New York Could Die

...In purely economic terms the waste itself has created a feverish prosperity in certain basic industries, those whose products are consumed to feed the American dream of the better life through suburban living...

...But the economic corollary is persuasive to these groups...

...The blunt economic truth that must be borne upon them is that surrender to the automobile means ultimate disaster to the mass transportation system...

...Second only to his consuming passion for maintaining the Port Authority's high credit standing (so it can market its bonds successfully and perpetuate itself) is Tobin's drive for ever greater traffic flow...

...Our city officials' bias in favor of the private automobile and their appalling obtuseness in confusing concentration with congestion lead inevitably to the disintegrating development known as urban sprawl...

...The frenetic unplanned waste of space and materials may soon reach a point of frustrating the further development of the New York regional economy...

...Mumford and Owen are typical of those who speak for what must be called the consuming public...

...The most rigorous and delicate planning must be undertaken not only to save the central city from congestive failure but also to preserve for its inhabitants the fast-disappearing open land within the city's regional area...

...Wiley's response has been that cities never die of congestion but only of the lack of it...

...About I37,000 more cars enter the area daily than in 1948...

...The moribundity of the city's residential plant is intensified...

...If this is not done, within a decade New York's entire metropolitan region will be unalterably debased...

...This proposal has been challenged on the grounds that these facilities will surely worsen an already intolerable situation...

...The fact is that mass transport facilities such as commuter rail lines are much less expensive to build and maintain than highways capable of handling comparable numbers of people...

...Progress...

...But in Cleveland it is 25.6 per cent and in Los Angeles an appalling 40 per cent...

...do we accede to it as an "uncontrollable" fact of life...

...The usual response is a throwing up of hands: "What can we do...

...It would mean instead an arbitrary rejection of this public preference, if preference it really is (who knows...

...Furthermore, as he points out, the resulting fragmented metropolitan areas present not only a disfigured, monotonous and boring habitat for the suburbanite, but also make for a weakened center city...

...Lewis Mumford in his New Yorker series has underscored the folly of the Port Authority's predilection for automotive facilities at the expense of rapid transit and of a rationally balanced network of all kinds of transport, including walking...

...All of us can sense instinctively that while concentration and congestion are similar they are also different conditions...

...and a universal dismay at the increase in traffic snarls and the spoliation of rural land...

...Real estate is the prime source for municipal tax revenue, but the sheer storage of vehicles, that is, parking, represents a purely non-productive use of space...

...However, the privilege of private choice in transportation is no longer feasible...

...These decisions must be made by an agency that is responsive to needs that cross both municipal and state lines...

...The surface manifestation of this is the evidence that mass transportation has come increasingly to be used by the poor, while the taxis and private cars choking the streets carry the economic elite...

...That public opinion is beginning to change is reflected in many obvious ways: the grudging approval of rail tax relief and subsidy...

...The city's Commissioner of Traffic, T. T. Wiley, is pressing for the construction of 15 huge parking garages costing $52.5 million in mid-town Manhattan to lure back suburban shoppers...

...And no one in the Port of New York Authority, in Detroit or in any other temple of automotive worship can refute the axiom that an express highway for automobiles can handle only one-tenth the hourly passenger load of a comparable mass transit system...

...Any acceleration of this trend in jam-packed New York City would have the most deleterious effect...

...The first step in rehabilitating New York is an imaginative and courageous use of positive restrictions in dealing with the automobile...

...And linked to these are questions about housing, the exodus of wealth and talent to the suburbs, and the disintegration of central city residential and commercial areas...

...What I hope emerges from my discussion is the extraordinarily critical role transportation is playing in the drama...

...Just as the present surrender to the automobile has set in motion a vicious circle of ever greater congestion and of an evermore impossible operating climate for mass transportation facilities, a reversal of this policy would reinvigorate such facilities...

...The Hudson Tubes, for example, now carry less than a third the number of passengers they carried back in 1927...

...The consequences of such segregation are many and malignant...

...Public education suffers a qualitative decline...

...NATURALLY a vast number of people prefer to commute by automobile...

...Measure against this the fact that there has been a concurrent decline in patronage of rail commuter service to and from New York...

...There is, however, an unofficial opposition by assorted intellectuals, an opposition formidable enough to give officialdom pause...

...New York's transportation system is now operated by 25 public agencies and private operators and regulated by the independent decision of at least 100 agencies...

...Roughly 5.3 per cent of New York's central business district space is now so devoted...

...popular recognition that there exists what is called "the urban problem...

...The sickness of congestion has become epidemic among our great cities, and New York has not been spared...

...These are basic necessities, needs held in common...

...Properly planned, first-class mass transportation would arrest this trend to population extremes, bringing in its wake better housing, better schools, a more heterogeneous and better balanced urban residential population...

...These are the wealthy executives who comprise the management of Manhattan-headquartered national businesses, the retired wealthy, the wealthy professionals in medicine, in the communications industries, including publishing, broadcasting, advertising...

...or do we actually encourage it...

...In consequence, just under a billion dollars has been invested in Port Authority transport facilities, all designed to produce maximum "traffic flow" in New York...

