In This Issue:

– No Excuse for Moses’ Auto Obsession

– There’s Hope for Amtrak Yet

– Calendar

Moses’ Highway Oriented City Would Have Meant Less For Everyone
If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a model might be worth a million. This is the thought that came to me as I stared in fascination and horror at Robert Moses’ planned freeway across Manhattan on display at the Museum of the City of New York.

The elevated freeway would have gone from the Lincoln Tunnel across to the Midtown Tunnel and cut just beside the Empire State Building. Robert Olmsted, former planning director for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who happened to be at my elbow, told me that the original plan was for a tunnel. Accommodating it is why the Sixth Avenue line dips going uptown out of Herald Square for no apparent reason, Olmsted said. But Moses got a four-lane tunnel converted into a six-lane above ground freeway – on the drawing board. Neither was ever built.

The model on view is part of the big exhibit on the big builder that is taking place this and coming months at MCNY, the Queens Museum of Art and Columbia University Wallach Art Gallery. Hilary Ballon is the curator and has edited a fascinating accompanying book on Moses with historian Kenneth Jackson of Columbia University.

The core of the exhibition at MCNY is many of Moses’ actual transportation models. They range from coffee-table to room sized. For decades gathering dust in a room under a bridge, the models were rescued from decay or destruction by Laura Rosen, the archivist for MTA Bridges and Tunnels.

The exhibition as a whole is pitched as a reevaluation of Moses, which is certainly welcome. If the exhibition had a motto, it might be “He wasn’t all bad.” Which, of course, he wasn’t. Along with plowing down neighborhoods for freeways and soulless high rises, he also built some elegantly designed bridges and parkways, and hundreds of recreation centers and parks, including Riverside Park on the Upper West Side.

But the models on view at MCNY should serve to remind us that Moses’ transportation and related visions of housing and work were not just poorly or cruelly executed. They were fundamentally flawed, even on their own terms. If Moses had had his way, Manhattan would be crisscrossed with freeways and studded with new parking lots and garages. Which not only would have destroyed many people’s homes and businesses, it would have made the city less prosperous, and ultimately put less money in both private and public pocketbooks.

It all comes down to capacity. Like many people of his generation, I’m convinced, Moses essentially didn’t understand the different capabilities of different modes of transportation, despite his learning and education. A freeway at top capacity can move only a few thousand vehicles per hour, and all those vehicles have to be put somewhere once they arrive where they’re going. That means many lanes of freeways and many parking lots and garages chewing up prime real estate.

By comparison, a subway or commuter train can move tens of thousands of people per hour, and they all arrive without the need to store a vehicle. This essential fact is why Manhattan can have dozens of skyscrapers, which not incidentally produce millions in salaries, profits and taxes, crammed right next to each other without any parking lots.

Moses’ vision of New York, if he had completed it, would have essentially downsized large parts of the city. At the MCNY exhibit, there’s one artist’s conception of what Soho would look like after the highway was cut through it. It essentially looked like Dallas or Houston – a broad boulevard lined with Edge City style office buildings. And whether you love or hate Dallas, it’s a far less productive city than New York, when calculated on a per square foot basis.

This is what happened to much of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which are still recovering from the damage Moses did. The boroughs are not only less hospitable because of the worst of Moses’ freeways; they are also less productive.

Moses thought he was modernizing Manhattan and the boroughs by adjusting them to accommodate the car and the highway. It’s true that on a conceptual level, he was acting similarly to those of the 19th century, who had put in train lines into New York and other cities, adjusting them to that then new mode of transportation.

But what Moses apparently didn’t see is that the car and the highway operate by different rules than modes of transportation past. Despite its behemoth-like size, a highway is actually a low-capacity mode of transportation, particularly when compared to trains.

Moses can’t be forgiven his intellectual errors by the observation that “everyone was doing it.” For one thing, everyone wasn’t. Lewis Mumford, who in the 1950s was a prominent and respected critic, laid out in painstaking fashion just exactly why plowing freeways into cities would not improve overall transportation, even while destroying so much of what was worthwhile in urban centers.

Secondly, Moses was not just part of the pack; he led the pack. Before World War II, the general plan was to put freeways beside major cities, not through them. Moses helped convince the federal government otherwise.

This capacity question still is with us today. It is the governing factor on how much New York City and the region can grow. It is the promise of the three major transit projects on the stage today: East Side Access, which would enable Long Islanders to reach Grand Central Terminal; Second Avenue Subway, which would deliver a long promised second subway line along the East Side with the potential to extend it to the Bronx and Brooklyn; and ARC, which would be another tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey.

The region’s transit system is above or at capacity on most of its key lines. These new lines will add new capacity, and thus create the potential for new growth. Adding them would increase the city’s amazing ability to handle more people comfortably.

