by Jeffrey M. Zupan, Senior Fellow for Transportation, RPA
It would not be an understatement to say that contemporary Long Island is the land that Robert Moses created. The master builder and expert manipulator of bureaucracy cut the expressways across the Island before and after World War II, thereby turning the land of farms and baronial estates into mile and miles of auto-dependent suburbs.
Last month, the topic of Moses' impact on Long Island was the subject of a symposium I participated in at the State University of New York at Stony Brook entitled, "The Moses Legacy." I was called on to discuss Moses' transportation legacy. Other panelists were experts in open space and local government, and the keynoter speaker was Robert A. Caro, author of the monumental and wide-acclaimed book about Moses, The Power Broker.
My interest in Moses is personal as well as professional. Like scores of others, the apartment house I lived in as a child was razed to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway. I gained my appreciation of nature in Van Cortlandt Park despite his three highways that divided and then subdivided it. Unlike New York City, where the Moses highways plowed through fully developed neighborhoods and city parks, Long Island has a different, but no less profound, Moses legacy.
Moses had a vision. Enthralled by the unfolding automobile age, the leader of infrastructure building in New York State for a half-century had a vision for how the age of the car could be accommodated and accelerated. On Long Island, aesthetic and carefully designed parkways - the Southern State, Northern State, Meadowbrook, Wantagh and many others - were designed to bring new automobile owners living in New York City and the suburbs to his new parks and beaches. The rights-of way were relatively easy to acquire since the roads preceded the development of the Island. He built them to exclude commercial traffic, both buses and trucks. He saw the passenger car ride itself as part of the recreational experience, yet he purposely made it impossible for those without cars to immerse themselves in that aesthetic, thus not incidentally denying his new parks and beaches to most minorities as well.
But these new parkways did much more than bring people to parks. They made auto commuting on Long Island possible and helped accelerate the growth of the Island. The completion of these roads by the mid-1950s in Nassau County and by the mid-1960s in Suffolk coincided with the explosive growth on Long Island. In about 15 years from 1945 to 1960, Nassau County's population tripled and in the twenty years from 1950 to 1970, Suffolk County's population quadrupled.
To be sure, the availability of flat farmland, the woes of the City and the GI Bill were important too, but without the initial mobility Moses provided, these growth rates could not have been achieved. This initial mobility, however, did not last long, as the Island's new residents quickly clogged Moses's new roads. And the trucks that were excluded from the parkways were forced onto local roads like the Sunrise Highway and Jericho Turnpike, condemning them and their neighboring communities to bear the brunt of truck traffic. (Only his Long Island Expressway built in sections from 1958 to 1973 allowed trucks, and it too quickly became jammed up.) In a relatively short time, Moses' vision of the car ride as an aesthetic experience, a pleasurable break from routine, was dead.
As roads on Long Island became clogged, citizens there were left with few alternatives given the paucity of bus service and rail service that only provided for east-west movement to New York City. To say that Moses had no interest in public transit is an understatement. As Caro's book documents, he made sure that public transit was explicitly excluded from his road designs, whether for rail lines on the Long Island and Van Wyck expressways, or for buses on his parkways. Long Island is what is it is today - for better or worse - largely because of the low densities that Moses's roads made possible. Long Islanders drive more than other residents of the region. Except for the Long Island Rail Road , which primarily brings commuters to Manhattan, and a struggling under-funded bus network, Long Island is automobile (and oil) dependent. Its roads are hopelessly congested, transit is seldom an option for most travel, and walking to most activities is impractical.
Some say that to get things done today we need another Moses. But we should be careful what we wish for. We have more sensitive values toward both people and the environment, and that's a good thing. Our "Moses" today is not likely to be one man, but rather a collective vision, arrived at openly. It will require leadership from those elected officials who reject the single-minded focus of the next election and from a public that rises up against the what's-in-it-for-me attitude.
It would not be an understatement to say that contemporary Long Island is the land that Robert Moses created. The master builder and expert manipulator of bureaucracy cut the expressways across the Island before and after World War II, thereby turning the land of farms and baronial estates into mile and miles of auto-dependent suburbs.
Last month, the topic of Moses' impact on Long Island was the subject of a symposium I participated in at the State University of New York at Stony Brook entitled, "The Moses Legacy." I was called on to discuss Moses' transportation legacy. Other panelists were experts in open space and local government, and the keynoter speaker was Robert A. Caro, author of the monumental and wide-acclaimed book about Moses, The Power Broker.
My interest in Moses is personal as well as professional. Like scores of others, the apartment house I lived in as a child was razed to make way for the Cross Bronx Expressway. I gained my appreciation of nature in Van Cortlandt Park despite his three highways that divided and then subdivided it. Unlike New York City, where the Moses highways plowed through fully developed neighborhoods and city parks, Long Island has a different, but no less profound, Moses legacy.
Moses had a vision. Enthralled by the unfolding automobile age, the leader of infrastructure building in New York State for a half-century had a vision for how the age of the car could be accommodated and accelerated. On Long Island, aesthetic and carefully designed parkways - the Southern State, Northern State, Meadowbrook, Wantagh and many others - were designed to bring new automobile owners living in New York City and the suburbs to his new parks and beaches. The rights-of way were relatively easy to acquire since the roads preceded the development of the Island. He built them to exclude commercial traffic, both buses and trucks. He saw the passenger car ride itself as part of the recreational experience, yet he purposely made it impossible for those without cars to immerse themselves in that aesthetic, thus not incidentally denying his new parks and beaches to most minorities as well.
But these new parkways did much more than bring people to parks. They made auto commuting on Long Island possible and helped accelerate the growth of the Island. The completion of these roads by the mid-1950s in Nassau County and by the mid-1960s in Suffolk coincided with the explosive growth on Long Island. In about 15 years from 1945 to 1960, Nassau County's population tripled and in the twenty years from 1950 to 1970, Suffolk County's population quadrupled.
To be sure, the availability of flat farmland, the woes of the City and the GI Bill were important too, but without the initial mobility Moses provided, these growth rates could not have been achieved. This initial mobility, however, did not last long, as the Island's new residents quickly clogged Moses's new roads. And the trucks that were excluded from the parkways were forced onto local roads like the Sunrise Highway and Jericho Turnpike, condemning them and their neighboring communities to bear the brunt of truck traffic. (Only his Long Island Expressway built in sections from 1958 to 1973 allowed trucks, and it too quickly became jammed up.) In a relatively short time, Moses' vision of the car ride as an aesthetic experience, a pleasurable break from routine, was dead.
As roads on Long Island became clogged, citizens there were left with few alternatives given the paucity of bus service and rail service that only provided for east-west movement to New York City. To say that Moses had no interest in public transit is an understatement. As Caro's book documents, he made sure that public transit was explicitly excluded from his road designs, whether for rail lines on the Long Island and Van Wyck expressways, or for buses on his parkways. Long Island is what is it is today - for better or worse - largely because of the low densities that Moses's roads made possible. Long Islanders drive more than other residents of the region. Except for the Long Island Rail Road , which primarily brings commuters to Manhattan, and a struggling under-funded bus network, Long Island is automobile (and oil) dependent. Its roads are hopelessly congested, transit is seldom an option for most travel, and walking to most activities is impractical.
Some say that to get things done today we need another Moses. But we should be careful what we wish for. We have more sensitive values toward both people and the environment, and that's a good thing. Our "Moses" today is not likely to be one man, but rather a collective vision, arrived at openly. It will require leadership from those elected officials who reject the single-minded focus of the next election and from a public that rises up against the what's-in-it-for-me attitude.
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