Access to the 3 Staten Island Port Authority bridges is mixed. The Bayonne Arch has a fully open pathway. The Gothels has paths that have been closed for extensive bridge maintenance for several years. One Gothels path is scheduled to reopen to non-motorized travel this year, possibly this spring. The Outerbridge, unfortunately, lost its paths in 1964 to widening of the narrow approach ramps. At that time, there had been a Tottenvile-Perth Amboy ferry so there was little demand for using the path. That ferry closed in 1964 parallel with the opening of the VNB, but now there was no alternate bridge path.

As to the VNB, Zure writes “that bridge is far too long and remote for the average person to traverse.” The VNB once had the longest mainspan in the world, and is still a world class bridge. But for walking and biking, it is the overall sidewalk to sidewalk length that matters, and the VNB is only 10,000 feet or less than 2 miles end to end. To a non walker, this may sound like way too far, but for comparison, the Brooklyn Bridge Promenade is over 1 ½ miles long. The heavily used George Washington main span is just 700 feet shorter, and also just under 2 miles as well. Not mentioned by Zure, but typically included in the list of no-no’s, are: too windy; too steep; too much exhaust. With proper railings, no-one is going to be blown off. Over half a million bicyclists have crossed the VNB in all weather conditions, and wind was annoying but hardly a show stopper. The bridge has a 4 percent grade, only ¼ percent steeper than the Brooklyn Bridge, and well within handicapped grade limits.

Remote is in the eye of the beholder, or is it lost behind the couch cushions? The VNB connects Bay Ridge Brooklyn, well liked but not known for rural charms, with the eastern shore of Staten Island, a mixed residential, waterfront park, historic fort, and link to the ferry location. Obviously, Zune has not noticed the thousands of walkers, runners and cyclists using Moses 1941 Shore Parkway paths, who come from all over Brooklyn, not just Bay Ridge, for the grand open view. The VNB paths would be have a direct off road connection from the waterfront to the bridge paths. How many of these thousands of recreation users would add the two miles of a VNB promenade to their runs and walks and rides?

PORT traffic surveys show that 10 percent of the VNB car traffic has only an 8 mile door to door trip. This is well within bicycle range. How many drivers are ready to stop putting miles on their cars, stop paying tolls and get some exercise to ride less than 8 miles? The VNB has a world class view – just the same as the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Golden Gate is out at the far tip of San Francisco, yet nearly every tourist to SFO makes the pilgrimage to walk on the bridge. We have the same goldmine tourist trap in the VNB. Anything that adds to a tourist’s stay in NYC adds revenue from hotels, restaurants and more. A walk across the VNB, tied to lunch in Bay Ridge and a Staten Island Ferry ride will add half a day to their stays.

Finally, during the 2003 Blackout, thousands of SI residents were able to walk out of Manhattan on the bridges, trying to walk home, only to be stopped dead at the VNB. There was no path, there was not enough buses and the bridge police were not prepared to open a lane for people to walk across. NYC had an emergency evacuation crises here on a smaller scale than New Orleans, and like NO, failed to meet emergency needs.

Mayor Bloomberg has stated that he does not consider the terrorism risk from to bridges from pedestrians or bicycles to be serious, certainly not in comparison to a truck that can be freely driven up on any of these bridges. The new MTA Director, Lee Sander, has expressed interest in reopening the VNB path completion.

We need to complete the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge by installing the bicycle pedestrian paths it was designed for.

Detailed information on the history and design options for the VNB paths can be found at:

The web site of Neighborhood Open Space Coalition - http://www.treebranch.net at:
http://treebranch.net/Verrazano_Lifeway.html

There is a link there to the full NYC Dept of City Planning Report,
which has been posted to the Transportation Alternatives web site:
http://www.transalt.org/bridges/verrazano.html

DCP Summary Report:
http://www.transalt.org/bridges/verrazano/dcp_rpt.pdf

NYC DCP - Amman and Whitney Task 5 technical report:
http://www.transalt.org/bridges/verrazano/aw_rpt.pdf

Finally, a link to my 1976 Harvard VNB Study:
A Bicycle Path For the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge:
A Demand & Feasibility Study:
http://home.earthlink.net/%7Esfaust1534/vnb/index.htm

No, imagine what the city would be like if all the cars were replaced by streetcars.

