100 Years of 100 Things: Cars in NYC

Title: 100 Years of 100 Things: Cars in NYC

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC Centennial Series, 100 years of 100 Things. Today it's thing number 38, 100 Years of Cars in New York City, for better or worse, with Nicole Gelinas, author of the new book Movement: America's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car. The book begins with the line, "A century ago the automobile changed the world and helped drive New York City and other cities to the brink of decline."

Now, listeners, it might surprise you to hear that as the premise of a book coming from a New York Post columnist and senior fellow at a conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, is this, and she writes plenty of conservative things. But Nicole Gelinas has always been an independent thinker, not a party line person, so let's see what she's got in this new 100-year history of New York City and the car. Nicole, we always appreciate when you come on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Nicole: Good morning, Brian. Likewise. We people who write for the Post, we know how to write books.

Brian Lehrer: Absolutely. Chapter one of your book is called New York's Original Sin: Scrapping Street Transit. What do you mean by street transit for people who don't know that exact term and when and why was it scrapped?

Nicole: Well, I wanted to go back into early 20th century to illustrate that we tend to blame Robert Moses for the turn away from mass transit and the turn toward the automobile. Decades before Moses had any power, the city was industriously going about getting rid of a sturdy part of its mass transit infrastructure, which was the streetcars and the trolleys that had nothing to do with Robert Moses. In the turn of the 20th century, streetcars were carrying more than a billion passengers a year. This was a major part of surface transportation. These were electric buses before we had electric buses. They had dedicated rights-of-way.

What happened was the city was seduced by technology. When the motor bus came along, three different mayors, Mayor Highland, Mayor Walker and Mayor LaGuardia said, we don't need the streetcars anymore. We're just going to rip up these trolley tracks and replace them with buses. Long before we were able to blame Robert Moses, New York was busily dismantling a priceless, irreplaceable part of its mass transit infrastructure.

Brian Lehrer: The second chapter of your book is called The 1929 Regional Plan: Paving New York City's Car Future. Could you remind everybody of what a regional plan is in the context of Greater New York, and then tell us about that one from 1929?

Nicole: Sure. This also fits with the theme of stop blaming Robert Moses. The regional plan came out in the late 1920s. This was put together by the prominent wise men of the day, top business officials, top current and former government officials. The goal was we need to remake the city for the 20th century. We need to accommodate growth, not very different from what Mayor Adams is trying to do with the city of yes. The regional plan was populated by a former railroad executive, a person who designed the city's first zoning plan to protect us from skyscrapers ruining our light and air supplies.

These were smart people diligently working, again, not really unduly influenced by Moses, because Moses was just building his reputation. What did they come up with for the blueprint for New York's future? The maps that they produced were that they contained what would become the Cross Bronx Expressway, what would become the Bell Parkway, what would have become the Lower Manhattan Expressway and the Mid-Manhattan Expressway. These things were all put out and received very well. Conventional wisdom was the people wanted to drive in cars. People were turning away from mass transit. Cars were the future, and the city had to adapt or die to the future.

The future was we were going to reorganize the city around the car rather than force the car to conform to the dense city. Everybody thought building highways, building expressways, building parkways was a wonderful idea. The New York Times thought so. The labor unions thought so. The progressive settlement movement thought so. The biggest complaint as the regional plan began to be put into practice, and Moses was the person largely in charge of executing it in the future decades up until the late 1950s, was that Moses wasn't building these things that New York wanted fast enough. You have these editorials, there's still too much traffic. Why is Moses so slow at building this road network out?

Brian Lehrer: Were similar things going on in other cities in the US?

Nicole: Not just the US but the world. Again, it's puncturing the myth that we can blame this one bad villain for tricking us into building all these roads and expressways and parkways that we didn't want. There is not a city in the US or for that matter look at London, which sliced off a piece of Hyde Park to build part of a motorway before it decided this wasn't a good idea.

