The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York

by Caro, Robert A

  In particular, how were they going to handle the traffic during morning and evening rush hours?

  Employment-location forecasts showed that in 1985 about half of all Nassau and Suffolk wage earners were still going to be commuting daily to New York because that was where the jobs were going to be. The only difference in the situation was going to be that, because of the deterioration of the Long Island Rail Road and the diffusion of population away from its lines, a far greater proportion of commuters was going to be commuting by car. In 1955, out of 250,000 wage earners living in Nassau and Suffolk, 115,000 commuted to New York, 40,000 by automobile (joining 50,000 from Queens—see footnote, page 946). In i960, according to the most conservative forecasts, there were going to be about 125,000 commuters crossing the city line heading west in the morning rush hour and crossing it heading east in the evening rush hour—about 50,000 in cars; in 1970, there were going to be 160,000 commuting—70,000 in cars; in 1985, 215,000 commuting—90,000 in cars. And these were just the commuters from beyond the city line. How about the commuters from Queens—an estimated 90,000 car commuters by 1985 piling onto the same east-west roads at the same time as the 90,000 from the suburban counties?

  Attempting to handle traffic in such volume by building highways just didn't make sense. In 1955, there were 90,000 drivers commuting from Nassau, Suffolk and Queens, and existing highways couldn't come near handling them. Now you were talking about adding another 90,000 drivers. The capacity of an expressway lane, under optimum conditions, was only 1,500 cars per hour. You would have to build sixty lanes of new highway just to keep up with the increase in traffic, not to catch up with the deficit in lanes

  already existing. The Long Island Expressway would be six lanes, three in each direction. Its maximum rush-hour capacity would therefore be 4>500 cars. Forty-five hundred cars out of 90,000! Building the Long Island Expressway, expending on it hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, would hardly make even a noticeable dent in the Long Island commuting problem. Building a dozen Long Island Expressways wouldn't make a noticeable dent. And how about when that traffic reached the central city? The streets of Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn were already jammed, filled to overflowing with cars and trucks. Now you would be piling into them 90,000 additional cars. Congestion in city streets had already reached intolerable levels. To what levels was it going to be escalated? You couldn't possibly solve Long Island's transportation problems—or the city's—by building roads. You couldn't possibly even come near solving those problems by building roads. Trying to solve them by building roads just didn't make sense. Building the Long Island Expressway didn't make sense.

  But building the Long Island Expressway with rapid transit on the center mall—rapid transit that could carry 40,000 passengers per hour, 40,000 passengers who would arrive in Manhattan without cars to be parked —made sense. Says Lee Koppelman, executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board: "By the time the Long Island Expressway was planned, we planners had been screaming for years about the need for mass transportation. By this time, the suburbanization—the urbanization in parts —of Long Island had already occurred. We saw the forces, we saw the problems, and we were talking about the problems, and we all knew we had to have mass transit on that road. It was obvious. In terms of commutation, you have to say, 'How can you make this road work so I don't have to build six more Long Island Expressways?' and there was only one answer. We all knew that if there was no mass transit on that road, it would be a disaster. Without mass transit, the road was guaranteed— guaranteed —to fail before it was built."

  "Mass transit doesn't only mean trains, you know," Koppelman says. "It can mean buses."

  Buses do not have the capacity of trains. But they have enough to make a difference. "Every bus," as Koppelman puts it, "can be the equivalent of fifty automobiles." And if an expressway is designed for buses as well as automobiles—if one lane, slightly wider than the normal lanes, is reserved exclusively for buses by separating it from the others by a divider and if the width and turning radii of entrance and exit ramps are made big enough to facilitate their use by the big vehicles—hundreds of buses can use that lane in an hour, theoretically as many as 800, conservatively 400. The capacity of that lane becomes 20,000 people per hour, about thirteen times greater than it was before. Designing and reserving for buses two of the Long Island Expressway's six lanes—one in each direction—would be the equivalent of building a new eight-lane expressway right next to it.

