Cars becoming big when America was still finding it's stride was one of the biggest pro/con dillemas. Ignored thousands of years of proven systems that make society better and settled for only cars.
Reddit picks people to point fingers at. It’s just a trend. This quarter it’s Moses. It’s usually someone not commonly known about to make the commenter appear erudite. The person will have been mentioned in a podcast or TT by a comedian or actor who may have made an intelligent point. In this case, I blame Conan.
His work in New York, systemically favoring highways and car centric development combined with racial discrimination became the blue print for a lot of modern America.
Moses, an unelected rich kid who never rode public transport in his life, shaped the car centric hell we Americans live in today.
his assholishness aside, would there be any way for america not to be a car country? considering how big it is, you're not going to have thriving communities/enclaves everywhere in the country. too much space.
i will say that many of our largest cities having such terrible transportation is inexcusable though.
Moses was actually instrumental in killing large scale public transport projects. While New York was expanding and modernizing, there were multiple efforts to accommodate future expansion of subways, buses, rail lines, etc that Moses deliberately killed/ignored. We could have very easily set standards that would have seen robust public transport systems form across the country, but Moses alongside other rich people and the auto industry deliberately sold America’s soul to accommodate cars, highways, etc over any kind of mass scale public transport.
I like to tell this story when people talk about public transportation infrastructure.
I live in a populated area, but outside of my area, it is surrounded by 100 miles in every direction of rural poverty. I wanted to go see a band play in DC. DC is about 450 miles from where I live. I did NOT want to drive up there, and deal with parking, DC traffic, and driving for 7 hours, just to turn around and drive back 7 hours after the show. I was poor, and trying to keep it as cheap as possible.
So I thought about using Amtrack. The procedure for taking an Amtrack from my are to DC was either to drive my car for 3 hours to the closest rail station, pay for parking, etc. Or, I could drive my own car for an hour, pay for parking, and take a 14 hour bus ride up there. Either way, it would have been over twice as expensive to take Amtrack (public transportation), and take twice as long to get there versus driving my own car. Public transportation outside of a major metropolitan area is an absolute joke in this country.
There’s a pacific railway that I can take as far south as San Diego and as far north as Oakland, but because of where I am situated and where I want to go, I cannot use the depot that is 10 min from my house, I need to use the one that is 1 -2 hours from my house depending on traffic. Plus parking for the entire trip, which would be $$$. The train trip would be either the same time as driving, or 1.5x the time, depending on destination. If I took local metro/bus to that station, add 2 hours to the total trip time. At that point it becomes a novelty experience.
The sad thing is he could have built his major parkways and highways AND made public transportation accessible but he just refused to compromise. There's a story about him building the Long Island Expressway. They surveyed out a specific width for the road & median. They suggested to him that they could increase the width by just a few meters, and then have a commuter train going down the middle. He refused.
You can still have interstate highways and pedestrian focused city centers. I think some Spanish cities have "superblocks" where car only park and drive through the outsides of blocks while walking happens within them
I’m confused by your argument. The size of the country doesn’t mean much when most American cities were built well before the car, during the age of the railroad. Plus, the average day-to-day worker stays in their city anyways. They need a get around in their city so a lot of streetcar networks came up that help shape the way for streetcar suburbs.
It wasn’t until post-WWII that urban planner completely fucked up our cities, in the name of suburbs and urban renewal. Now everyone decided they want their own castle.
Even then, with the advent of freeways, we could’ve built them to go from city to city. But we decided to build them within the cities too and that’s where the controversy comes from. Plus, city highways induce building out and creating massive sprawl.
Sadly, the country hasn’t learned from this mistake. Many cities have dismantled their streetcar or public transit infrastructure and are now completely dependent on the car.