Paris also had the ring roads and the highways along the river that it's now only just starting to dismantle. No global city and no American city decided we're going to cut the city off from the automobile or even we're going to make sure that we mitigate the impact of the automobile on a dense city. These were collective mistakes, and it was a collective coming to the senses starting in the 1960s, the world over. This was not unique to New York City.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to the 1960s and move up toward the present as we go. Again, to reference the opening line of your book, "A century ago, the automobile changed the world and helped drive New York City and other cities to the brink of decline." In the immediate aftermath of that 1929 regional plan, say during the depression years of the 1930s through World War II, before we get to the post-war boom in the suburbs, was there a decline in what you call urban viability in the book right away?

Nicole: Well, there was a decline in urban viability. It just didn't become apparent as an acute crisis until much later. The idea, and again, if you get into these people's heads, you can certainly feel some sympathy for the idea, was New York was competing with the suburbs. Particularly after World War, people wanted a yard for their kids to play safely. They wanted to get away from the crush of people on the subways and the buses and have a private car ride to their place of employment. This wasn't entirely just the pull of tax subsidies for mortgages, loans for cars. This was a lifestyle that many people embraced. If you lived in a tenement with your kids, you had no place for them to play.

The idea of having a house and a car was very seductive and continues to be seductive to a lot of people. New York was thinking, we are competing with office parks, we are competing with suburban malls, we're competing with single family homes. We need to offer the same thing. We need to build our own roads, we need to widen the roads, we need to make it easier for people to park and do their shopping or we're going to lose our population and our businesses to the suburbs. You see this futile attempt to make a city something that a city cannot be and should not be, which is a suburb. That continued. It wasn't until the population losses of the 1970s that we realized once and for all this is not a good idea and tried to undo some of these mistakes, at least modestly.

Brian Lehrer: The part you were just describing was maybe the most interesting part of your book to me when you wrote that after World War II, this assault on urban viability accelerated as cheaper and faster travel by car lured much of America's white middle class into the leafy modern suburbs. I think that's the part that everybody knows. Then as you were just describing, elected officials you document tried to reverse this exodus by making New York City more hospitable to the car.

Maybe that's what people tend to think of as the Robert Moses period. Even if you write that, as I think is generally accepted history by now, that this highway build-out gutted neighborhoods, left subways to rot, and left pedestrians defenseless against traffic and pollution, your words, did it work at least to stem the tide of the exodus to the suburbs because now car owners had highways to drive in in the city itself?

Nicole: No, it didn't work. Like many things, it took quite a while for the failure to become apparent. You can fast forward to the 1970s. Manhattan had a record amount of car traffic coming into the core of the city, even though the population was falling, and the number of jobs was declining. Why do we have more cars in Manhattan but fewer people during the 1970s? It was because the people who remained were abandoning the transit system for the private car because the transit system was falling apart. It was unreliable. We were starting to have a double-digit number of homicides on the subway.

It wasn't a pleasant way for people to get around. You had emptier but also dirtier and a more traffic choked core Manhattan. It was the start of a vicious cycle, and luckily, we began to end that vicious cycle in the early 1980s. We had this buildup to the 1970s. Everything fell apart, including the folly of having tried to turn New York into a car-centric city and the slow recovery from the 1980s right up until the new millennium.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners who has some oral history of your or your parents' or grandparents' relationship with living in the automobile era in the New York City area? 212-433-WNYC. Have any stories of trolleys even going way back or other street transit from way back in the last century that have been handed down to you? Who was the first person in your lineage to own a car in the city and why? 212-433-9692. Did the car infrastructure build up after World War II that Nicole was just describing inspire your family to move to the suburbs? How did that work out? Has driving and parking for your 9:00 to 5:00 job in Manhattan, if that's what you or anyone in your family has done, actually been more pleasant than taking the railroad from your town?

