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Unfinished Post About Robert Moses
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1964 - Moses was finished with highwaybuilding, NYC area had 899 miles of roads. LA the highway city had 459.
Everywhere you went required a car, greatly increasing traffic
Lane of expressway 1,500 cars per hour, in 1955 requiring 60 new lanes by 1985 just to handle cars in Queens.
By allowing for rail tracks in the center of a highway median - trains could carry 40,000 passengars per hour a 13X increase in the same space. Could have been done for negligible increase in price.
A big bus-only lane - wider, divided with bigger turning radii, could handle 20,000 people/hour. - one lane in each direction is equal to building an extra 8 lane highway. It must be exclusive though.
For instance, adding a seven mile train line to middle of Marathon Parkway, would have cost 20 mil. 25 mins to Queens and 40 mins to Nassau would have been saved.
in comparison, Moses proposed spending 500 mil to increase LIE's capacity by one lane - 1500 cars/hour., less than the 6500 people a day the marathon extension would have saved.
Building a train line along the LIE would have cost 100 mil or 1/5th the road expansion. Doing both would cost an additional 20 mil on top of the 500, money the Triborough had in cash reserves.
Mid town elevated expressway.
made sure all 204 bridges and were too low and every exit ramp radius was too small for buses
To have sufficient mass transit, you need density, or people had to get in their cars anyway. Moses's highways made sure that density would never happen.