No manure problem there, folks. They have ZERO emisssions and are 100% electric. Even if you take into account coal burning power plants to produce the electricity that runs then (which is only the case sometimes) streetcars are still 95% more efficient than private automobiles.

Yes, there is a storage problem, but multi-story car houses (including underground levels) could be built to minimize footprints.

If New York had only streetcars and no subway system, you'd have no mass transit at all today, other than buses. That's what happened in Los Angeles, home of the largest streetcar/interurban system in the world.

What does it matter if the "average" person wouldn't use a bridge -- there are plenty of above-average people in New York. The bridges between Staten Island and New Jersey are a lot shorter, there is no reason for them not to have roadways for human-powered. At least one of the Whitestone and Throggs Neck Bridges ought to have one as well. (Of course if the Cross Bronx hadn't destroyed the South Bronx, I would have been a lot more willing to use the Triborough or the Harlem River crossings, not that that would have helped me get from the Bronx to Nassau County or even Flushing.)

Not sure what 9/11 has to do with it. A lot of perfectly good access to a lot of places has been restricted using 9/11 as an excuse, but most of that isn't necessary.

Also, there wouldn't be any parkways or expressways across the city. The Cross Bronx would never have been built if not for Moses strong arming tactics to 'get it done'. Imagine what transportation gridlock would _really_ be like with I-95 ending at the George Washington Bridge and not picking up again until the Connecticut border.

Pedestrian and bicycle access at other bridges is somewhat in doubt nowadays following 9/11. One cannot walk across any of the other Staten Island toll bridges (Goethals, Outerbridge, Bayonne). Moses was right to block the walkways on the Verrazano Narrows -- that bridge is far too long and remote for the average person to traverse.

I guess the question is, what would have happened if the city hadn't had Moses in charge of the TBTA, and hadn't floated all those bonds to build the bridges and "bridge approaches" (a.k.a. the BQE, GCP, LIE, Van Wyck, etc.) and then had to pay interest on them. Would people have spent all that toll money on subway tokens and LIRR tickets instead, perhaps funding some capital construction or at least people to clean graffiti? What if they didn't run out and buy cars to drive over those bridges? Wouldn't they have had more money to spend on other things, helping to grow our city's economy instead of Detroit's?

I'm also trying to imagine someone worse than postwar Moses in charge of this stuff. It's hard to imagine anyone in power being politically able to avoid building expressways even if they wanted to, but they probably wouldn't have been as good at getting it done as Moses was. We might have ended up with a full-length LIE and Bruckner (say), but only a half-built BQE and Cross-Bronx, and no Sheridan, Clearview or Van Wyck.

Not really. The city was already bankrupt by the time Moses took charge of the Parks Department and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA). One major source of his power was his skill at building major public projects without spending the city's money. Tolls and revenue bonds from TBTA to build auto-oriented transportation projects, and piles of New Deal money paid for parks and housing during the Thirties. A lot of his popularity (which lasted into the Fifties) was based on the role he played getting New York back on its feet.

Unfortunately, his independence from taxpayer money implied independence from voters and elected officials. He could do what he wanted, in many cases, and a lot of what he wanted to do was not really in the City's interests.

Moses 1963 decision was just the final act of his conversion from a young Jedi Knight performing wondrous feats in the urban realm in the 1920s and 30s, even if quite a bit warped at the edges, into the Darth Vader of Urban
Planning. One can date Moses’ descent into the Dark Side of the Force at Word War II. The last great non-motorized project Moses completed was the bicycle-pedestrian network along the Belt Parkway greenways through Brooklyn and Queens, which opened June 1941.

Moses’ first act following the war was to demolish the bike-ped pathways from the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in 1946, to squeeze on more cars. Everything Moses did after WW II put the car first, people second.

Robert Caro's The Power Broker came out in 1974, followed by StarWars in 1977. Coincidence?

If one looks at Moses from this Darth Vader perspective, one can see both his power and greatness, as well as the warped perspective of his creations that have circumscribed New York for the past 80 years.

The explanation came from an unexpected source. Ivor van Heerden is the deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center and author of The Storm, What Went Wrong During Hurricane Katrina—The Inside Story From One Louisiana Scientist, a damning account of the levee failures in New Orleans. He happened to be giving a lecture to coincide with the book release last spring when I was volunteering in New Orleans with the Common Ground Collective, and my partner and I went.

