile age and the mistakes that accompanied it, the next chapters are prescriptive; that is, they outline what forty years of practice as a working transportation engineer have taught me are the best solutions to our existing transportation challenges. This latter part of the book examines each of four key aspects of sustainable and useful urban transportation systems:
• Enough density and connectivity to make active transportation—mobility that comes from muscle power: walking and biking—a practical choice for significant numbers of people. (Chapter 5)
• Multiple methods of transportation (or what engineers call multimodality) and many points where they intersect (multinodality), such that transit networks don’t depend on a single form of transportation or a dominant core to which all routes lead. (Chapter 6)
• Transportation plans that take full advantage of intelligent systems: everything from GPS-enabled buses to smartphone apps. (Chapter 7)
• Networks that are accessible everywhere, all the time, and by everybody. (Chapter 8)
If this combination of desired features in a transportation network sounds a little utopian, I can understand why. But, as you’ll see in the chapters that follow, these traits of effective transportation systems are already being implemented all over the world in cities as big as New York and as small as Charleston, South Carolina, as far west as Los Angeles and as far east as North Korea.
North Korea?
In May of 2010 I met in Beijing with a contingent of North Korean officials who were part of a delegation accompanying Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il to China. I was there at the invitation of a former student of mine from South Korea, with whom I’d worked in 2005 on transportation options for a future reunified Korea. This meant, among other things, planning a route through the DMZ, the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, which required a visit into the zone—a nerve-wracking visit, because it requires surrendering your passport.
The head of the delegation was a man my student called the “Viceroy for Infrastructure” (his actual title was chairperson of the Taepung International Investment Group—Taepung translates as “Great Wind” or, more directly, as “typhoon”). I spent a day or so in a conference room in which they first explained their ambitious transportation agenda: five new railroads, six airports, hundreds of miles of roads, several new ports, and an entire new city in the northeast part of North Korea, which is tucked just under Russia and hooks around the eastern edge of China. The new city sounded really cool. It was to be an international destination for trade and tourism and very environmentally sound. I was imagining a walker’s paradise with narrow streets, beautiful boulevards, pedestrian plazas everywhere, bike lanes crisscrossing the city, and streetcars decorated with Asian motifs whisking people to and fro. Yes, there’d be some car parks but pretty much at the edges. I was dreaming of creating a real-life version of Disneyland. To say this got me excited is an understatement.
They then asked me about the planning and building process from project conception to completion. I felt I was back in a classroom as I explained the steps from establishing goals and objectives to problem identification to planning and then execution. My “students” dutifully took notes.
At the end of the meetings they indicated that they would like me to play a major role as the master planner, to become a kind of Robert Moses for North Korea. At that point a memorandum of understanding was drafted between me and the Democratic People’s Republic. We then celebrated with a banquet in which we repeatedly toasted peace between the two countries. I felt I was on my way to a Nobel Peace Prize. Or possibly jail. Neither has materialized. There’s been no follow-up since (Kim Jong-il died shortly thereafter) and I have no idea whether some of my ideas have been implemented. However, if there are skinny roads with wide, tree-lined sidewalks somewhere in Pyongyang, I’d be pleased.
But I wouldn’t be totally surprised. All over the world, from Zurich, to Barcelona, to Bogotá, to Pyongyang, to Columbus, Ohio, mayors and city planners are building in a new way—or, more accurately, in an old, time-tested way. They are creating environments that are dense and connected, affordable and desirable, appealing both to smart employers and the employees they want to recruit. They’re building roads and rails for a smart future. Or, rather, a Street Smart future.
At various places in this book, you may notice a casual inconsistency in the naming of a number of departments in the bureaucracy of New York City. Sometimes the “Department of Traffic” appears as the “Traffic Department,” for example. This isn’t carelessness, exactly, rather a recognition that the departments themselves, and the newspapers that cover them, are equally inconsistent. Nonetheless, please accept my apologies for any confusion.
a This is not the last time Robert Moses will appear in this story; see Chapter 2.