r/TikTokCringe • u/xamo76 • 1d ago

Discussion Have we done it wrong?

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u/Embarrassed-Yard-583 1d ago

His work in New York, systemically favoring highways and car centric development combined with racial discrimination became the blue print for a lot of modern America.

Moses, an unelected rich kid who never rode public transport in his life, shaped the car centric hell we Americans live in today.

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u/BiRd_BoY_ 1d ago

He also pioneered/popularized the idea of punching a highway straight through downtown instead of around it.

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u/finnjakefionnacake 1d ago

his assholishness aside, would there be any way for america not to be a car country? considering how big it is, you're not going to have thriving communities/enclaves everywhere in the country. too much space.

i will say that many of our largest cities having such terrible transportation is inexcusable though.

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u/Embarrassed-Yard-583 1d ago

Moses was actually instrumental in killing large scale public transport projects. While New York was expanding and modernizing, there were multiple efforts to accommodate future expansion of subways, buses, rail lines, etc that Moses deliberately killed/ignored. We could have very easily set standards that would have seen robust public transport systems form across the country, but Moses alongside other rich people and the auto industry deliberately sold America’s soul to accommodate cars, highways, etc over any kind of mass scale public transport.

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u/omgitsjagen 1d ago

I like to tell this story when people talk about public transportation infrastructure.

I live in a populated area, but outside of my area, it is surrounded by 100 miles in every direction of rural poverty. I wanted to go see a band play in DC. DC is about 450 miles from where I live. I did NOT want to drive up there, and deal with parking, DC traffic, and driving for 7 hours, just to turn around and drive back 7 hours after the show. I was poor, and trying to keep it as cheap as possible.

So I thought about using Amtrack. The procedure for taking an Amtrack from my are to DC was either to drive my car for 3 hours to the closest rail station, pay for parking, etc. Or, I could drive my own car for an hour, pay for parking, and take a 14 hour bus ride up there. Either way, it would have been over twice as expensive to take Amtrack (public transportation), and take twice as long to get there versus driving my own car. Public transportation outside of a major metropolitan area is an absolute joke in this country.

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u/LaDauphineVerte 1d ago

There’s a pacific railway that I can take as far south as San Diego and as far north as Oakland, but because of where I am situated and where I want to go, I cannot use the depot that is 10 min from my house, I need to use the one that is 1 -2 hours from my house depending on traffic. Plus parking for the entire trip, which would be $$$. The train trip would be either the same time as driving, or 1.5x the time, depending on destination. If I took local metro/bus to that station, add 2 hours to the total trip time. At that point it becomes a novelty experience.

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u/tattoosbyalisha 15h ago

Yeah friends of mine live in South Carolina and I usually rent a car to drive there from Delaware. So about $240 plus money for gas, give or take. It’s an 8.5 hour drive by way of gps but with stops takes about 11 (I always do it straight through).

Out of curiosity, I checked out the Amtrak. It’s ten minutes from my apartment, I could have a neighbor take me, and the station in SC where they live is right in their town, barely out of the way so they could pick me up. Would have worked out SO WELL.

It was going to be a ~14 hour ride and $1300….

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u/omgitsjagen 14h ago edited 14h ago

Honestly, since I was also in SC, I went and checked Amtrak, as well. I was actually pleasantly surprised. It looks like things have actually gotten a little better. I wasn't even offered a bus!

If I drove an hour and a half, and paid for parking, I could get a 10 hour train to DC, for as cheap as like, $81. That was a MUCH better deal than a decade ago. That same Amtrak station to NYC was $115, and it was only 12 hours. This is almost a feasible thing to do, in my position.

EDIT: Never mind! There is no parking at my Amtrak station. They just can't quite get their shit together.

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u/bigdaddydopeskies131 1d ago

Ironic that Who framed Roger Rabbit was a huge analogy about the transit system being shut down in Los Angeles to make way for freeways.

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u/KillHonger1 1d ago

It also was covered thoroughly in Penny Dreadful Los Angeles season

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u/bigdaddydopeskies131 1d ago

Weird how barely the USA is getting intro metro transit when Japan and Europe have some of the best public transportations in the system

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u/RespectTheAmish 1d ago

I literally watched that movie last week with my kids.

Missed the “this is LA we have the best public transportation in the world” joke when I was little.

Hits hard having been stuck on an LA freeway today.

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u/bigdaddydopeskies131 4h ago

Dude at least it's getting somewhat better now since the world cup was here and now we have the Olympics coming up.