  But such capacity can be attained from buses only if a lane is designed

  and reserved exclusively for them. If it is not, if buses are forced to creep along in the general traffic flow, they no longer offer the faster trip that, along with the comfort of letting someone else drive, would overcome for substantial numbers of commuters the disadvantages represented by the higher immediate, out-of-pocket expense of a bus trip and the fact that the nearest bus stop might be inconveniently far from their offices. Too few commuters would be lured out of their cars onto the buses to significantly alleviate expressway congestion. If Moses wouldn't build rapid transit on the Long Island Expressway, planners pleaded, at least let him build it with lanes for buses. Moses refused even to consider the suggestion.

  Making provision for mass transportation on the Long Island Expressway was in many ways not only Long Island's chance but its last chance.

  Mass transportation systems work only if they are able to transport masses—people in numbers sufficient to pay the system's cost, to justify the immense public investment that created it. Such systems work only if there is high-density development around them. They do not work in an exclusively low-density subdivision landscape. Low-density subdivision had already inundated two-thirds of Nassau County. But the rest of Nassau and most of vast Suffolk still lay largely unsubdivided—unshaped; great chunks of Long Island were in 1955 still a tabula rasa on which a design for the future could be etched with the lessons of the past in mind. For these areas—close to a thousand square miles of land—there was still time to insure a different, better, type of development—a different, better, life for the millions of people who would one day be living on that land. But there wasn't much time. With the population of the two counties increasing at the rate of almost 100,000 per year, each year the tide covered almost five miles more of the Island. If a change was to be made in the development pattern, it must be made at once.

  Once the Long Island Expressway was built, no change would be possible. Construction of the great road would open the entire Island to development. As it pushed through new farm country—even before it pushed through the country, as soon as the announcement was made that the push was imminent—that country would fill up with subdivisions. The pattern of development—a pattern too low in density to support rapid transit—would be fixed. (And, of course, the land would become too expensive for the creation of the huge commuter parking terminals.) The time was now, before the expressway was built, to insure not only that rapid transit would be provided but that it would be used by enough people to ease the transportation burden from the backs of all the people on Long Island. It would not be possible once the expressway was built. Build the Long Island Expressway with mass transit—or at least with provision for the future installation of mass transit—and Long Island might remain a good place to live and play. Build the Long Island Expressway without mass transit and Long Island would be lost—certainly for decades, probably for centuries, possibly forever.

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  When planners proposed rapid transit on the expressway, Moses replied by saying it was "impouabkT—aad by refusing to discuss the matter. The cfc aka a an of die newly formed Metropolitan Rapid Transit Commission knew from personal experience—twice, after all, Charles YL Tank had had Robert Moses on the witness stand before him under oath — the value of jfHfr p-^ n t investigation of Moses' assertions. Going outside the Moses sphere of influence—over the New Jersey border to Philadelphia and the t:rr. v: '^>. i. /
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  depend on Moses for a living and commissioned them to find out if this

  The MRTC could not afford a complete sn.: & Zimmerman

  therefore analyzed the cost and effect of placing rapid transit not on the entire eighty-five miles of the expressway but only on a seven-mile stretch in Queens, from Marathon Parkway near the city line tunning west to Corona, where the tracks could link up with one of several : subway

  lines and follow its tracks into Manhattan. This limitation placed the rapid transit proposal in t: possible light, maximizing its right-of-way cost,

  for Queens was built up far more heavily than the less heavily populated suburbs, and minimizing its effect, since while in the suburbs development could still be influenced by rapid transit, with higher densities near the line so that traffic on it would be increased, in Queens the pattern of development was already set.

  Even in the possible light, however, the proposal looked good.

