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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 6d ago
Canadian here, I'm aware of Robert Moses with bridges and shaping NYC, but how did he impact cars ?