In the middle of a blistering account of the incompetence of the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, the White House, and so on, van Heerden asserted that some levee failure was largely the fault of Mister Go. The New Orleanians filling the auditorium nodded knowingly, while the two dumb-ass San Franciscans stared at each other and asked, “Mister WHO?” Mister Go is the local nickname for the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet (MR-GO), a channel dug in 1965 to connect the Intercoastal Waterway that flows through New Orleans with the Gulf of Mexico, lopping off 40 twisty miles down the lower Mississippi. It’s known in the Crescent City as an expensive, environmentally disastrous boondoggle.

The argument van Heerden made, complete with maps and diagrams of storm surge heights and wind directions, showed how the high water driven by Katrina was concentrated at the eastern end of Mister Go and its force amplified by the narrow, deep channel that sent the water rushing west toward the city, with devastating impact on the levees. Meanwhile, miles of wetlands and barrier islands that in the past had absorbed and dispersed such storm surges had been destroyed by oil and gas exploration and development. Their beneficial effect was gone.

Suddenly, it hit me. Storm surge equals heavy traffic, Mister Go equals freeway, wetlands equals city streets. The analogy is a bit far-fetched, but it’s stood up to subsequent observation. Concentrating traffic on freeways doesn’t remove it from city streets; it just amplifies the impact in certain locations. Communities near freeway ramps know the argument that freeways help reduce traffic is garbage. Cars don’t drop onto freeways from helicopters. They clog up the ramps and spread the mess back from there.

I haven't followed the latest trends. Are suburbanites now living 10 to an apartment with a shared kitchen and minimal plumbing?

You were on track for a while. Moses was trying to get rid of some nasty conditions. His primary failure, IMNSHO, was thinking that central planning could do a better job than letting people improve themselves, and along with that underestimating the strengths of those old poor (and ethnically segregated) neighborhoods.

Seriously, are there any old cities that had those slums that didn't get urbanly renewed in the postwar period that are better off for it?

http://www.mibarrio.org/italian_harlem.htm

However, it mentions that 116th Street was fancier, known as “Doctors’ Row."

So with the first picture you're playing old Yiddish or Neapolitan songs in the background, and with the 70s picture it's Tito Puente?

I have two pictures of Lexington Ave. and 116th St.

In the first, taken in about 1910, there are wide sidewalks, lots of people walking, and exactly one vehicle, a horse-drawn wagon being used for street maintenance. It looks very quiet and peaceful.

In the second, taken in the 1970s, the sidewalks have been narrowed, and the widened streets are filled with cars. It looks congested and frantic.

They fixated on the benefits of the car while marginalizing its problems. And for a person born in 1888, these really were wonderful benefits. Enclosed, private point-to-point transportation without manuer or a mind of its own.

And because it didn't exist yet, they couldn't conceive of a world totally overrun by the car. In an age of rapid technological advancement, I am sure if they thought about air pollution at all they thought it was a temporary byproduct that would solved in the future (and maybe it still will be).

As far as not knowing about the capacities of various lines, I think they/he understood it perfectly, but wanted to decongest the city. They had memories of the miserable slums of the five points and the Lower East Side, and worked to eradicate the population density and the form of the housing that existed there, not knowing that this type of construction -- the low-rise walkable rowhouse and the tenement building -- would be considered charming and exciting by a future generation of people who grew up in the suburbs and found them socially stultifying.

They thought the city was a dirty, noisy, factory-filled and polluted: An obsolete product of an earlier economic era, and through planned shrinkage we could all live in much smaller utopias, in harmony (ironically) with nature.

What Moses really didn't seem to understand (or maybe didn't care about) was the effect of density on productivity and livability. He also didn't seem to get (or didn't care about) the proportionally larger amount of pollution (air, noise and visual) caused by roads and cars, the proportionally greater danger caused by cars, and their effect on quality of life.

Finally, a reading of Caro's biography suggests that Moses cared more for the middle class and their desire for "independence" than for the poor and their basic transportation needs. His modernism also seems to have blinded him to any possibility that automobiles were not the best transportation solution for a given problem.

I think all these factors make it hard to pin dissatisfaction with Moses on any one factor.

Regarding Robert Moses, he is probably the most destructively influential figure in NYC history. I would say that robert moses contributed to the 80's blight of the city even more than crack cocaine.

I may be on the fringe here, but I believe that transportation is and has been for a long time the single most important issue for NYC, far more than anything else.