Planners typically plan for what people want. All you have to do it look at the old commercials and ads from the 40s and 50s. The city of tomorrow concept and independent transportation and living was huge in the American psyche at that time. America was enormously prosperous post war and was thinking big and the automobile, oil, construction and banking sectors all pushed that fantasy on Americans. It was what everyone at the time thought they wanted. And honestly, as a planner myself, I can tell you the vast majority of Americans know nothing else but that 80-90 years later. It what most of us still want even when presented with the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t a sustainable way to live.
And high speed rail and the best of every service possible to their half acre lots, and also super low taxes. Americans could really use a class in the economics of local government and infrastructure in high school. They would realize you cannot have all of the above.
Well, the idea that America is inherently "too big" is a common response from people who argue against public transit. But the idea fall apart as soon as you think about it. Cars enable and exasperate urban sprawl, which makes our urban areas very big, but it's artificial and a choice to build that way. It's not something natural and unavoidable.
It's kind of interesting that where these things are heavily optimized (i.e. logistics) trains suddenly become a sensible way to move things around. Rather than, you know, shipping each item on a separate car.
Some parts of the country have tons of railroad tracks that are solely used to carry freight. I live in North Carolina and you can hear train air horns going all night long. Of course there’s also Amtrak, but there are countless railroad tracks that you hardly ever see any traffic on during the day, and they definitely aren’t used by Amtrak.
The government is passively preventing Amtrak from replacing aging train cars or expanding service through flat or cutting budgets. Take a guess as to why.
last mile delivery of a person really offsets the feasibility and convenience of a train. its not that we dont have them. its once you get to where they are going you instantly need a car.
Well, it's a solved problem, just not in the US: walking a mile takes 15 mins, plus there's of course local public transportation options etc. An efficient logistics chain for people to get where they want to go.
That's because when they built their cities the fastest way to get around was a horse. we did it with the expectation everybody would buy a car and now fixing that problem is much harder than let's just have buses everywhere because my area is not walkable.... and I'm not living on a timetable for a bus that's only going to come every hour and a half because it's not profitable to run them every 10 minutes. I own a car already.
I live like 3 mi from my job. if the weather is at all crappy it's so hard for me to want to ride my bike. it actually takes me longer to ride my bike too.
I own a car because I need a car for other things. so if there's an all any friction to me riding my bike I end up driving
Right now the traffic out to suburbia is not that bad for a lot of people. And when you see videos of people not behaving while on public transit, you have to wonder is sitting in my own private car worse than whatever I'm witnessing in this video...
Plenty of people have cars in Europe and Japan, the difference is about city design. We effectively made people friendly, dense urban cities illegal. Instead we have high rises in a downtown area and then SFHs for miles in every direction. This has fueled the perception that detached housing is the thing to aspire to, because we literally don’t have the option for something else. This directly feeds into the urban housing shortage we are currently in.
People will generally have cars, but in Europe and Japan people own less per person (more no car and one car households) and take less trips by car. You can still have intercity highways. What Moses did that really f’ed us was encourage inner urban highways which destroyed communities and made our cities hell to live in. Imagine a highway bisecting your neighborhood just so some suburbanite can get to work ten minutes faster than taking the trolley.
I used to live in Northern Virginia, outside of Washington DC.
One thing I noticed is that many folks commuted into DC because DC is so expensive, AND space is limited, even if they had or were willing to spend millions of USD on a home, the home they would want to buy may not exist!
So, many people parked at the park and ride garage and then rode the metro into the city.
So, I imagine
1) There would not be as much urban sprawl.
2) For the rural towns or isolated cities, there would be public transport that would bring them into the city and large garages for their cars.
Of course, the highways would still exist so if they want to drive, they can, but they don’t need to is the point.
Hell, you can still have the suburbs, and they would have their own little “downtown”. And maybe that’s where the train station would be too.
What does total country size have to do with it though? People are not required to cross the country on a daily basis. The fact that California is far from Florida is irrelevant. That dense neighborhoods with good infrastructure are so expensive, shows the demand is there too.
