"One editorial opined that the new parkways would, by relieving the traffic load on the Southern and Northern State Parkways, 'Solve the problem of access to Moses' Long Island parks for generations.' The new parkways solved the problem for about 3 weeks. '[...]3 weeks after they opened that I decided to go out to Jones Beach on a Sunday', Paul Windels recalls, '[...]by God it was as jammed the Southern State ever was!'. Moses announced that he had the solution: build 45 miles of new parkways."
"Some city planners noticed that the traffic pattern on Long Island had fallen into a set pattern. Every time a new parkway was built, it quickly became jammed with traffic; but the load on the old parkways was not significantly relieved. If this had been the pattern for the first 100 miles of parkways, they wondered, might it not be the pattern for the next 45 also? Perhaps consideration should be given to trying to ease LI's traffic problem by other means; specifically, improved mass transit"
"The Wantagh State Parkway extension did not receive its first real test of traffic easing capacity until the first warm weekend morning of 1939. On that morning, it was jammed bumper-to-bumper for more than 3 miles. Traffic experts[sic] could not understand where those cars had come from. The other Long Island parkways, after all, were just as jammed as ever."
It's amazing that these piece of shit parkways are still around.
"On August 17th, 1936, a little more than a month after the Triborough Bridge opened, Long Island's parkways were the scene of what some observers called 'The greatest traffic tie-up in the history of the Metropolitan area'. Referring to it as, 'A cross-country traffic jam', The Herald Tribune was forced to conclude that the bridge had, at least indirectly, caused it."
Despite almost a century of these observations, traffic disappearing when a highway shuts down is some kind of magic anomaly.
"But traffic on the 4 other East River bridges was not falling off at anything near a comparable rate. The 8 million cars & trucks that Moses had forecast would use Triborough each year were supposed to be cars & trucks that had previously used the other bridges - particularly the Queensboro. Not only Moses, but all traffic experts [sic] who had studied the problem had agreed on that. Otherwise, where would these cars & trucks come from?" #InducedDemand
"Traffic between the Island & the City had been increasing before, of course; increasing steadily. But never had it increased at this rate. If traffic between the Island & the City was a stream, something had suddenly opened the sluice gates much wider than they had ever been before. The more the traffic experts[sic] studied the problem, the more difficult it was for them to avoid the conclusion that the 'something' was the only new element in the situation - [...] the Triborough Bridge itself."
Your regular reminder from the 1930s and the 1970s that shutting down highways is not only good for the climate, but good for congestion as well. And any state DOTs or politicians who claim "just one more lane will fix it" are completely full of shit.
"Somehow, in ways [the traffic 'experts'] did not even pretend to understand, the construction of t[he Triborough] bridge, the most gigantic and modern traffic sorting and conveying machine in the world, had not only failed to cure the traffic problem it was supposed to solve, but had actually made it worse."
@Andres4NY I'm only like 150 pages in, but he always seemed so dead set on these parkways. And given his constant praise of being brilliant throughout his life/being a voracious learner I can't wrap my head around how he couldn't understand how cars would be less efficient at moving people compared to trains...but, no spoilers haha
@fetch Slight spoiler (sorry): at one point towards the end of Vol 1 or at the beginning of Vol 2, Caro talks about how Moses worked out his formula so well for Long Island parks (including those "parkway" access roads), but then he took what was a rural/suburban design and just applied it to urban design without really caring enough to change it. He had his formula down by the time he started working on NYC roads/parks.
Which is basically what we see state/fed DOTs doing to cities.
@fetch Both in terms of actual building, and of the roadway standards they produce that state & municipal governments are required to follow when accepting federal transportation funds.
@Andres4NY@fetch He’s a fascinating figure because he embodies and personalizes a whole set of biases and bad practices that still dominate North American land use and transportation today
@Lyle@fetch I'm at the part where he tricks legislators into giving him unbridled irrevocable power via an Authority. He drafts bills that are like "the Authority shall cease to exist when all bonds are repaid or in 40 years" right up front, like every other similar bill.. and then buried hundreds of pages later, something letting the Authority reissue bonds and list himself in the bond contracts. Makes me wonder if they had computers and 'diff' back then, if he would've been stopped..
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