Robert Moses

Getting to the Empire State Trail from the Hudson River Greenway is quite the climb! Could a bike lane be the answer — and to a greenway closure, too?

We can shatter Robert Moses's blueprint for cities across America — and the injustices that endure to this day — but it's not easy.

Some then-and-now photos of New York City show how residents lost precious space to the automobile. What we could do to fix it.

The reconstruction of the Riverside Park Rotunda and traffic circle forges ahead — without the cycling safety measures the community demanded. Cue the complaints.

In 1974, he underscored his magnum opus as "Robert Moses and the Fall of New York." This week, Caro reiterated that New York has never recovered from the master builder's evil.

Rail~volution is underway in Portland, Oregon, bringing together more than 1,000 city planners, engineers, transit advocates, bike policy experts, and elected officials to strategize about making cities and towns better for transit, walking, and biking.

There is probably no more beloved figure in urbanism than Jane Jacobs, who fought to preserve some of New York City's most treasured neighborhoods and who gave urbanists some of the field's fundamental texts. As Ed Glaeser notes in the New Republic this week, Jacobs died in 2006 "a cherished, almost saintly figure," while her principal antagonist, Robert Moses, remains popularly reviled as a villain.

T.A. director Paul White sends along this little nugget he came across in the New York Times archive. Read it for a timely review (penned by a pre-Bilbao Herbert Muschamp) of a Municipal Art Society show staged the last time an economic downturn coincided with a presidential election, in 1992:

Dave Lutz of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition has been digging through the Municipal Archives and look what he found: a 1938 memo from Robert Moses to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia about the need to create a network of dedicated bike paths in city parks. Moses's reasoning looks odd to modern eyes, in part because he argues for bike paths as a purely recreational amenity. His rationale for bike infrastructure fails to see cycling as transportation (sound familiar?), choosing instead to segregate bike facilities from the street network.