Have bike lanes or pedestrian plazas, or dare I say pandemic era outdoor dining changed your relationship with living in the five boroughs? We're going to get to all of that, or anyone else with any other bit of oral history in our 100 Years of 100 Things segment today. Thing number 38, 100 Years of Cars in New York City and vicinity for better or worse with Nicole Gelinas, author of the brand-new book Movement: America's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car. 212-433-9692. Going way, way back, we've got this text that's come in already that says, let me find it, listener writes, "Saw a documentary years ago about how GM, General Motors, convinced many cities to abandon their trolley trains in favor of GM buses. Horrible decisions/corruption." Is that something you know?

Nicole: Yes. It is true that GM was involved in this antitrust attempt, it's successful for quite a while, to get cities to switch from the trolleys to the bus. If you watch the 1980s movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that's the story of that scandal in California. Just like we can't blame Moses for the decisions that elected officials, the business community, the labor community all thought was a good idea, we really can't blame GM for tricking us into switching from the streetcars to the buses. New York City began its changeover from the streetcars to the buses long before this started. You look at Mayor Highland in the very early 20th century.

His reason for not liking streetcars was very idiosyncratic. All mayors have their idiosyncrasies. Mayor Adams has his. He didn't like streetcars because he didn't like private industry. Streetcars were at the time a private sector monopoly. He wanted to break the monopoly of detraction interests as he called it, and he thought he would do that by having city owned bus networks. He couldn't take over the streetcars, so he thought he would destroy the streetcars and replace them with buses. Then you had Mayor Walker whose motive for wanting to get rid of the streetcars is he saw a lot of money to line his pocket in letting out these new contracts for bus franchises.

The state captured the corruption that was available through the street cars. He thought the city could capture the corruption opportunities that were available in the buses. Then LaGuardia, and here we're coming into the Moses era but, again, this was not Moses's project, he thought streetcars were a thing of the past. He was embracing the thing of the future, which was the motorbus. This was just pure urban boosterism. Three separate motives. Very little of it had to do with GM in New York City, destroyed one of the most important parts of our transit infrastructure.

Brian Lehrer: That's an interesting piece of history that I didn't know, but it's competition between one form of mass transit and another. The trolley versus the bus. It doesn't sound like it has to do with the private car. Was one in the public interest? Go ahead, you tell me.

Nicole: Because one of the reasons the business community, the civic associations wanted to get rid of the streetcars was because they saw them as in the way of the car. The trolleys had middle tracks down the middle of avenues and major two-way streets. They were very efficient and then you could carry a couple hundred people on the streetcar. You didn't have to wait behind stalled cars, move around parked cars, double-parked cars.

If you were sitting in a motor car, you were thinking, this streetcar is in my way. Then cars did start to park on streetcar tracks and streetcars were stuck behind these cars, and people said, we'll just get rid of the streetcar. The bus will fit in much better with car traffic because it can just go around the car traffic. Now we're back to fighting for a dedicated lane for the bus when the streetcar had its own dedicated lane. This was a big part of remaking the city for the car.

Brian Lehrer: As a footnote to this part of the conversation, listener Marco in Norwalk writes, "There's an amazing trolley museum in New Haven. You can ride some of these old trolleys that have been restored and learn about the history. There are even some trolley cars from New York and Europe." I think we have another piece of deep oral history before we move closer to the present. From Brian in Manhattan. Brian, thank you for calling in. You're on WNYC.

Brian: Hi. My grandfather was a beat cop on the Lower East Side and one of his main jobs was to take dead horses off of the street, if it could be called a street at that time because especially the beer wagons would just flog the horses until they died and then they would clog up the street, prevent carriages from going by. He apparently also reported that if the car hadn't been invented, that horse manure would have gotten up to the top of the first story of houses by the 1920s.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Does this resonate with something you know, Nicole?

Nicole: Yes. If we wrote a book about sanitation, it's interesting because Brian talks about his grandfather having to remove the horse carcasses. This was why sanitation was so intertwined with public health, because a lot of our detritus on the streets wasn't trash the way we think of it now. It was basically rotting animal carcasses. Progress is good in many ways. No one is saying, or at least I'm not saying we should never have invented the car. Even if we thought it was a good idea not to invent the car, you could never, at least so far, stop something from being invented.

