spread across the United States, creating an influx of traffic into New York City. Moses, a man who never learned to drive himself, became a creature of the automobile. 99 He even responded to newspapers with long letters boasting that he could fix the problem of congestion within three years. 100 Throughout the city there was a widening of streets and expressways rose up, reshaping how different areas of the city were connected and changing the communities within them. Moses had worked on the city’s roads under the New Deal in the 1930s. The plans he conducted at that time were bigger than that of any other city, but what he proposed in the 1940s dwarfed even that, opening up a new era of road and highway development in New York. 101 Many city planners pointed out that ‘traffic generation’ was taking affect, arguing that the more accessible the city is, the more traffic will be attracted to it, building the congestion further. This was proved even before the war when Moses built and opened the Triborough Bridge to ease congestion on the Queensborough Bridge, but the congestion was so bad on both that he built another - the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge - to try and solve the problem. Many thought the city would be better off investing in public transport infrastructure. 102 Moses’ developments greatly influenced how people in the city lived, and simultaneously reshaped its population. New York had been a working city filled with working class men and women who lived close to work but could not afford to travel by car. Moses’ highways shifted the demographics of those who worked in the city. As the city became 99 Thomas J. Campanella, How Low Did He Go? , (July 9, 2017), https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/how-low-did-he- go/533019/ [Accessed 13/12/2017]. 100 Caro, pp. 896-897. 101 IBID. 102 Caro, p. 897.
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