Nicole Gelinas joins Brian Anderson to discuss her new book, Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back its Streets from the Car.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the Editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Nicole Gelinas, a friend who’s been on many, many times. She’s a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a longtime contributing editor of City Journal, and a columnist for the New York Post. She writes often on urban economics, infrastructure, and finance. Her works appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, other publications.
Today though, we’re going to be discussing her new book, Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back its Streets from the Car. It’s a really important book and thrilled to be able to talk about it. So Nicole, thanks very much for joining us.
Nicole Gelinas: Likewise, Brian. Happy New Year to everyone, and thanks for having me back on.
Brian Anderson: Yeah, well, Happy New Year, absolutely. So I have to say, I’ve been working with you for many years, but Movement is really a monumental achievement. So first, congratulations on the book.
Nicole Gelinas: Thank you, Brian.
Brian Anderson: You’ve been writing about transit in New York for many years now, including in City Journal’s pages, and the book is in a lot of ways a culmination of all of those years of work, research, and thinking about these important issues. So tell us a bit about your work on the book, how you conceived of the narrative, and maybe what surprised you in doing the research on it.
Nicole Gelinas: Sure, absolutely. And I also want to say I really appreciate everything that the people at the Manhattan Institute and City Journal have done to support the book, including in the many years of research and pre-research.
So, what gave me the idea for the book is that I noticed over the years, everyone kind of gets stuck in this Robert Moses trap, and that we tend to think we live in the world that Robert Moses built. Moses starting in the first third of the 20th century, in the popular notion, was responsible for building the expressways, the parkways, the highways, the large-scale public housing that defines New York. And it’s whether it’s pro-transit politicians, anti-transit politicians, pro-bicycle, anti-bicycle, everyone seems to think Moses created this world, and there’s not a lot we can do about it. We can take some harm reduction steps, narrow a highway or cap a little bit of an expressway, but there’s just not very much we can do to change this world.
And it just got me to thinking, Moses has been dead for more than 40 years. He hasn’t had any power for close to 60 years. So, should we really be acting as if we’re so helpless that we can’t make major changes to something where, even if you believe the Moses myth, he hasn’t had anything to do with New York State and New York City transportation policy or practice in well more than half a century. So, something must have happened during that half a century, and we should be able to build on that in more drastic ways.
So, I just thought it would be a good idea to go back and see what has happened since Moses lost power, since the late-1960s. So, everything to do with creating bike lanes, creating pedestrian plazas, rebuilding the MTA, finding financial resources for the MTA, getting crime off of the subways. All these things from the Koch Administration through to the Bloomberg Administration and beyond, a lot of stories there that just weren’t being told.
Brian Anderson: Well, there’s no question though, as you note in the book, that great things or certainly monumental things, to use that word again, were accomplished under Moses or under his direct influence. So his Regional Plan, as you note in Movement, resulted in the creation of this kind of car-centric environment with four bridges, three tunnels, 11 parkways and expressways.
So I wonder, since you do write about Moses in the book, were these achievements predominantly the result of his incredible willpower and effectiveness as bureaucrat, his authoritarian impulses? Or was he really reflecting what was a different attitude more broadly in the city about some of these issues on urban development?
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, there’s no question that Moses was a bureaucratic genius, a managerial genius. He was a visionary when it came to Jones Beach and when it came to the system of parks and also for better or for worse, housing. But on transportation and transit, what he accomplished really reflected what New York City wanted. Starting after World War I, not really so much after World War II, that’s just a popular notion, New York, whether it was the business community, elected officials, multiple mayors and governors, the what we now call the mainstream media, New York Times and many, many other outlets, everybody thought the future of the city is the car. If we don’t remake the city around people wanting to get around in the private automobile, the city is going to lose out to the suburbs. And if you put yourself in these people’s minds, it made a lot of sense at the time.
So, you had the Regional Plan made up of prominent business people, prominent citizenry, saying, “We have to build expressways, we have to build highways, we have to build parkways, we have to separate traffic from people walking around and from the buildings.” And so this was the blueprint that Moses kind of seized on and he executed it. And for most of this time period, well up until the early 1960s, the elite criticism of Moses and sometimes often the sort of common man on the street criticism was that he was too slow in executing these projects.
So this idea that Moses, he had this secret plan to foist upon New York things that elected officials and the press and the populace did not want and that they had no choice in the matter, just not the case. He never built anything that was not approved multiple times in multiple fora by governors, mayors, other elected officials. And when these people all changed their minds, Moses’s power very quickly melted away. So it’s like The Wizard of Oz. I mean, there’s no there there, when it comes to an unelected person forcing a vision of New York, that New York otherwise would not have wanted.
Brian Anderson: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And you alluded earlier that Moses’s power started dissipating before he was done as bureaucratic reign with conflicts with Jane Jacobs famously. Since the peak of that Moses era, the city has certainly seen a shift away from the focus on the car and back to an emphasis on walkable neighborhoods, mixed use developments, and an emphasis on transit, at least to some extent. So, what were the forces, maybe we can just mention them briefly, that resulted in that shift in culture that resulted in Moses losing his power?