...We've got to accommodate them or business would collapse...

...Austin Tobin, director of New York's main transportation agency, the huge Port of New York Authority, shares this view...

...Hardly another task confronting New York has a higher priority...

...The urban resident cannot decide whether or not to pay for water, fire, police and sanitation services...

...At the September 7, 1960 Planning Commission hearings on the issue of the midtown garages, it was appalling to listen to the testimony of department store chiefs and big builders defending the program in terms of "planning," when short-term profit was clearly the motivation for their appearance.* Somewhere in between the intellectuals' protest against congestion and its official sanction by the city's brass is the Regional Plan Association, New York's oldest and most respected planning body...

...But the revolt has not yet gone anywhere near far enough...

...The economically underprivileged, hemmed into the physically run-down slum areas, exist as a vast service and laboring population to the economically privileged groups...

...The ambiguous attitudes on congestion of this powerful, private, but quasi-official organization is reflected in the fact that after failing for months to make up its mind about the Wiley midtown garage proposal, it finally gave a qualified half-hearted endorsement...

...When one shifts from these economic considerations of urban sprawl to social and cultural considerations, the conclusions are still more sobering...

...It is true that the "quality sell" is a hard sell to politicians and businessmen...

...The sheer physical factor of space needed for car storage should be sufficient to give New York's officials pause...

...And their collapse, or even a serious further deterioration and limitation in their performance, would mark the end of growth for New York both qualitatively and quantitatively...

...In New York, the idea of deliberately refusing to build a new bridge or tunnel, in order, as it were, to buck the automobile is unthinkable...

...Nor can the highway interests be permitted to build their freeways ruthlessly through the re maining open rural areas...

...The engineers of the Port Authority are aware of Owen's dictum that land use determines traffic volume and flow...

...the slowness of buses navigating on streets jammed with cars—all militate against the individual's free selection of public over private transportation...

...The population is growing...

...One car takes the equivalent of the office space of two workers...

...If 34th Street weren't congested we'd be in trouble," says Tobin...

...Over 500,000 cars (with an average of only one and a half occupants per car) enter New York City from outlying counties every day...

...But if its life is miraculous, then its decline, even its terminal illness, is not at all impossible...

...All the publicized questions about the advisability of tax relief and subsidy for passenger railways and mass transit...

...All told, four million cars are registered in the New York metropolitan area...

...Wood, like Gottmann, decries the waste of "indulging ourselves in the luxury of recreating small towns over and over again...

...ing loop with Jersey railroads—all these technical questions, urgent though they are, are secondary to the basic problems of congestion and the role of the automobile...

...Books like Galbraith's The Affluent Society, and W. H. Whyte's The Exploding Metropolis, with their cries of alarm over our complacent acceptance of urban decay, have been widely read...

...New York would begin a period of general decline...

...In his Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics, Robert C. Wood is persuasive in arguing that without the strong, vital central city the suburb becomes a meaningless environment...

...IV What is at stake here, however, is more than transportation as such or even the problem of congestion...

...And it must be coupled with equally positive efforts to revitalize the city's mass transportation systems...

...Wilfred Owen of the Brookings Institution, the author of Cities in the Motor Age and The Metropolitan Transportation Problem, similarly has challenged the transportation policies of New York's officials...

...Yet the desirability of congestion is the central issue in the current controversy over "what to do about New York...

...other areas would be restricted to public taxicab and buses only, with no private cars or trucks...

...Economic and cultural opportunities become constricted in a variety of ways...

...Miraculous as the completion of the journey may seem, it is almost always a debilitating experience: a compound of exasperation over the difficulties of arrangements, the slowness and the frustrations of delay, fatigue from the crowding and noise, a consciousness of waste, expense, chaos, jostling, soot, stench, and even the possibility of injury or death...

...The rea son for this is that today we have vast dispersed urban regions that can often only be served by trucks...

...and the grid street pattern in still other strictly residential areas would be converted into courtyards and walkways...

...the rejection of high-tail fins and two-tone cars in middle-class taste-making circles...

...It represented the city's first official reversal of policy toward the automobile, a shift from promotion to limitation of its use...

...The very population complexion of the city is involved...

...THE MARXIAN PROPHECY that country and city would merge into a new, undifferentiated environment is being fulfilled in what is called urban sprawl or what French geographer Jean Gottmann calls Megalopolis...

...Surely most New Yorkers must feel this whenever they travel from one point in the city to another...

...The logic of the situation would call for, even compel, the creation of an over-all metropolitan planning body with the power in the tri-state New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area in order to make the planning decisions which hitherto have been made by a melange of agencies...

...Stanley Isaacs, the Republican City Councilman and one of the few officials to speak courageously on the congestion issue, points out that a few years back the city had a tax on car ownership to discourage midtown driving and all-day street parking...

...Some such transportation zoning is essential and decades overdue...

...It has been evident for twenty-five years that such decisions cannot be made by a multiplicity of unrelated agencies...

...The reminder that a city and its culture can flourish only when millions of persons are so concentrated that communication among them is continuous—this is quite unconsoling...