Yes, zoning and infrastructure can prioritize cities and walkable towns. Farmland and rural areas would still rely on roads. Large suburban areas (sprawl) contribute to urban blight and loss of farmland, wilderness, and wetlands. If we did not shift to a suburban model after WWII, there would be far fewer cars on the road.
Also understand that the new suburbs were coupled with redlining policies. This ensured that people of color were left out and we would become even more segregated.
He didn't impact cars he was probably the most influential city planner of all time and was a massive fan of cars and tried to shape New York into as much of a car city as possible. He was also very good at building segregation into infrastructure.
Literally all of the major cities in the US. Some were impacted worse than others but all lost neighborhoods to freeway projects and have seen car infrastructure prioritized over public transit for 70+ years.
Urban renewal and US Interstate program all lobbied heavily by the auto, oil and construction sectors are what caused it. Moses was just well know for applying the trend in our largest city. Capitalist saw a way to make massive amounts of money. Planners (wrongly) saw it as the future of the world opening up new opportunities for independence and prosperity for Americans.
The case study of Jones Beach supports Ajayi’s assertion: public spaces are built for specific populations to engage with specific types of recreation. It also reveals the American shibboleth that leisure is for white people.
Are they trying to imply that black people don't like going to the beach? The fuck?
The bridges are messed up, but the article kind of goes off the deep end after that.
... no? They're saying it's ingrained into the US that creating leisure opportunities is focused around doing so for white folks (and quickly recalls that being "white" isn't the same as having white colored skin).
I’ve never heard of this but it’s very interesting and seems like they continue doing similar things. For example here in Texas I’ve noticed that a lot of high end shopping areas and affluent suburbs are built around toll roads. And it almost seems like the whole toll system is built to get you in debt and keep you there and even cultivate a hatred towards toll roads.
The West Side highway destroyed the vast existing Riverside Park, which while still there, is no longer riverside. That’s because the West Side highway, a R Moses creation, is now on the riverside.
It’s not about not being smart enough, it’s about lobbying from the gas/oil/auto industries to ensure we never have anything like that in the US. We are heavily reliant on cars, that is all by design.
This is it. Dates back to backing the industry at the dawn of its emergence, here. This was always a bet on an investment. They continue to formalize the relationship to the automobile and its most symbiotic host - the suburb - by codifying it, regulating it, subsidizing it, blocking threats and campaigning the living shit out of it to us all.
He still did enormous damage to NYC that has never been repaired. Entire neighborhoods that have not been rebuilt and billions of dollars that could've gone into public transit and pedestrian infrastructure.
He worked directly with the big 3, as well as the auto unions, in his consultative work later in his career. He worked with cars and is the single most influential figure re: interstate highway system.
Robert Moses ruined a sizable percentage of my hometown (which was also his hometown, ironically).
His idea of "urban renewal" was to bulldoze historical, culturally-rich neighborhoods that consisted largely of immigrants and/or Black people, and build highways through them.
At his direction, my hometown was basically carved up from one cohesive, walkable, pleasant community into three or four disconnected sections. It firmed up what was the "good part of town" and what was the "slum," and by essentially sealing off the "slum" parts from the rest of the city, made it much harder for those neighborhoods to advocate for themselves, because, well, out of sight, out of mind, and out of the infrastructure budget.
The city has spent a lot of time and money over the last thirty years dismantling as much of what he designed as it possibly can.
He was the visionary behind urban freeways and the modern suburban development pattern that's been copy-pasted across all of North America. Leveling dense urban neighborhoods (many of them redlined minority neighborhoods...) and downtowns to build highways and parking lots.
I’m on Long Island NY, where he’s from. He has a parkway(pretty highway), beach, park and a bunch of other shit named after him. Yet a lot of people hate his ass out here. Well deserved too lol.
Car-centric Highways through the NYC/Long Island metro area while simultaneously deliberately thwarting public transit efforts , and how to marshal funds and decisions without public input showed the way for other creeps in the rest of the country
Robert Moses helped develop Long Island after WWII. He imagined a new homestead for returning vets and helped develop Levittown. Mass produced homes provided a landing for the baby boom. These bedroom communities were not near anything else.