What is a better way to integrate the car into a dense urban environment? We went in completely the wrong direction. Starting in the early 20th century, just we're going to make New York into a wide highway thoroughfare to get from one place to another without thinking. New York is not a place to move through. It's a place to to be in, mostly on foot and on transit. That's not to say, though, that some people are not going to need to use cars and you do need to move goods into the city.

Some people can't use transit for various reasons. What is the level of traffic that you want to see in the city, and how do you reduce that level of traffic to less than we've seen historically? What parts of the city should be entirely pedestrianized? Which parts should we have narrower streets? How should we be thinking differently about parking? You're never going to get rid of the car but give people other choices for how to get around and what's left. Make sure that they are not in charge of the streets, that the streets are in charge of them.

Brian Lehrer: We have some amazing oral history callers waiting on the line. Listeners, you're always amazing in these 100 Years of 100 Things segments with the stories that relate to your family from decades and decades ago, as well as to things today. As I say, we will get to some of the modern controversies right up to the election of Donald Trump this week and what it might mean for congestion pricing in New York, as was in the newscast with Michael Hill just a few minutes ago. Frank in Massapequa hang on. You're going to be second. Marcia in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Marcia.

Marcia: Hey, hi, Brian. Thank you for your guest. I just wanted to share a different perspective on cars in the early part of the 20th century. My grandparents were immigrants from Poland and Russia. She a seamstress, [unintelligible 00:21:02], he a bricklayer. They hadn't met. His wife died. He had children. She had my father out of wedlock as a good communist of her time at some commune where everybody got together, and she needed a job with a home, and he advertised for a governess.

They met and they eventually married. To appreciate the America that gave them this opportunity to survive, though they both worked very, very hard, they bought an old car in 1928 and started going to the lower 48 every summer with the three children, who were 6, 8, and 10, all the way into the teens and covered every state in their cars, which their modest affluence allowed them to do. They felt it allowed them to get to know the America that had given them an opportunity to become this beautiful family. I just wanted to say that.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great story. Did you say that was in the 1920s?

Marcia: 1920s. Let's see. Gran got here about 1916. I don't know when my step-grandfather got here. It was a little bit after that. They were able to integrate, I wouldn't say assimilate, into the society and they feel the car helped them accomplish that.

Brian Lehrer: Among the first people to drive cross country. Quite a story, Marcia. Marcia's story, Nicole, reminds us of why the car is such a sticky technology, right? Sticky in terms of being so attractive that everybody wanted to have one.

Nicole: Oh, absolutely. That's Marcia's grandparents going across the US decades before the interstate highway system was built. It points up the car is very important, and it's not because somebody tricked people into wanting to like the car. I think that is important to absorb so that we're not constantly sitting around thinking, oh, Moses forced this upon us. Eisenhower forced this upon us. GM forced this upon us. People like the car, and people like the car for good reason. It is convenient even in within New York City and the suburban New York region. If you make Google Maps, a lot of times your trip is faster and easier by car.

Aspiring to the suburban lifestyle has always been a marker of American upward mobility. This is an old story and a new story. You talk to immigrants and the children of immigrants today in the Bronx, in Brooklyn, in Queens, and they very much resist any restrictions on parking, any restrictions onto driving into Manhattan because they say my family became successful, we bought a car, and we want to drive the car. That does not mean that you let the car take over New York City.

Just as the suburbs have their place in the country and the car has its place in the country, a dense urban environment where people are mostly getting around on mass transit, and once they get off the transit system, they're mostly getting around on foot. The tall buildings, the skyscrapers, as well as apartment buildings, just as a physical matter, you cannot fit this level of density into the city in private motor vehicles. It's fine that some people rely on car within New York City, but if most people, or even more people rely on a car, the city just shuts down, and it doesn't work as a city.