...For one thing, the sought for better schools, leisure, country, efficiencies, etc., are too often not being realized...

...New York epitomizes many of these developments...

...This is the concept that must enter into the formulation of over-all metropolitan plans...

...awareness of dangerous air pollution (Los Angeles has a $3%2 million budget for fighting smog caused by auto exhaust...

...There is a close and necessary relationship between the growth rate of our gross national product and the ton miles that are moved by trucking...

...Its mark is waste, the devouring of space, of materials, of credit...

...And in the pathology of cities, circulatory failure ranks high among the list of fatal accidents...

...The Megalopolis of Gottmann is the urban sprawl from Boston to south of Washington, D. C., with the immense New York metropolitan region as its core...

...As of today, twothirds of the three million people that enter Manhattan every weekday are still using mass transportation facilities...

...A large portion of the class group that would normally comprise the various middle grounds between the extremes of advantage and disadvantage cannot or will not choose to live in the city proper since it means inferior schools and recreational facilities, slum housing or an impossible expense for luxury apartments...

...This idea cannot be revived in the atmosphere created by Wiley, Tobin, et al...

...Yet, owing to its altogether unparalleled richness in terms of human talent and cultural variety, it has still not suffered to the extent of certain other cities of Megalopolis...

...The New York officials responsible for transportation, on the other hand, invariably reflect the city's immediate business and commercial interests...

...others threaten to price themselves out of the market...

...It would mean that large projects, such as bridges, tunnels and highways for auto travel, would no longer be planned on the defeatist criterion that the public has made a commitment to the automobile and that facilities must be provided regardless of their impact upon the total environment...

...This has achieved a 36 per cent increase in the number of cars entering New York from 1948 to 1956, while the number of persons entering has decreased by 12 per cent...

...For instance, planner Victor Gruen, among others, has proposed a system of transportation zoning in New York whereby certain streets and avenues would be zoned clear of all automotive traffic and become in effect pedestrian malls...

...Yet Gottmann observes that the very density of activities and the intensity of movement throughout Megalopolis has become so complex as to be out of control...

...The decrepit equipment of public transportation (an estimated 75 per cent of urban passenger railway cars are over 40 years old), the fantastically overcrowded subways, the inadequate range of subway and bus service both geographically and in terms of time...

...Long-term goals would be set for residential areas, for recreation, for parks, for schools, for commercial, industrial and business areas...

...The real issue is reducible to this question: do we take positive steps to discourage automotive travel in New York City...

...all the arguments about the 30th Street Expressway, the Narrows Bridge, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the new lower level for the George Washington Bridge, the extension of Manhattan's rapid rail transit to New Jersey in a connect * Mark down March 16, 1961 as the greatest day in the modern history of New Yorkplanning...

...The low level of imagination, intellectual daring, and public zeal in the city government precludes any constructive inquiry, let alone action, along these lines...

...Though signs are mounting of a general public revolt against our masochistic accession to every demand made upon us by the automobile, official policy is still to provide maximum means for auto use...

...Official response to this notion remains either hostile or uncomprehending...

...But a concrete response to this principle, restricting automotive freedom, remains a matter of occasional speculation...

...Officially, there is no opposition to the theory that congestion is desirable...

...11 Nothing is more tedious than the minutiae of traffic-flow studies that generally passes for discussion of "the transportation problem" in New York...

...We can't tell them not to...

...Similarly, the time is upon us when mass transportation must be supported on a compulsory basis, through taxation and through restrictions upon private car usage...

...He reports that a horse-drawn truck could average eleven miles an hour in New York City in 1910, against an average speed of six miles an hour for motor trucks today...

...New York today is in a state of unhealthy segregation...

...So did The New York Times, in one of its most depressing accessions to the department store, hotel trade and amusement area lobbyists...

...III The possibilities for a qualitative improvement in the city as a place in which to live and work would then be incalculable: cleaner air (electrically powered bus service is a distinct possibility), quieter, uncluttered streets, deference to pedestrian amenities such as malls, squares, plazas, trees, even fountains...

...in favor of mass transportation facilities, themselves planned with reference to basic considerations of efficient land-use...

...People want to drive their cars...

...On that date the City Planning Commission, defying the Mayor and thecity's most powerful commercial leaders, rejected the midtown garage proposal on thegrounds that it would produce congestion and have "serious long-term effects on theintegrity and function of the most valuable midtown core area...

...But to recognize this and to build the needed highways accordingly is not to concede the unrestricted right of private car usage within New York City itself...

...Lines are shutting down...

...Now, such a decision—to prohibit cars, to invest in mass transportation systems—would decisively modify the planning of all our planning agencies: the Port of New York Authority, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, the Transit Authority, the City Planning Commission, the Traffic Department, and such quasi-official bodies as the Regional Plan Association and the Metropolitan Regional Council...

...But whereas back in 1924, only 10 per cent of those entering Manhattan used automobiles, now 22 per cent do...

...This does not mean that highways should cease to be built...

...Fewer cars would mean increased rail passenger revenue, buses less encumbered by automotive jams, reduced expenses for policing and engineering, more money for transit investment and so on...

...the investigations of the Port of New York Authority...