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| Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic) (464922) | |||
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Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic) |
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Posted by WillD on Mon Jul 23 14:36:22 2007, in response to Re: Brooklyn Dodgers (on topic), posted by GP38/R42 Chris on Mon Jul 23 14:05:40 2007. There was no one pushing to expand rail traffic,That is patently untrue and a criminal amount of revisionism. Francis Dodd McHugh was chief of the City Planning Commission and realized none of the numbers for the Van Wyck expressway's capacity and Idlewild's number of generated trips added up. He suggested Moses leave a 50 foot right of way in the median of the Van Wyck for an eventual subway expansion to the airport. The cost would have been a mere 2 million dollars on a 30 million dollar road project, but Moses turned him down flat and then proceeded to ruin his career. Other contemporaries of Moses attempted to divert a small fraction of the 1955 Joint Program bond with the PANJNY and TBTA to the badly neglected subway and LIRR riders. Even with a complete renovation of the LIRR's rolling stock, additional tunnels under the Hudson and East Rivers, (forming a kind of ESA and ARC terminals, although the NJ side called for tunnels in midtown and lower Manhattan, connected by a loop), and an extensive rehab of the subway system and construction of the SAS and Flatbush Ave subway amongst other projects there'd still be money left in the 2.7 billion dollar program to build the Narrows Bridge, Throgs Neck bridge, and several other major road projects. Instead of this logical balanced approach Moses continued as he had since 1933, funding none of the rail projects and all of the road projects, to the point of constructing low-use, high cost roads which served no purpose but to employ the construction unions that assured he stayed in power. The rehabilitation of the LIRR's system had to wait until Moses was just about gone and Rockefeller had to do it at 10 times the cost it would have been in 1955. We're finally getting the terminals proposed by Moses' contemporaries, but they're invariably a pale shadow of what was proposed. The NYC subway STILL hasn't fully recovered from the neglect of the 1950s. And yes, Moses is responsible for that neglect, it was he who proposed raising the fare slightly so as to make the subway "self supporting" debt, then took all the money from the debt limit that opened up for road construction and left the city to eventual bankruptcy. In essence at the time he stole from the poor to give to the rich, neglecting the city's essential functions, including fire prevention, the police force, the schools, healthcare, and everything other than the parks and roads which were his domain to advance his own power. He wasn't just hostile to transit, he was hostile to anything he didn't control, but to claim he was anything else is completely and utterly false. |
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