  One D> ft Zimmerman alternative, for example, was to lay tracks down the expresswaj center mall from Marathon Parkwav into Corona, leave the raj at Flushing Meadows Park, cut across its northeastern corner to link up with the IRT Rushing subway near its iuth Street station and follow that line ( which ;i has ample capacitv to accommodate" the added traffic; to Times Square. The total cost of building such a line—the total cost of the additional forty feet of expressway right-of-wav. of bridges at grade separations, of electric substations, of eleven large, modern passenger stations with parking garages at the eleven major avenues intersecting with the ex-Bway within that seven-mile stretch, of every piece of moden rapid transit equipment desirable—would be only S20.830.000.

  Benefits to the public would be as large as costs to the public would be small. Day & Zimmerman calculated these benefits onlv for the small section northeastern Queens directly involved and for adjacent northern Nassau County. But even for this limited area, the figures were staggering. From K in 1955, 158,500 persons traveled into Manhattan and back on an average weekday, 85,000 by automobile, 59.500 by bus and 14.000 on the Port Washington branch of the Long Island Rail Road.* The vast majority of these commuters would be able to save significant amounts of money

  * The Day & Zimmerman figures do not fit in with figures for over-all commuting from Queens, Nassau and Suffolk furnished by the Regional Plan Association and the Nassau and Suffolk Planning Boards (the two counties then each had its own planning

  and time—in Queens up to twenty-five minutes, in Nassau up to forty minutes—by using the proposed rapid transit system instead. Based on surveys of the commuters, on analyses of traffic patterns and on other surveys done in similar situations in other cities, "initially about 17 percent of general commuter traffic from the area would use the proposed rapid transit line in the initial year of operation." And 17 percent of 158,500 is 27,000. Twenty-seven thousand commuters who now jammed available means of transportation to New York twice a day would be removed from those means of transportation, freeing them for other users—and their own trips would be made vastly cheaper and faster, as much as forty minutes each way faster.

  The effect on the jam-packed buses from the area would be dramatic. Some 19,000 of the 27,000 passengers diverted to the new rapid transit would be bus passengers. The effect on the jammed Long Island Rail Road would be less dramatic but still meaningful. Some 1,500 passengers of the 27,000 passengers diverted would be LIRR passengers. And as for the highways—most notably the Long Island Expressway, which the vast majority of commuters from this area would use once it was opened—close to 6,500 of the 27,000 persons diverted would be persons who drove their cars into and out of Manhattan every weekday.

  These figures were conservative—far too conservative, most planners felt. The figures would, moreover, increase year by year, as the area's population increased and as the percentage of the population using the rapid transit line increased as more commuters became aware of its advantages.

  But even the initial, ultraconservative figures had remarkable implications. Robert Moses was planning to spend $500,000,000 for an expressway that would increase the one-way automobile-carrying capacity of Long Island by a maximum of 4,500 automobiles or buses per hour—during the two-hour peak period, by a total of 9,000 automobiles or buses. For $20,000,000— one twenty-fifth of that cost—he could reduce the automobile-carrying capacity needed by 6,500 automobiles and 400 buses. He could do as much for Long Island by spending $20,000,000 as by spending $500,000,000— if he spent it on rapid transit.

  And these figures represented the advantages of building rapid transit on only seven miles of the Long Island Expressway, seven miles out of eighty-five.

  No study was ever done of the cost of building such a line on the other seventy-eight miles of expressway, so much of it r 1955 still open farm country, but the best-informed estimate is that the cost—including large terminals in key locations—would, if the job had b 1 done in 1955, have

  board). For example, while the figure for the over-all number of commuters by car from those three counties was given at the time as 90,000, the Day & Zimmerman figures show 85,000 commuters from northeastern Queens and northern Nassau County alone. The reason for the discrepancy is that the over-all figures are not based on detailed studies, while the Day & Zimmerman figures are—and that the figures for automobile commuting from Queens, Nassau and Suffolk should actually be higher than 90,000.

  been no more than half a million dollars per mile. Building a rapid transit line the length of the Long Island Expressway would almost certainly have cost less than $100,000,000—one fifth of the cost of the expressway without rapid transit.