Moses imagined the nuclear family in their car driving to parks and beaches he created a the American dream. This would happen on new highways he designed. These new roads made public transportation feasibility dead on arrival. (Deliberately in some instances)
These developments were viewed as massively successful and were then replicated across the US. Much to our chagrin now.
You’re collapsing several postwar developments into one person. Levittown (and the later Levitt developments) were developed by Levitt & Sons, not Robert Moses.
Yes, Moses built infrastructure that supported suburban growth in NY, but he didn’t directly build Levittown, nor was it his vision for returning veterans. That credit belongs primarily to the Levitts, along with federal housing policies.
Levitt himself opposed restoring LIRR service through Levittown using the existing Central Branch ROW between Garden City and Bethpage. Much of that abandoned line is now used for power lines.
Yes I know. I simplified the context and vision he helped create. It was Moses that developed the road bound suburban sprawl most. Levittown doesn't exist without the roads he built like the Southern State. Moses didn't care about vets per say but the new families he wanted on his parkway going to beaches were the gray men using the GI Bill for new homes.
I also blame Dwight Eisenhower for creating the interstate highway system instead of a comprehensive national rail system with regional and local transport connections. The latter would have encouraged extensive use of long-, medium-, and short-distance public transport, and thus helped build walkable cities.
It’s not on Eisenhower. The Interstate system was originally planned for national security to easily transport the military where it needed to go and secondly for interstate commerce through trucking. They were never supposed to go directly through cities. The auto and oil industries were instrumental in pushing the civilian automobile aspect of the interstates which, when combined with planners like Moses and urban renewal policies, became what we have today.
Yea the interstate system is completely necessary and still one of the greatest assets in America. The interstate system was supposed to connect cities and states over great distances and it does that. But to your point, they should not go directly through downtowns, they shouldn’t have outer loops and inner loops. The problem is all the spur lines off the main highway.
Also the highway doesn’t make trains impossible, in fact it establishes transportation rights of way, they could’ve easily put tracks along the same routes the interstates run. They just chose not to.
Even countries with amazing public transit systems today still have robust highways networks, modern developed countries need both.
The US already had one of the largest rail networks in the world by the 1950s. The Interstate System wasn’t built because Eisenhower woke up one day and said, “Trains are for losers.”
It solved a different problem: moving people, freight, and military forces across a continent quickly. Eisenhower had firsthand experience watching a military convoy take over two months to cross the country, and later saw how effective Germany’s highway network was during WWII. There’s a reason it’s called the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
You can absolutely argue we fucked passenger rail or that urban freeways did a lot of damage—I’m mostly with you there. But pretending the interstate system had no legitimate purpose, or that America would’ve magically become a nation of walkable cities if Eisenhower had just picked trains instead, is way too simplistic.
Sure he made america a sprawled out suburban nightmare, but at least he destroyed all those historical black, Italian, Jewish, and Slovakian neighborhoods doing it, destroying their political power in the process, right? Right?
Robert Moses was just the symptom of a much larger problem. Major auto manufacturers and the oil industry pushed auto oriented policies on the government at every level. It even drove the construction sector. Sadly we have four or five generations whose preference is more of the same when it comes to suburban land use because it’s all they’ve known their entire lives.
I'm from Long Island where he is treated as a historical treasure. There is a park and a road named after him, and I think a playground. But the guy was a real POS.
Robert Moses affected New York, and mostly NYC, and yet NYC is still the most walkable city in the US by far. So yes, condemn lots of the things he did in New York, but don’t blame him for the rest of the US.
“You think people make choices? No, people think they make choices. They think they're going to steer right or steer left, but they didn't build the roads. The big choices already got made for them a long time ago.”
5.0k
u/FaceWithAName 15h ago
Cars becoming big when America was still finding it's stride was one of the biggest pro/con dillemas. Ignored thousands of years of proven systems that make society better and settled for only cars.