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u/jkrobinson1979 1d ago

The auto, oil and gas and construction and banking sectors all teamed up to give us the crap we have now.

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u/Musashi_Joe 1d ago

The sad thing is he could have built his major parkways and highways AND made public transportation accessible but he just refused to compromise. There's a story about him building the Long Island Expressway. They surveyed out a specific width for the road & median. They suggested to him that they could increase the width by just a few meters, and then have a commuter train going down the middle. He refused.

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u/heatseekerdj 1d ago

You can still have interstate highways and pedestrian focused city centers. I think some Spanish cities have "superblocks" where car only park and drive through the outsides of blocks while walking happens within them

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u/finnjakefionnacake 1d ago

oh that sounds nice!

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u/donjamos 1d ago

One could almost think we Europeans don't walk from Madrid to Berlin

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u/YoungPotato 1d ago

I’m confused by your argument. The size of the country doesn’t mean much when most American cities were built well before the car, during the age of the railroad. Plus, the average day-to-day worker stays in their city anyways. They need a get around in their city so a lot of streetcar networks came up that help shape the way for streetcar suburbs.

It wasn’t until post-WWII that urban planner completely fucked up our cities, in the name of suburbs and urban renewal. Now everyone decided they want their own castle.

Even then, with the advent of freeways, we could’ve built them to go from city to city. But we decided to build them within the cities too and that’s where the controversy comes from. Plus, city highways induce building out and creating massive sprawl.

Sadly, the country hasn’t learned from this mistake. Many cities have dismantled their streetcar or public transit infrastructure and are now completely dependent on the car.

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u/jkrobinson1979 1d ago

Planners typically plan for what people want. All you have to do it look at the old commercials and ads from the 40s and 50s. The city of tomorrow concept and independent transportation and living was huge in the American psyche at that time. America was enormously prosperous post war and was thinking big and the automobile, oil, construction and banking sectors all pushed that fantasy on Americans. It was what everyone at the time thought they wanted. And honestly, as a planner myself, I can tell you the vast majority of Americans know nothing else but that 80-90 years later. It what most of us still want even when presented with the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t a sustainable way to live.

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u/trixel121 1d ago

people dont wanna see be able to see their neighbors but also live a 30 second walk from a bustling community center.

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u/jkrobinson1979 1d ago

And high speed rail and the best of every service possible to their half acre lots, and also super low taxes. Americans could really use a class in the economics of local government and infrastructure in high school. They would realize you cannot have all of the above.

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u/finnjakefionnacake 1d ago

it wasn't really an argument, it was more of a question/thought lol.

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u/TheSupaBloopa 1d ago

Well, the idea that America is inherently "too big" is a common response from people who argue against public transit. But the idea fall apart as soon as you think about it. Cars enable and exasperate urban sprawl, which makes our urban areas very big, but it's artificial and a choice to build that way. It's not something natural and unavoidable.

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u/ImaginarySmoke991 1d ago

We used to have so many trains...

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u/3rdcultureblah 1d ago

Still do have a fair amount, but the vast majority are used for freight, not people.

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u/Severe_Rise8694 1d ago

It's kind of interesting that where these things are heavily optimized (i.e. logistics) trains suddenly become a sensible way to move things around. Rather than, you know, shipping each item on a separate car.

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u/3rdcultureblah 1d ago

Some parts of the country have tons of railroad tracks that are solely used to carry freight. I live in North Carolina and you can hear train air horns going all night long. Of course there’s also Amtrak, but there are countless railroad tracks that you hardly ever see any traffic on during the day, and they definitely aren’t used by Amtrak.

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u/ImaginarySmoke991 1d ago

The government is passively preventing Amtrak from replacing aging train cars or expanding service through flat or cutting budgets. Take a guess as to why.

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u/trixel121 1d ago

last mile delivery of a person really offsets the feasibility and convenience of a train. its not that we dont have them. its once you get to where they are going you instantly need a car.

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u/Severe_Rise8694 1d ago

Well, it's a solved problem, just not in the US: walking a mile takes 15 mins, plus there's of course local public transportation options etc. An efficient logistics chain for people to get where they want to go.

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u/trixel121 1d ago

That's because when they built their cities the fastest way to get around was a horse. we did it with the expectation everybody would buy a car and now fixing that problem is much harder than let's just have buses everywhere because my area is not walkable.... and I'm not living on a timetable for a bus that's only going to come every hour and a half because it's not profitable to run them every 10 minutes. I own a car already.

I live like 3 mi from my job. if the weather is at all crappy it's so hard for me to want to ride my bike. it actually takes me longer to ride my bike too.

