Back in the early 1990s, anxious about long-term regional decline and hoping to put my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, back on the map, local leaders embarked upon constructing a totally new light rail system that was to provide living proof of our dynamic vision for the future. The MetroLink promised to unite the diffuse bistate area like never before.
But three decades and billions of dollars later, most St. Louisans except the starriest-eyed of rail boosters would probably say that the money might have been better spent on road repair and expanded bus routes. However noble the ambition, the system has proved an underutilized and crime-riddled vanity project that, for the foreseeable future, is more trouble than it’s worth.
More recently, a smaller-scale St. Louis project, The Loop Trolley, burned over $50 million on a 2-mile vintage-style streetcar line along one of the area’s main commercial corridors, worsening traffic and hurting small business. The system ended up an embarrassing failure that brought in roughly a tenth of projected revenues and shut down after just a year of service. Currently, the trolley is running again for part of the year, not even bothering to collect fares, only so that stakeholders can avoid paying back the federal money that was poured into the fiasco. St. Louis wounded itself by emulating the transit model of larger, denser cities with profoundly different folkways. What might have made perfect sense in a midsized city along the Acela Corridor wasn’t quite a fit in the Middle American context.
The United States spans an entire continent and beyond. It should not be surprising to find enormous variations in what policies are most sensible in different locales with very different cultures, economies, and histories. Which all speaks to the necessity of federalism and subsidiarity in American life, what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously termed “laboratories of democracy.” The sausagemaking of policy is grueling and messy and rife with unintended consequences. Mistakes are inevitably made that can only be grasped and rectified by people on the ground with real skin in the game. New York and Washington tend not to understand “flyover country” any more than those places in the middle understand New York and Washington, and often less since the smaller places aren’t constantly in the national spotlight.
To the credit of the veteran policy journalist Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute, her new book, Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, never suggests that she’s telling anything but a very New York story about a unique metropolis, whereas a big chunk of the YIMBY crowd explicitly aims to replicate their Brooklyn bike lanes all across Everytown, USA, at the earliest opportunity.
As a Midwesterner born and raised, the romance of the open road still rides deep in my soul: The car means freedom, it means opportunity, and it means possibility. There’s some part of me that instinctively bristles at trendy anti-automotive ideologies, whether expressed so bluntly as it being great to raise the price of gasoline or more diplomatically in terms of pushing bike lanes and electric vehicle mandates and generous subsidies for “walkable cities” and the “new urbanism.” In the Middle American context, that perspective often implies a kind of clueless elitism: a white-collar professional in a relatively dense affluent area may only need to bike or take his or her hybrid sedan a mile or two to Whole Foods or the coffee co-op, but workers in the trades or who reside in more rural or exurban places might have damn good reason to drive that gas-guzzling truck or SUV.
So these days, as a now-longtime Manhattanite who doesn’t own a car and takes the subway every day, I wasn’t exactly heartbroken this past June when Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) abruptly suspended plans at the last minute for “congestion pricing” designed to discourage drivers from entering much of the island. I don’t like the city air being befouled or mind an additional revenue stream for mass transit. But there’s something importantly democratic about executives in town cars bound for Connecticut getting stuck in the same traffic as bricklayers from Yonkers.
Nearly 500 pages of richly detailed Gotham history later, Gelinas has me largely convinced that, in the New York City context, congestion pricing is probably the least bad option and that pivoting further from the primacy of the automobile is in most New Yorkers’ best interest.
Beginning her narrative early in the 20th century, the era of nickel fares and trolleys still clattering through the streets as subways rumbled down below, she deploys seemingly limitless archival research to present a sweeping and briskly paced account of generations of social, political, ideological, technological, economic, and demographic change across the nation’s marquee city, right up to the present era of municipal bike rentals and rideshare apps and closing parks to traffic.
In the usual telling, the shortcomings of getting around the tristate area are primarily the doing of the racist megalomaniac Robert Moses, as chronicled in Robert Caro’s towering classic The Power Broker, published 50 years ago this fall. But Gelinas makes a compelling case that, for whatever Moses’s flaws, he was perhaps only the most prominent symbol of a broader array of officials and influential interests who spent much of the 20th century utterly convinced that mass transit was a sideshow and that cars, cars, and more cars were the inevitable wave of the future — despite the finite amount of space available, especially in Manhattan.
Years before Moses’s rise, mayoral administrations, including that of the fondly remembered Fiorello La Guardia, had been determined to rid the city of its relatively efficient trolley system in favor of cars and buses. Then, with businesses and much of the middle class increasingly departing for suburbia, city leaders felt it logical to tear down crumbling tenements full of poor people to build bridges and highways promising to draw in more of the upwardly mobile professionals anticipated to fuel the future economy.
Yet the Big Apple gradually learned the hard way about that strange policy paradox whereby more lanes tend to attract more traffic. With no room for more cars, there’s really little conceivable alternative at this point but enhancing public transit, which inevitably needs to be paid for, no matter how unpalatable that may be.
Issue by issue and conflict by conflict, Gelinas weaves memorable portraits of the various New York characters who duked it out in times when the city was more diverse in certain respects, especially politically, than it is today. Indeed, as Gelinas chronicles time and again, the supposed experts can get things terribly, terribly wrong. Some of city leaders’ midcentury plans for public works would’ve grotesquely disfigured Manhattan and, in hindsight, sound insane. Just as much as her book is an engaging history of how New Yorkers get around, it’s also the inspiring account of motley coalitions of concerned citizens mobilizing and fighting like hell to stop the madness. That’s why, in addition to likely becoming the standard reference on the evolution of New York transit, the book should also resonate far beyond city limits.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Jesse Adams is the writer and consultant behind The Ivy Exile on Substack.