On Nov. 5, New York City author Nicole Gelinas published "Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back its Streets from the Car" (Fordham University Press), an extensive, decades-long look at how America's greatest city went from a pedestrian and transit paradise to a car-choked, polluted mess. Yes, Robert Moses is a key figure, but there are so many villains along the way — looking at you, LaGuardia! — that you really do need a 500-page volume to understand it all. Plus, "Movement" offers a term paper's worth of remedies for any society that wants to change. Gelinas chatted with Streetsblog NYC Editor Gersh Kuntzman this week.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length and to get you excited about "Movement" without Kuntzman's excesses and flourishes.
Gersh Kuntzman: The book opens on a pretty dark idea: “The automobile changed the world and helped drive New York City and other cities to the brink of irrevocable urban decline.” Many, many people saw that this decline would follow the widespread adoption of the auto. And it indeed came to pass. Why do most Americans, however, not agree with that statement — or aren't even aware of it?
Nicole Gelinas: Well, I think it's it's like the fish not being aware of the water. Unless you live in New York City and a couple of other specific places in the United States, you live in an auto-dependent culture, so you don't even notice it. The degree of the dependence is so much. You cannot go to the grocery store, and you cannot go to school, you cannot find a job unless you have a car, and unless you're spending a significant amount of time in your car.
So I understand why people in the rest of this country are immediately suspicious and resentful at any attempts to restrict access to the car or to get people to get around in other ways because dependence creates a real sense of fear. "If the car or the SUV is the only way I can get to my job and feed my family, if you're going to try and take this away from me or restrict my use of it, you are harming me, and I don't want that."
Kuntzman: But people hate traffic everywhere. And they hate having to drive. And no one is really restricting anyone's ability to drive.
Gelinas: People hate traffic, but New York is the only place where
they are at least open to other ways of dealing with traffic then expanding the road and the highway system. And that is a new thing: from World War I until the mid-1960s New York's answer to traffic was the same as the rest of the country's answer to traffic: by building new roads, building bypass roads, widening existing roads that we have. And that didn't work.
The difference between New York and the rest of the country is we kind of realized that it didn't work. The difference is we belatedly and after exhausting all of the other options, we stopped building new urban highways and even began in the decades after that, to narrow the roadways, make more room for pedestrians, for cyclists, for other street uses, and, of course, much later, for open dining.
But the rest of the country is still going with the idea of building a wider highway or a bypass road. So, yes, people hate traffic, but a natural reaction to hating traffic is, "There's too much traffic. We need to widen the highway."
Kuntzman: The book continues the ongoing revision on the overall legacy of Robert Moses. He’s not villain. He’s the symbol of our collective sin. You say that “it’s time to stop blaming Moses” because he’s been dead for 40 years and "our current generation of leaders” haven’t given us the city we need. That's obviously true, but aren't we still living in Moses’s mistakes? There are scars. There was underinvestment in MTA. How do we undo Moses?
Gelinas: I would like us, and I hope the book will get people to see it a little bit differently: we don't live in the world that Moses created. We live in the world that we create and the world that we choose to live in. So if you are Chuck Schumer — a long-time senator, long-time member of Congress, long-time member of the Assembly or Senate, in other words, you have some power — and you are pointing to something like the Cross-Bronx Expressway and saying, "Moses built that and we're stuck with it," or you're pointing to the parkways and saying, "Moses built the parkways so they wouldn't allow busses," again, don't blame Moses. What are you doing? If you if you think the Cross-Bronx Expressway is having such a horrific effect today on the neighborhoods of the Bronx, what is your plan to either cap this over or reduce traffic across the region? What is your plan to reduce the need for this expressway so that we can narrow the road? What's your capital plan to raise all the bridges over the parkways so that busses can fit? Stop blaming someone who has been dead for more than 40 years, and start thinking about what you have or haven't done.
Kuntzman: Another big part of the book is how transportation is also part of the culture war these days. But it was always thus! Your book describes a war against streetcars that car owners started in the 1920s, saying streetcars cause traffic and are unsafe! Today it’s bikes. Or restaurant sheds. Or delivery workers. Fact is: car people have always deflected blame.
Gelinas: That was all elected officials at the city level directly accountable to the voters. They saw the bus as this great new technology that would save us from the old way of doing things. And we see that over and over: we are seduced by a new technology. We're seduced by Uber and Lyft. "You can throw away the old rules that we have to cap the number of cabs because Uber and Lyft, you do it on the app. It's a whole new thing!" Well, it's really not a new thing. You still have to cap the number of for hire vehicles. And we see this today with autonomous vehicles or electric vehicles. These are still very low occupancy motor vehicles, and should be treated the way we treat the same old low occupancy inefficient motor vehicles in an urban environment.
But yeah. I mean, why did the mayors get rid of streetcars? Because they saw this lumbering thing in the middle of the street that was getting in the way of the cars. They wanted to make more room for the cars. And pedestrians, when they got off the streetcar, they would get hit by cars. And it's the same argument we see over and over. Well, what was the problem there? For a very long time, pedestrians had been able to get off the streetcar without incident. The problem that was introduced was the car. But instead of seeing that as a problem, we just rearranged the streets for the car.