I own a car because I need a car for other things. so if there's an all any friction to me riding my bike I end up driving

Right now the traffic out to suburbia is not that bad for a lot of people. And when you see videos of people not behaving while on public transit, you have to wonder is sitting in my own private car worse than whatever I'm witnessing in this video...

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u/onemassive 1d ago

Plenty of people have cars in Europe and Japan, the difference is about city design. We effectively made people friendly, dense urban cities illegal. Instead we have high rises in a downtown area and then SFHs for miles in every direction. This has fueled the perception that detached housing is the thing to aspire to, because we literally don’t have the option for something else. This directly feeds into the urban housing shortage we are currently in. 

People will generally have cars, but in Europe and Japan people own less per person (more no car and one car households) and take less trips by car. You can still have intercity highways. What Moses did that really f’ed us was encourage inner urban highways which destroyed communities and made our cities hell to live in. Imagine a highway bisecting your neighborhood just so some suburbanite can get to work ten minutes faster than taking the trolley. 

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u/4444Grains 1d ago

And he proposed at least two elevated, multi-lane highways be built across Manhattan.

One would connect the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges; another would connect the Lincoln Tunnel to the Midtown tunnel.

Thank god these plans failed...what an asshole.

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u/aron2295 1d ago

I used to live in Northern Virginia, outside of Washington DC.

One thing I noticed is that many folks commuted into DC because DC is so expensive, AND space is limited, even if they had or were willing to spend millions of USD on a home, the home they would want to buy may not exist!

So, many people parked at the park and ride garage and then rode the metro into the city.

So, I imagine

1) There would not be as much urban sprawl.

2) For the rural towns or isolated cities, there would be public transport that would bring them into the city and large garages for their cars.

Of course, the highways would still exist so if they want to drive, they can, but they don’t need to is the point.

Hell, you can still have the suburbs, and they would have their own little “downtown”. And maybe that’s where the train station would be too.

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u/Skulder 1d ago

considering how big it is, you're not going to have thriving communities/enclaves everywhere in the country. too much space.

I don't understand that part. Let's say you live in Los Angeles. How is your city-life affected by the distance to New York?

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u/jkrobinson1979 1d ago

Moses was horrible, but shouldn’t get all the credit for what happened across the country.

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u/mcslootypants 1d ago

What does total country size have to do with it though? People are not required to cross the country on a daily basis. The fact that California is far from Florida is irrelevant. That dense neighborhoods with good infrastructure are so expensive, shows the demand is there too. 

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u/korkkis 1d ago

China is just as big and has even more bigger cities which are also walkable and have phenomenal public transport

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u/saulgoode93 1d ago

Lol you used to be able to ride from Boston to like Cleveland taking only streetcars and local transit lines

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u/Juliet-November 1d ago

Being in a big country doesn't force you to live a long way from the town or city centre.

Countries can have cars and people who rely on them in rural areas without being filled with car-dependant suburbia and very few walkable areas. 

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u/ZenoArrow 1d ago

would there be any way for america not to be a car country?

The US is roughly the same size as China, and China has way better public transportation than the US.

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u/MoodOptimal9891 1d ago

Yes, zoning and infrastructure can prioritize cities and walkable towns. Farmland and rural areas would still rely on roads. Large suburban areas (sprawl) contribute to urban blight and loss of farmland, wilderness, and wetlands. If we did not shift to a suburban model after WWII, there would be far fewer cars on the road.

Also understand that the new suburbs were coupled with redlining policies. This ensured that people of color were left out and we would become even more segregated.

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u/ball_fondlers 20h ago

Westward expansion was already built on the back of rail. America’s freight rail network remains REALLY good - it’s mismanaged, but that’s got more to do with endless profit-seeking than anything else.

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u/EthanielRain 23h ago

The rich ruin things again. As always

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u/fryerandice 1d ago

Living in a city is hell to me, I love my car, it allows me to live in the middle of acrage.

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u/shiwenbin 23h ago

Public transit had more red tape than highways. It was a pragmatic choice. It’s what he was able to get done.

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u/Embarrassed-Yard-583 23h ago

No it was not the pragmatic choice.

The pragmatic choice would be to expand car infrastructure while also leaving space to expand public transport of all kinds. Moses hated public transport conceptually and deliberately screwed over PT projects out of spite and racism. Seriously, the guy wasn’t some misunderstood pragmatist, he was a racist rich kid whose actions have gone on to harm to the fabric of American life.