Blame It On Robert Moses?

Escaping the city on Saturday night was damn near impossible-- and while my friends blamed SantaCon for the volume, there's also a more historical reason-- the power broker, himself: fucking Robert Moses . . . here's what Robert Caro has to say on it:

To build his highways, Moses threw out of their homes 250,000 persons -more people than lived in Albany or Chattanooga, or in Spokane, Tacoma, Duluth, Akron, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Nashville, or Sacramento. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighborhoods, communities the size of small cities themselves, communities that had been lively, friendly places to live, the vital parts of the city that made New York a home to its people.

By building his highways, Moses flooded the city with cars. By systematically starving the subways and the suburban commuter railroads, he swelled that flood to city-destroying dimensions. By making sure that the vast suburbs, rural and empty when he came to power, were filled on a sprawling, low-density development pattern relying primarily on roads instead of mass transportation, he insured that that flood would continue for generations if not centuries, that the New York metropolitan area would be--perhaps forever an area in which transportation--getting from one place to another would be an irritating, life-consuming concern for its 14,000,000 residents.