willing and we have elected officials crime and these changes and restart it to side away from the slightly for political direction and partly because of how feel riding a bike. in the basic sense and feel good so let's try together. moved away from that base where we can try something new. >> one thing you said about elected officials -- >> we are going to leave this program briefly. live gavel to gavel coverage for

u.s. senate. ... the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c., january 2, 2025. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable chuck grassley -- charles e. schumer, a senator charles e. schumer, a senator >> .. signed: patty murray, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under

the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until 11:45 a.m. on friday, 11:45 a.m. on friday, >> the 118th congress will gavel out for the last time tomorrow and the new congress will begin at noon eastern. you can follow live coverage here on c-span2. as we now return to our booktv programming in progress. >> liability insurance for when they hit someoneik or for when e e-bike operator i is injured, travis industry sort of take over with related and inadequate regulation has harmed commuter cycling and harmha recreational cycling in the city. that's an example of elected officials being cowed by the technology rather than controlling the technology. the same now you talk about uber and lyft, electric vehicles. there's a tendency to say it's

electric vehicle so it should be exempt on the cap for for higher vehicles. maybe it should be exempt from congestion pricing. an electric car still a car. it is not a good thing to encourage more automobile use in an advanced city. when you see people being bullied by the technology rather than controlling the technology, it goes back to the cities original embrace of the automobile.. city around it. and i think we're struggling with at the moment. i surprised at a little at your portrayal of mayor lindsay. it was more favorable. i might have imagined and. maybe that was a mistake on my part. i'm wondering if you can sort talk about him and role in advancing a sort of a a less car

focused agenda? yeah, actually, i was surprised in doing research, in looking at the at the lindsay administration just documents but talking to people who worked in the lindsay administration the late jay kriegel that he was broadly right on the policies he understood long before anybody else did that we needed to get away from increasing the use of automobiles in increasing automobile infrastructure in new york city and re-embrace the subway and bus system. it was actually, you know, somewhat it was his idea to merge the tri borough the moses empire into the transit system and use the from the tolls to fund mass transit. but he was just terrible at the

politic of that. and so governor rockefeller sort of stole his idea the thing lindsay was good on is understanding you now that factories are not locating in new york. it's to be white collar office work that rebuilds the tax base these are people that are going to have a choice of where to work. and we need to be an amenity based city fund. so fortunately he a lot of other things wrong that made it hard to accomplish those things but he was right those two things and we have seen other mayors create the environ where he if were here today i think he would say yes we we actually do have to be fun city you mentioned you interviewed jay kriegel who played a very important role the lindsay administration and was just a wealth of knowledge about so many things in the city in the history the city. how many interviews did you do for the book?

i think around 300. yeah. good. and it's it teaches you you have got to get this stuff down. i -- ravitch, passed away a little more than a year ago. jay kriegel passed away just right before pandemic. so making sure. hazel henderson, who worked on the environmental movement and the clean air, and that was the basis for the legal agreement to refund the subway system. so just making sure you get this stuff down and people's own own words before it's too late has has turned out to be very important. was there anyone that you wanted to interview you didn't get a chance to or turned down or wasn't available. chuck schumer. he was everything all person on my list who was at some point answered me and talked to me of them. it took, you know, ten or 15

tries or getting in touch with like their cousin. but he was the only one i wanted to talk him about capping the cross bronx expressway, a couple other issues, but hopefully i'll catch him the next time around you can get him for the paperback edition edition. the bibliography in book is is wonderful. i sort of jotted down a couple of books that seemed interesting to me by, their titles that i wanted to read. if somebody is interested in learning more new york city history or transportation and history, what are a couple of books that you would recommend that they read. oh, let's see. i always read sam's books for not only the policy of you know, you've done the future of autonomous vehicles, you've done other cities and sort of gingerly moving away. sam schwartz, who is an on transportation here in new york, he read sam schwartz's book.

i would also say the empire on the hudson to get other side of the growth of public authorities. this was a book that talked about the history of port authority. phil plot has done a much more recent book for the the centennial of the port authority understanding the how these institutions work and don't work and why some things that seem absurd they may be absurd but understanding why they are absurd. phil potts did a good job of that in his own port authority book. there are many more, and if i think of some as we go along, i'll tell you personally at the end of the evening, great. when you when you think now about the book, who do you imagine? who did you, the reader was going to be when you were writing? is it is it in a audience? is it a new york audience?