Nicole Gelinas: Well, I think one of the forces starting in the early 1960s and really becoming much more starkly clear during the 1970s, was the emerging fact that remaking New York around the automobile was not stopping the flight to the suburbs. And in fact, in some ways it facilitated the flight to the suburbs. So, this idea that you could build parking lots and you wouldn’t lose shoppers to the suburbs because they could park just as easily in the city as they could out at a suburban mall, or that you could build wide highways into the core of the city and someone would choose to drive into the city rather than choose to drive to a suburban office park. It was never going to be very easy to drive into and around New York City, no matter how many roads we built and widened.
And we started to figure that out in the early 1960s that this wasn’t working, but not only that, you were destroying the quality of life for people who wanted to stay in the urban environment, people who weren’t attracted to the subways but we’re now kind of stuck with the car generated pollution, noise, danger, and so forth. So, just sort of realizing all of this highway building was not working and was in fact making it worse, kind of started to took take root in the early 1960s.
And also, the creation of a new political base in Manhattan kind of succeeding the old Tammany Hall base. Tammany Hall was kind of transactional with regards to the working class, voting base. People got some modest social services, they got government jobs, government benefits, and in return, they would vote for the government. Starting in the 1960s, you had what now today we would call gentrifiers moving to Manhattan, moving into places like Greenwich Village, more affluence and more sophisticated at the political process. And they understood and created a way to fight the political process, rather than just find their place in the political process.
So, sometimes for good results and sometimes for results we might not agree with, a new base of voters, found a way to work against business as usual and doing things like when the city wanted to widen a road through Washington Square Park, figured out a way not only to not widen the road, but to get rid of the existing road through the park. It’s something you just would not have seen a quarter of a century before when the people who lived in these areas were basically, what they wanted from the government was a job and some early semblance of social services benefits.
Brian Anderson: How big a role did Jane Jacobs play in this kind of shift, or did she just reflect underlying patterns that would’ve led to a different person taking up that cause?
Nicole Gelinas: Well, she certainly played an important role, but much like the Moses story is partly the moments created the man, as much as the man created the moments. The same thing with Jane Jacobs. She would not have had the same success that she had in the late 1960s at killing the Lower Manhattan Expressway that would’ve, as the name implies, gone across Lower Manhattan and destroyed much of Soho and Little Italy. She could not have had that success if she had not learned from the previous generation of activists.
A woman named Shirley Hayes, a neighbor of Jane Jacobs in the village in the 1950s. She was the point person on killing the road through Washington Square Park. She was not a sophisticated urbanist. She had gone to college but had not studied any planning or architecture or transportation field. She had been an off-Broadway actress and worked for The Voice of America before settling down as a homemaker in the village. But she was really the first to crack the code that if you want to beat Moses, you don’t put the pressure on Moses, you put the pressure on the elected officials who control Moses. So she kept her pressure in the Washington Square Park Road fight. She kept the pressure on Mayor Wagner. She kept it on the Manhattan Bar President and got enough tens of thousands of voters together to really represent a credible political threat to these people. And so, they capitulated.
And a decade later when Jane Jacobs was fighting Moses, she really wasn’t fighting Moses. It was John Lindsay ultimately, who killed the Lower Manhattan Expressway because he was in a tough reelection fight and he needed these liberal voters who had been there the first time he ran, who were very disillusioned with him. He needed to keep them on side to win the second time. And so he canceled the highway. It was really not up to Moses as nothing unilaterally was up to Moses.
Brian Anderson: I wonder what lessons current and future urban planners and city officials can learn from this history of New York City’s transportation development. And then more broadly, how important is the transportation situation in the city for New York’s economic future and for prosperity? More than most cities, New York really depends on a very robust public transportation system.
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing to keep in mind is that the goal of the book is, and of pro transit approach in general, is no one wants to get rid of the car. The car has its place in the city, the car even has its place in Manhattan. We all take taxis, we all take for-hire services. Many of us have cars and use cars, so within Manhattan and within the rest of the city. It is just a game of inches, where the car has to have a place in the city that is not the dominant mode of transportation or be dominating the physical streetscape.
So for example, three quarters of people coming into Manhattan come in on some form of mass transit. Only a quarter come in by private car. And if more people tried to come in by private car, you would just have complete gridlock. The people just do not fit on streets of Manhattan. So even if you drive in, certainly you’re right, but it helps you immensely that most people do not drive in. So, something to keep in mind when it comes to economic growth in the city, if the subway system, commuter rail system, bus system, if they are not working and you cannot get your workforce reliably into Manhattan, the economy of New York City is not doing very well.