I attended a briefing on the Olympics in early 2000 by the urban planner Alex Garvin. He talked about how the 2012 Olympics, if it were held in New York, would need to handle an estimated 500,000 visitors a day. That had crippled sprawling cities like Atlanta and the system of buses and satellite parking lots it set up to handle its Olympics. Oddly enough, Garvin said, New York, with its 8 million people, could swallow an additional half million without a hiccup. Its huge transit system could handle them without any problem, particularly given them most of them would be traveling at off-peak hours.

It was a fascinating display of the logic of New York. Where is the best place to put a lot of people? Where there already are a lot of people. That’s why if we do it right, the city can expand from 8 million to 9 million people over the next 25 years, which many predict, without sacrificing comfort or livability.

So as we evaluate Moses, we should remember that it wasn’t just his means that were unsound; many of his ends were too.

- Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Improving Train Service Means Changing Amtrak’s Paradigm
“Every morning at 6 o’clock, one lonely train passes through Lynchburg, Virginia, on its way north. The train is often late, so passengers have to wait on the platform or in the tiny station for, sometimes, an hour or more. The ride is not cheap: $144 round trip to Washington, D.C.; $332 for New York. Once on board, the service is hardly white glove.

And yet, landing a seat on The Crescent, which originates in New Orleans and ends up in the Big Apple, can be difficult for Lynchburg passengers. Amtrak gives preference to long-distance travelers because they pay the highest fares. It would be easy to right this problem by scheduling more trains and having both local and express routes, but Amtrak can’t afford to do that.

This is the plight, paradox and opportunity of Amtrak. Despite inconsistencies, there is demand all over the country for good inter-city train service — as an alternative to congested freeways and air routes, as a security backup and as an economic development tool.

Nowhere is this more true than the Northeast corridor, which has the highest train usage in the land, and depends on it more than anywhere else. But just as Amtrak as a whole is locked in a ill-serving paradox, so is the Northeast. Because demand for train service is high in the Northeast, Amtrak is using it as a cash cow, rather than exploiting its potential as a dominant and vital component of our overall transportation system.

What Amtrak should be doing, or should be directed to be doing, is putting a higher priority on maximixing total number of passengers through reasonable pricing, upgraded infrastructure, and better on-board service. This is a good game plan not only for the Northeast, but in many selected megaregions around the country where demand for train service is high.

The problem is not only lack of money, which is certainly real enough. It also has to do with mission. Amtrak is actually legally defined as a private, for-profit corporation. It’s supposed to try to make money. Thus, rather than maximizing passengers or service, it’s attempting to maximize revenues.

That’s why Amtrak is currently imitating the airlines by practicing “yield management”: restrictive ticketing policies that charge whatever the market can bear. That’s why it costs more now to ride on the heavily traveled Northeast lines than on less-frequented ones in the Midwest.

That’s no way to run a railroad, or any transportation system. Imagine if the New Jersey Department of Transportation, for example, was required to try to make a profit. Tolls, and eventually potholes, would sprout on most highways and streets, as officials desperately attempted to extract revenue from every inch of asphalt, while cutting back on long term maintenance as a hindrance to the bottom line. We don’t have such a policy because with roads, we instinctively know that funding them helps the overall bottom line of society, even if it’s a healthy sum in every year’s annual state budget.

We can see a similar contrast when we look at how the region operates the subways through New York City Transit, or how NJ Transit operates regional rail. Right now, it costs $48 to travel one way from New York’s Penn Station to Trenton on Amtrak. Few people take Amtrak for this trip, because NJ Transit will charge you only $11.50 for the same ride.

The difference is one of policy more than cost. By statute and policy direction, NJ Transit has different and better priorities than Amtrak. NJ Transit focused on keeping commuters flowing among the major cities of the region, so that the state’s overall economy will thrive. That’s why New Jersey funds NJ Transit to the tune of several hundred million a year. Whatever its flaw, NJ Transit is a far better model for Amtrak than the private railroad companies of yore that Amtrak is loosely modeled on.

There is hope for Amtrak. The Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2007, introduced by Sens. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Trent Lott of Mississippi, attempts to give Amtrak longer-term funding and sort out some of the mess that restricts its service. While it doesn’t change Amtrak’s legal status, it does direct the corporation to put more emphasis on what the bill calls New Service Quality Standards – trains being on time, better on board service, and so on -- which might have some of the same effect. The bill would also set up a commission to focus exclusively on Northeast Corridor service, with money to bring that part of the system up to a state of good repair. With a new Congress in power, this bill may pass. People who want better train service should do their best to support it.

Improving intercity train service in this region will also be on the agenda at the invitation-only Northeast Summit taking place in Philadelphia on March 2 that RPA is organizing as part of its America 2050 project. Called the Northeast Climate and Competitiveness Summit, it is focusing in part on Northeast Corridor mobility and features former governors Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts and Parris Glendening of Maryland.