  To save Long Island, it was not absolutely necessary for rapid transit to be built into the Long Island Expressway in 1955. But it was absolutely necessary for provision for rapid transit to be built in. The right-of-way for the tracks had to be acquired and the necessary heavier foundations had to be sunk beneath the center mall. As long as those two steps were taken, tracks could be installed on the expressway with a minimum of expense and inconvenience in the future. Fail to take those steps and, as with the Van Wyck Expressway ten years before, the expense of acquiring the land— now so cheap—would be enormous, so enormous, in fact, that it would probably be prohibitive financially—by Day & Zimmerman's estimate $15,000,000 per mile—and politically: not only would building rapid transit on the shoulders of the road require the acquisition of additional right-of-way and cause public outcry from the owners of that land and from thousands of others whose adjacent homes would be blighted by a nearby roalroad, but rebuilding the expressway's foundations would require the closing of several lanes for years, causing immense public inconvenience. The cost of making provision for rapid transit would, in 1955, be minimal in terms of the expressway's over-all cost: acquiring 240 feet of land instead of 200 feet and building heavier foundations would cost, for the whole eighty-five-mile length of the expressway, perhaps an extra $20,000,000. The expressway was going to cost $500,000,000 anyway. For $20,000,000 more—for an increase in the cost of only 4 percent—you could take the step that would insure that the expressway would one day be able to fulfill the function for which it was built. Fail to spend that 4 percent, and the expressway would never be able to fulfill the function for which it was being built. And that money was available: if Moses couldn't persuade the city or state to put it up, he could put it up himself—Triborough had the $20,000,000 readily available.

  The Day & Zimmerman study, the first independent analysis of the long-term effects of a Moses highway proposal during the thirty years that Moses had been building highways, represented a serious threat to Moses. His opponents were usually unable to refute his facts and figures with figures of their own. When he told press and public a proposal was "impossible," there was no choice but to accept that statement. Now there would be. And if editorial writers learned how simple it would be to provide rapid transit on the expressway, there might well be a public outcry for that provision.
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  Moses knew how to handle threats.

  While Day & Zimmerman were studying, he started building—getting the expressway under way with $20,000,000 in Triborough funds so that he wouldn't have to wait for state or city allocations. Even while the MRTC consultants were attempting to determine the advisability of making provision for rapid transit on the expressway, Moses was building the expressway with-

  out any such provision. By the time the firm reported its findings to the MRTC, it had to report also that the findings no longer mattered. Because of "actual construction work" done on the expressway "since the conception of the rapid transit study plans," the firm stated, placing rapid transit on the expressway would now "require complete revision of the expressway plans and the economic waste of the substantial construction work completed. . . . Construction of a rapid transit line on this highway" is no longer "practicable." Discussion of the question no longer served any useful purpose. Not surprisingly, there wasn't any—at least not any of significance. The Day & Zimmerman report was one of the best-kept secrets in New York planning history. The city's newspapers carried scarcely a word on it. Newsday, the Long Island daily, never mentioned it. The public never knew of the ease with which rapid transit could be built on the Long Island Expressway. Long Island never found out about the report that spelled out a way by which Long Island could have been saved. The Long Island Expressway was built without rapid transit—and without provision for rapid transit in the future. And as each section of the superhighway opened, it was jammed—with traffic jams of immense dimensions. One man's dream became a nightmare— an enduring, year-after-year nightmare—for tens of thousands of other men. Year by year, the huge road bulled its way eastward, through Queens, across Nassau County, deeper and deeper into Suffolk; it would take fifteen years to build it out to Riverhead. And as each section opened, as each piece of Moses' largest road-building achievement fell into place, the congestion grew worse. The Long Island Expressway's designed daily capacity was 80,000 vehicles. By 1963, it was carrying 132,000 vehicles per day, a load that jammed the expressway even at "off" hours—during rush hours, the expressway was solid with cars, congealed with them, chaos solidified. The drivers trapped on it nicknamed Moses' longest road "the world's longest parking lot."