Brian Lehrer: I think Frank in Massapequa has a story, a sad story, a tragic story of a very early example of a traffic death. Hi, Frank, you're on WNYC, is that right?

Frank: Good morning. Good morning and thank you so much for taking my call. I'm sorry to bring any sadness to your program, but I have wondered while listening to your program how often something like this might have taken place. I was raised by my grandmother and grandfather, and they themselves had seven children of their own before I came along. There was always talk about a young, precocious boy who was very advanced for his years and capable of things at such a young age, but I never got a chance to meet him. I heard about he was a legend in the family. Whenever his name came up, there was always this sense of "ah, ooh, ah" about him. I always wondered what it would be like to meet him.

In any case, he was killed by a city bus on September 19th of 1931 at the age of six. The reason why I want to recount this story was because it was a pivotal moment in the life of the family. I was often told about what a dapper individual my grandfather was, how attentive he was to the family, and the kind of man he was. He owned a fleet of taxis, and at the time, all you really needed was one medallion. He owned seven cabs and had a medallion for every cab. In any case, when this happened, he took a baseball bat to every one of his cabs and sold or squandered in gambling, or just sold them cheaply, or gave away his medallions for literally nothing and then proceeded not to drive for the next 15 years.

Brian Lehrer: He got turned off by this tragedy in the family to the whole idea of cars or buses or any more motor vehicles.

Frank: Yes. He became a man that I was familiar with after this happened but was completely unfamiliar with the man he was before.

Brian Lehrer: Do you know, Frank, if he got or anybody in the family got involved in any advocacy to start making the streets in the then just beginning to burgeon car era 1931 efforts to make the streets safe for pedestrians as cars became more ubiquitous?

Frank: Not to cast aspersions upon my family, but I don't think advocacy was part of their motivation, they were motivated by that. They were very much into survival. This happened in '31. They lived in an apartment just off the corner of 12th Street and Avenue A. They all literally nine people lived in a very small apartment. It did affect the family in a major way. He became a different person. The men in the family, the males in the family, suffered greatly. My uncles had a horrible relationship with their father. He became an alcoholic. He became abusive. The females in the family all married before the age of 17 to men who did not treat them kindly.

Brian Lehrer: Frank, I'm going to leave it there, and thank you very much for that story sad as it is. The things that traumatic loss can cause an individual and even ripple out within a family. Nicole, I guess where this relates to the history in your book is when did efforts start or when did people first realize that efforts needed to start to protect pedestrians in the era of the flourishing automobile?

Nicole: Frank's story is terrible, but the most terrible thing about it is that it's not unique. He said that this bus crash, a fatal bus crash, occurred in 1931. This was the era that traffic deaths just skyrocketed. Even before the car, people were hit by horse omnibuses. People were hit by the streetcars, but the horses were moving slowly. People knew where the streetcars were. Traffic deaths were not a major, major public health issue. When people thought about traffic deaths, they hated the railway industry. The trains ran on open cuts on the west side and other parts of New York City.

Kids would get on the tracks and be run over by the trains and people thought the train industry, again, the private rail industry that Highland hated, was just uncaring. The railroad people didn't secure their tracks from trespassers and children with no place to pay play. We entered the automobile era of people in the mindset that the trains are dangerous, the trains don't care about us. Then you enter the automobile era where things just get much, much worse. I mean, this is when you go from a couple of hundred traffic deaths a year to more than 1,000 traffic deaths every year for the 1920s until the Depression and the lower traffic activity and the Depression brought those numbers down a little bit.

Traffic carnage was just horrific. 1990 was the peak year for both homicides and traffic deaths, where New York City had 2,200 homicides and 701 traffic deaths. I mean 701 people killed, pedestrians, car occupants and bicyclists, just in that, that one year. Since 1990, we've decreased traffic deaths from that 700 to about 200 or so a year. That's enormous progress, just as important as reducing the homicide rate both of these things show that we value human life more than we used to. This could not happen without the advocacy community. You asked Frank if his family had become active advocates, and his answer that we were just trying to survive.