it an urban audience, transportation junkies who who's the who's the reader? i wanted to make sure you don't have to be a transportation junkie to enjoy the book. you know, i'm friends with many transportation junkies. you know, the people know each of the are numbers on the subway cars. and when of them was put in place. this is not that. and the same thing with, you know, what should be the hourly throughput on a particular avenue like those kind of engineering issues? you know, i don't get into any of that stuff that it's not very important for some people to to know about those things. but a person who is interested, new york history, even if they don't care or big think they don't care about transport, it will be interesting to them just see how the politics work in your frankly future elected officials, future appointed

officials. if you have three goals in mind for you or in ministration, what are the things need to know about how the governorship works? what are the what are the mistakes that my predecessors made in this position? what are the successes that my predecessors how did they specifically accomplish or fail to accomplish things in different policy areas, not just in transportation and so if i'm a if i'm a car guy and i'm reading book, i might think, you know, boy cars are popular, right? what why is the why is the book consistently favoring a set of transportation alternatives to the automobile given that so many people their car how do you sort of how do you both you as the and those of us who are in government, how should we be thinking about the fact that while it may not be good thing for lots of people to in

midtown, lots of people seem to want to drive in midtown. yeah i think you know that's like a 500 page book, you know, sort of broadly speaking, antique car. and then you've got like these two pages that say, well, you know, sometimes you do need to be in a car. so i think that is important too. and this goes back to the moses myth that there is no american city and no global city that does not have some automobile transportation to and from that city and that city nobody is saying that we are going to entirely new york city off from traffic and just sort be a pedestrian and bicyclists paradise you do need cars you have parts of the city that are not well-served by transit. you have people who who want or or need to get away in a private motor vehicle for various

idiosyncratic reasons and broader reasons. the success here is measured in. there are certain parts of the urban areas where you shouldn't have any or limited automobile traffic. you know, of course, times square that global comparisons would be places covent garden, pedestrians areas of the paris case copenhagen central streets. so there are some areas where no you don't want cars you want something like a free bus service going through those areas. and there are other places where you want to narrow the road, but you want traffic going more slowly. ocean parkway in brooklyn is a good example. you're not going to get rid of the cars there, but we've succeeded with the speed and red light cameras that you don't have people driving through there now at 50 miles an hour. people are going 25 miles an hour. you know that itself in itself is a success. so, yes, most us need to be in a

car sometime, but making sure that they are fitting themselves into the streetscape rather than dominating the streetscape is is is the is the goal here. and, you know maybe you hate transit, you hate pedestrian plazas, you hate bike. you should read the book just so that you understand how all of these things came to be. great. let me open it up now for questions from the audience, if we have any sir. hi, my name is. paul. to both. paul, i wonder what's your take about insurance which insurance. did the question? i said hi, honey, all over the place were in cold water. know what you're talking about?

which. yeah, thank you, christopher. and thanks for coming out. yeah, i think the open streets just just the open dining during early months of, the reopening from the pandemic, i give the de blasio administration lot of credit. they rolled out these two things quickly and at a time people couldn't or felt uncomfortable going to see a friend or relative at their home. they weren't allowed to dine indoors for quite some months. i mean, even going into 2021, opening this street space both for restaurant use and like 70/4 in in around jackson heights, columbus, in, in on upper west side, many these open streets, a place where you could see your friends and relatives for the first time. let your kids ride around on a bike and not have to worry about that. so i doing those things quickly

was a good for new york's recovery. it would not have been possible. the city hadn't already proven, yes, we can. we can have a block closed off for pedestrians as we can. we can reopen. a space and the world not going to fall apart. so i think that worked out well. the longer term challenge is it's you can't just of take away traffic on a wide road and declare this to be an open street. you programing this is the same issue with the high line these things it is harder to do an area that is less dense and to make sure that the street is used for positive uses, you need a certain amount of money to program that space. you need some kind of arts and culture, need some kind of organized. you kind of need somebody in. so that is not taken over by more negative uses. and so these are these.

these things are more complex in the context of where the block is is there a place for deliveries you know all these things still apply. one of the really wonderful excavations in the book is early in the century, the police commissioner of all people decides that we need to close streets for children to play. presumably because there was some concern about what kids doing with their time. maybe it was less rather than more construct and not something you'd imagine happening today. but the more you, the more you read the book, the more you can sort of unearth these really wonderful hidden gems things that we have forgotten in our own history other questions. yeah yeah thanks for reminding about a place. so i had forgotten about them and they were really cool when i was little by my other question was would we be a better place if it was a political capital that