Kuntzman: At every turn, it's always this notion of progress. And it is the car owners who are causing the problems: road violence, traffic, recklessness. But the last segment of the book — "unfinished business" — becomes the juiciest for a discussion because it's where we really get into the culture war. The book lays out two scenarios:
More people live in the city’s office districts, in older buildings converted into apartments. Because most of their fellow residents, visitors, and commuters rely on transit, not cars, New Yorkers walk and bicycle safely on streets, zip smoothly along bus lanes, and eat at outdoor cafes. People traveling from one outer borough to another or from one suburb to an outer borough can do so via faster, cheaper, and more frequent rail and bus lines. Driving isn’t banned, but the city restricts it in dense areas, recognizing that people who choose the least efficient mode of transportation in the densest city in the United States mustn’t expect other people to sacrifice safety, comfort, and health for their convenience. The state and city charge drivers for moving and parking vehicles on dense streets at congested hours, where alternatives to driving exist.
In an alternate future, New York fails to rebuild confidence in its mass-transit system, and the Manhattan business district fails to recover. As riders stay away, the MTA cuts service, repelling more passengers. Subways and buses become the domain of people with few options, and the state and city can no longer muster political will to further subsidize fare revenues with tax revenues. Without well-designed congestion pricing, drivers crowd Manhattan roads, even as the population falls. Nobody wants to walk, cycle, or dine outdoors amid gridlock, noise, and danger. This lack of activity justifies handing streets back to cars; traffic is worse than ever, the reasoning goes, and drivers need extra space. People who had wanted to live or work in a big city because they wanted to walk and bike the streets are repelled by motor vehicles making urban life less livable. New York loses the wealth generated by Manhattan’s density, harming its ability to fund social services and public education. Poorer New Yorkers must buy second- or third- hand cars to get to work to school or sacrifice hours of scarce leisure time waiting for trains and buses that don’t come.
Why doesn't the majority of Americans realize this?
Gelinas: We have a problem through our history if there isn't a crisis. Rockefeller created the MTA in 1968. He wanted credit for creating the MTA but he didn't want to actually fund the MTA. So it lumbers along for another decade and change with no money. It wasn't until the early 1980s where it reached such a level of crisis, where people were constantly being ejected from the trains on their commutes because the train had failed. Track fires, graffiti everywhere, old broken down busses, terrible, unreliable infrastructure, where the businesses in Manhattan — financial firms, law firms, so forth — were saying, "We can't get our workers into the city anymore. This is bad." It has to be pretty bad for the CEOs to start noticing and saying, "Yes, we will support higher taxes for transit." And you needed someone like Dick Ravitz, who came from the business community, was a credible voice in that community, saying, "There's no other choice but for the legislature to enact these taxes to refund and rebuild the transit system."
So that was a crisis. And then you had the crime crisis. You know, 26 homicides on the subway in 1990, including Brian Watkins, the tourist from Utah. Mayor Dinkins was being hit by every newspaper. He was being hit by Gene Russianoff with the Straphangers Campaign. Well, why did we have to wait for 26 homicides on subways until we got to that point? We are not good at dealing with transportation and transit strategically outside of crisis. The only time when we came close was starting during the Bloomberg years, when the city was heading toward record low levels of crime, record high population. We seemed to have solved our major problems, so we could get a little breathing room and think about things strategically and start thinking in the long term.
That's kind of gone away past few years.
Kuntzman: But you lay out a scenario that is pretty clear to most people, that a) we're in a crisis.
Gelinas: Yeah it's clear, but we have an election, right? If you were to ask most people what their top five issues are this year — it is not transportation and transit. I didn't create that, but that is the political reality; this is not top of mind for most people unless there's a crisis. And hopefully the book will cause people to think about this a little bit differently.
Kuntzman: The other crisis that nobody really ever sees is the fact that there are 100,000 reported car crashes every year in New York. It's more than 200 a day, and there are 50,000 people injured every year in New York. I mean, those numbers are astounding.
Gelinas: Yeah. In the past few years, we have seen just far more aggressive driving. Drivers are just running red lights — two or three cars. Some of that can be solved with more cameras. I think we should have a red light camera at every intersection. But, yes, despite the fact that Streetsblog and others have gotten far, far more attention to this preventable loss of life and loss of quality life over the past 15 years, it would be good if people thought more about the risk of car crashes in integrating that into how they go about their day to day lives and say, "This is unacceptable, and how can this be better?" This should also be a top political concern, right?
Kuntzman: In other words, buy the book.
Nicole Gelinas will be hosting a book talk (with Howard Wolfson) on Wednesday, Nov. 13 at 7 p.m. at the bookstore P&T Knitwear (180 Orchard St. between Houston and Stanton). Tickets are $5 (which can be used as a credit for the book). Click here for info.