That's true of a lot of people. I mean, most people do not have time for advocacy. This advocacy for safer streets from traffic deaths only started in the 1970s when bicycle advocates were desiring safe way to bicycle. It didn't become a major political issue, frankly, until the city started to cut violent crime and the quality of life in the city started to improve in the 1990s when people could say, look, this is a big problem as well, and really took off during the Bloomberg and the de Blasio eras. Now we see it sliding back as once again, crime, disorder, other things seem to be more acute crises in people's day to day life, so they are starting to lose sight of this other equally serious problem.

Brian Lehrer: Traffic deaths also up in this period, right?

Nicole: In the past couple of years, and this is just another manifestation of the increased disorder the city has seen since 2020. I mean, you had a 53% increase in the homicide rate between 2020 or between 2019 and 2021. That was the biggest ever increase in such a compressed timeframe that the city has ever seen. We saw more disorder on the subways and we see the same thing on the streets where people, not everyone, but a significant minority of the population, are feeling more freedom to blow through red rights, to drag race at night, to drive very recklessly. This has resulted in an increase, particularly in the number of car occupant deaths. A lot of single vehicle crashes caused by reckless drivers and the same thing with motorcycles as well. This growth in antisocial behavior also means an increase, unfortunately, in traffic deaths.

Brian Lehrer: We are in our WNYC Centennial series, our history series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Today it's thing number 38, 100 Years of Cars in New York City, For Better or Worse with Nicole Gelinas, author of the new book Movement: America's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car. More with Nicole in a minute.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our 100 Years of 100 Things series today with Nicole Gelinas, author of Movement: America's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car. There's so much history we could do, Nicole, and so little time. I'll just reference because you referenced it briefly before that the narrative of the city's transportation history end of your book begins to turn in the 1950s with what you call a housewife's fight to save Washington Square Park from having a highway cut through it. Then onto other such battles. In the '60s, Robert Moses's nemesis the urbanist Jane Jacobs, helped defeat something that would have been called the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Then there was another defeat of one that would have been called Westway.

You write that in the 1960s, only eccentrics rode bicycles to work. Then in re-embracing transit and repurposing streets, New York redefined what it meant to be a global city. I want to play a clip of a moment once the bike lanes started to proliferate and the number of bikers, a moment that I remember from when it happened in 2010. This is the Brooklyn borough president at the time, Marty Markowitz, on Channel 11 complaining about too many bike lanes being established by Mayor Bloomberg. Markowitz even sings a satirical song he wrote that begins with the line "lanes made for Fido" as he protests Bloomberg's Department of Transportation, the DoT. Listen

Marty Markowitz: Just a philosophy of the current leadership of the DoT to force the FU point, which is to get people out of cars. They don't realize not everyone lives on the East Side of Manhattan. There are people in this town that need their cars, including many of the bikers that own cars as well. That's why I'm here.

Speaker D: You're so excited, but singing, really, you're going to start singing?

Marty Markowitz: Yes, I am, because this summarizes this whole issue. Here we go. Lanes fit for Fido, and lanes made for lovers, hikers and bikers, significant others, a lane just for Santa, but please don't complain. These are a few of my favorite lanes. Strollers and schleppers and skaters and joggers. Holiday lanes just for all the eggnoggers. But let's not forget cars, it's getting insane. Welcome to Brooklyn, the borough of lanes. When the horn honks, when the dog bites, when the bike is strained, I simply remember my favorite lanes. And then I just say. That summarizes this whole issue, period.

Brian Lehrer: With apologies to Rogers and Hammerstein, who wrote the original My Favorite Things, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz with My Favorite Lanes in 2010. Nicole, I don't know if that clip comes up in your book, but was it representative of what is still a contemporary battle over bike lanes and bus lanes, street use generally, today?