Whatever the means, it’s clear that the moment may be right to finally significantly improve train service in this country. It’s high time this happened. This country’s federal government was created in large part to facilitate interstate commerce, so it is quite appropriate that it be involved with building better train service across state lines.

- Thomas G. Dallessio, Vice President and NJ Director

Questions or comments on what’s in this issue? Send them to the editor of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall at alex@rpa.org

February 7 - 8
Redesigning the Edgeless City is a two-day professional development course offered by RPA and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in collaboration with Orange County Department of Planning and Development, NY.  This course, held in Goshen, NY, will explore innovative design and land-use law techniques for combating sprawl development.  Day one draws on case study work by the faculty from across North America on topics including re-making the suburban highway, turning “edge city” districts into compact mixed-use centers, and using “green infrastructure” strategies for shaping new communities at the metropolitan fringe. The second day of the course will consist of a hands-on design workshop to demonstrate the application of these strategies to central Orange County. Planning and policy advocates, city and state officials, developers, and citizen stakeholders are encouraged to enroll. Registration is $50 and participants qualify for 13 AICP and AIA continuing education credits.  Additional information can be found on the RPA website: www.rpa.org. To register for the course RSVP to: esmith@rpa.org or call 212-253-2727, ext. 324.

February 13, 20
The Evolution of the Urban Grid: Understanding NYC's Medieval and Baroque Precedents in European and American Urban Capital Cities. The Municipal Art Society offers 3 evening talks by Carl Riobo, Professor at Barnard College examining the evolution of both types of urban planning in European and American urban capitals in order to understand the history and principals of New York City's development, as well as to point out the innovations and differences that Gotham has to offer. The class will meet on successive Tuesday evenings, from 6-7:30, to discuss: February 13 - American cities; February 20 - New York City. The cost for all three talks for MAS members and RPA members is $45; individual talks are $20 each. Call 212.935.2075 or lynnr@mas.org.

February 17, 9:30 a.m.
Tour of Grand Central Terminal facilities and railroad equipment conducted by Electric Railroaders Association NY Division and MTA Metro - North personnel. Tickets $10.00, children welcome. furlong@erausa.org or 718/784-3643 for information.

February 21, 8 am – 4 pm
Redevelopment Forum 2007. New Jersey Future and Regional Plan Association invite you to attend the Redevelopment Forum 2007 at the Trenton Marriott and War Memorial. This is an opportunity to learn from experienced local leaders and professionals the keys to success in achieving innovative, high-quality, community-focused redevelopment projects. All workshops are structured in a hands-on, case-study format, featuring instructors who have successfully faced the challenges of redevelopment in communities throughout New Jersey. The registration fee is $50 for NJF members and $75 for nonmembers and includes conference handout materials, breakfast, lunch and reception. Note: there are special rates for municipalities. For more information ant to register online, please visit www.njfuture.org.

March 7, 6:30 PM
Interpreting and misinterpreting Jane Jacobs – New York and beyond. Jane Jacobs was a vocal opponent of Moses’ plans and a leader of the movement to preserve Greenwich Village and other Manhattan neighborhoods. She went on to become an icon for urbanists everywhere. This panel discussion will examine the principles that Jacobs espoused and how they have been applied, not always as Jacobs might have foreseen. The panel will be introduced by author and founder of the Center for the Living City at Purchase College, Roberta Brandes Gratz, and moderated by Mary W. Rowe, Senior Urban Fellow, Blue Moon Fund. The panel will include Ron Shiffman, Professor of Urban Planning, Pratt Institute; Michael Sorkin, Director, Graduate Program in Urban Design, CCNY; Margaret Zeidler, Toronto Developer.

March 20, 6:30 pm
The Best Laid Plans: Planning New York’s Future From Moses To Bloomberg. Robert Moses masterfully knit together his vision for New York and its surroundings but resisted the development of a formal Master Plan for the City’s future. Mayor Bloomberg recently announced a comprehensive sustainability action plan for the City’s long-term growth and development, the first of its kind for NYC. The discussion will question the role of planning in the growth of the city both in Moses’ time and today. Panelists include Rohit T. Aggarwala, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability; Robert Fishman, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan; Sandy Hornick, Director of Strategic Planning, New York City Department of City Planning, and Ron Shiffman, Professor of Urban Planning, Pratt Institute. Robert Yaro, President of Regional Plan Association, will moderate the discussion.

May 4
Regional Plan Association’s 17th annual Regional Assembly: “A Bright, Green Future: Climate Change, Energy and Growth in the Tri-State Metropolitan Region.” More information will be available soon at www.rpa.org. A distributable save-the-date card (PDF) can be found here (http://www.rpa.org/pdf/RPArasavethedate.pdf).