So, it’s not so much we don’t want anyone driving in Manhattan, but that we have to keep in mind, the focus should always be, how do we build a better mass transit system? And how do we make sure that people who are driving aren’t posing a danger to pedestrians, aren’t posing a danger to bicyclists, aren’t posing a danger to each other? So, some of this is just your basic law and order that we have to devise and enforce the laws and the rules of the road that makes sure that the car is not harming other people’s quality of life.
Brian Anderson: Yeah, one enthusiasm of transit riders, and I think you embrace this view, as well as to just encourage people to be using public transportation, subways. But right now, as you’ve written extensively, people aren’t very comfortable taking the subways in New York City. I don’t know what the exact ridership numbers are at this month, but they’re certainly down from where they were pre-COVID. And part of that I think reflects the concerns over public safety on the subway. So, I wonder how that fits into your narrative here.
Nicole Gelinas: Yeah, there’s no question that New York has had a hard time rebuilding transit ridership since the COVID lockdowns, going on five years ago now, and a big part of that problem is deteriorated public safety. So, from 1997 till 2019, we had one or two murders every year on the subway system. And much of that was the work of the former Transit Police Commissioner, Bill Bratton, later went on to become NYPD Commissioner twice in the early 1990s. He was in charge of public safety on the subway system. He dispatched the broken windows policing theory, that you stop small crimes before they escalate to larger crimes, in a small but not insignificant percentage of cases. So you would catch fare-beaters, a disproportionate share of them would have an outstanding warrant for a violent crime or they’d be carrying a weapon.
So, by stopping the fare-beaters, that’s good in and of itself, and that you don’t want to lose that revenue. But it’s also good in that you prevent a fight on the subway where someone pulls out a knife and stabs someone, or you prevent a robbery on the subway, or you keep someone from going in who is going to smoke crack or opium or an opioid or so forth on a subway car and scare the other passengers off. So, that worked very well. We started to lose sight of that in the couple of years leading up to 2019.
And during the COVID lockdowns, it all fell apart, where we’ve now had 43 homicides on the subway system in a little less than five years. So we’ve crammed 20 years worth of subway homicides into five years. A massive deterioration in public safety, assaults are up, open-air drug use are up. And smaller crimes, which often don’t get reported, like someone pushing you on the subway, things that are just considered misdemeanors or even just violations, these things are also way up. And so this is keeping some elements, 20% or so of our pre-COVID ridership, off of the subway. No question that New York has a long way to go with its criminal justice system and with a functional mental health system, before we get back to pre-COVID public safety levels on the subway.
Brian Anderson: Well, relatedly, as a final question, we’re going to be entering, seemingly, a new era of movement in New York with congestion pricing. The introduction of congestion pricing, which has recently happened for those people who are not from New York, who might be listening. Now, that’s a big subject, it’s certainly worth its own podcast once this experiment is further along. But briefly, how do you see congestion pricing fitting in with New Yorkers’ current priorities in 2025 when it comes to transit? And how is the program working so far?
Nicole Gelinas: Well, I think congestion pricing in theory is a good idea. And so far, although it’s too early to declare victory, defeat, or something in between, it’s certainly working from the perspective of keeping traffic down. According to the MTA, we’ve lost about 8% of our vehicle traffic into core Manhattan over the first week that it was in place, starting January 5th. But that’s not enough to know, is this good or not? We need to know, did people who stopped driving, did they get on the transit system? If they’re just staying home, that’s not good for the city’s economy. And we also need to know, do fewer cars and trucks on streets of Manhattan, are they creating a public safety problem and that people can drive more quickly? Are we going to see more pedestrian injuries and deaths? Again, too early to know, but just saying, “Oh, traffic’s down,” as some of the advocates are saying, that’s only a very small part of the whole story.
There’s four or five different metrics you need to look at, and I think another one of those metrics is, this by itself does not fix the MTA’s myriad problems. Congestion pricing was sold for a long time as, this is a elixir for all of the MTA’s capital investment problems. You’re going to have many new subway lines, bus lines, commuter rail lines, even bicycle bridges and so forth, if we just implement this program. This is only one of many revenues for the MTA and even with congestion pricing, they already have a deficit problem starting in the next couple of years. Their fundamental problem is their costs far exceed inflation, in terms of annual growth. Until they start to get their costs under control, which involves being tougher with the unions, being tougher with construction firms, all sorts of issues, congestion pricing is really not going to change peoples’ day-to-day commute.
Brian Anderson: Interesting. Well, you can read more of Nicole Gelinas’s work in this wonderful new book. It’s called Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back its Streets from the Car. It’s really kind of the definitive book on this subject of transportation in New York. And you can find her work, of course, on the City Journal website. We’ll have a link to her author page there in the description, and you can find City Journal on X @CityJournal and on Instagram @CityJournal_MI. If you like what you’ve heard on today’s podcast, please give us a nice rating on iTunes.
And Nicole, thanks for this insightful discussion and congratulations again on this fascinating new book.
Nicole Gelinas: Thank you, Brian.
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