Nicole: Well, if we think about New York's structural political problems, the borough president has no power. It's a ceremonial position. The only way they can achieve some measure of power is to constantly be looking for attention. This is one way of getting attention. Now we have a mayor who's never made the leap from being good at getting attention as a borough president to being the mayor where you actually have to do something besides constantly be looking for attention. Keeping that in mind, that this is why we have a song about bike lanes and not a serious audit of the city's streetscape.

Where the Bloomberg administration started putting the bike lanes, if you go out to, say, 8th Avenue or 9th Avenue today, you've still got four lanes for traffic and a lane for parking. If four lanes on an avenue is not enough to move traffic through Manhattan, five lanes was not enough before they took one away for the bike lane, and 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 lanes would be not enough. We've taken less than 10% of the city's street space away from motor vehicles that already did not fit in the space and gave some of that space to a more efficient mode of transportation. It's worked. We have greatly increased the number of cyclists in the city.

This was a real lifeline during COVID when a lot of people did not want to take the subway. Citibike, for example, doing well over 100,000 trips a day on some days. This is a major success. Having said that, New York, like with many things, it does the right thing the wrong way. In the past few years, we've let the bike lanes be taken over by e-bikes, e-cyclists that are working for commercial delivery apps. E-bikes are not bikes. These are motor vehicles. They also have their place on the road, but you need a different type of registration, insurance and so forth for a commercial motorized vehicle.

The city has yet to grapple with that issue, that commercial motorized delivery bikes are not pedal, personal use bikes. In fact, this is an unfortunate thing in the past couple of years, they are crowding out the pedal bike. Female cycling, for example, has plateaued and declined over the past couple years because women did not feel as safe in these lanes as they did during the Bloomberg and early de Blasio era. As with many things in the city, we do the right thing only after exhausting all the other options. This is why we've made so little progress compared to other cities like London, Paris, Copenhagen.

Brian Lehrer: We still could fill up the board with car owners in New York City expressing the same grievance that Marty Markowitz was expressing in 2010. War on cars, they would say.

Nicole: They should be worried about the 200 people killed by cars and trucks every year. It's like the fish that can't see the water. We accept the outrageous and we focus on the trivial.

Brian Lehrer: In our last minute, what about the highways? What can be done to reverse the ongoing effects of that part of our car infrastructure? Is capping the Cross Bronx Expressway a real possibility that's been in the news? I think people still want the interstate system not to bypass New York City, drivers not to be confined to local streets as they move from place to place 100% within the 5 boroughs. What can you see in that arena?

Nicole: I'm glad you brought that up because there are advocates actively working, Congressman Richie Torres working with Loving the Bronx, Noka Martel, some community groups to cap a portion of the Cross Bronx Expressway. This is another issue where people sit around and say Moses built the Cross Bronx. We live in the world that Moses built. Well, he built the Cross Bronx because elected officials, the business community, the labor community-

Brian Lehrer: We apologies, we have 15 seconds.

Nicole: -they all wanted this. If it was easy to get rid of it, we would have gotten rid of it. This is our problem. It's our fault. We can't continue to blame Moses for decisions that we make every day.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole Gelinas, New York Post columnist and senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute, author now of Movement: America's Long War to Take Back its Streets from the Car. If you want to see her in person, she's got some book related appearances coming up at P&T Knitwear. Yes, that's a bookstore at 180 Orchard Street in Manhattan next Wednesday, November 13th, and then on Tuesday, the 19th at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus. Nicole, thank you so much. This was really fascinating.

Nicole: Thank you, Brian. Likewise.

Brian Lehrer: That's our 100 Years of 100 Things segment for today. We'll have another one for Veterans Day on Monday. That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today and for this week. Thanks to our team for producing amazingly as ever. Thanks to Shaina and Milton at the audio controls. Have a great weekend, everyone, and stay tuned for Alison.

 

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