>> for those with general admission tickets, you're spited to gift cards for $5 per person on your order if you ordered for two tickets, $10 gift card and somebody ordered five tickets, there's a $25 gift card at the register and get that and they don't expire and use them toward anything in the store, a copy of movements or any of the books that you may be interested in. that's the business spiel. thank you for listening to that and thank you all again for coming. my name is joe, i'm the events managerpn at p&t knitwear and welcoming nicole here for her newestst book movement and howad here to read the q&a and talk with nicole.

movement has been called and the pedestriannf infrastructure and not just for the city and politicians and planners everywhere and going for christian and our trans socialist and going to be the research business that shows up the underbelly of the new york politics and there's a commitment and the short side of interest and the long view by rachel weinberger and director of research and chair of the transportation at the regional plan and association.

i want to open with an open ended question and why transportation policy, how you got interested in this, why you chose this book to write at this time. >> transportation touches on all of our lives and encompasses all

those other issues that you just talked about.

the activism involves not only in defeating the highway era and taking some street space back from the automobile in favor of pedestrians andpe bicyclists and other usessers and how is this done and applies to other issues beside transportation. if you want to get something done politically in new york city, it's not good enough to say i have this great idea. you have to know how do you get this accomplished in one of the mostmo complex political environments in the world and it's interesting to see how that environment has changed through history and how various people including from surprising backgrounds have cracked the code of how do you go from an

idea to actually having the idea being enacted and being conventional wisdom. >> talk about one of those ideas that may actually be on the verge of being enacted after being an idea for quite some time and you talk about it in the book and congestion pricing. we are on the verge now of what seems congestion pricing being rolled out in new york city after 34 fits and starts.

>> london did this 21 years ago and stockholm had this for 15 years and it's kind of a technology that's almost

seconds to t play you gone understand hw the processes work, two months go by very, very quickly. >> a lot of wonderful personalities you bring to life in the book and if governor hoche 18 a weak governor. who is somebody that sticks out to you as a strong reader who in the facee of opposition made a

major difference at some point along the way in the story?

financial leaders going to the media and saying we need to enact taxes on businesses so that we can rebuild this subway system from decades of decay and neglect. if we don't rebuild the u subway system, we're not going to rebuild our city tax base from the decline of the 1970s. most people say it's not the take away from the very real accomplishments and going for them and they'veon not done this and scary and going for them and independent and they let him be there important for people to think about.

>> sometimes people say quite understandably do we have to hash them and you love this story and you're tired of it in the past but i found in trying to move forward, you do have to go back and revisit the error and what you think you know ask what may be wrong and impacks what we do today and the partial responsibility for the decisions weon make today. so the narrative between mo

cespedes being this -- moses being this big bad villain that hoisted highways and parkways and express ways onto a city that didn't want those things, that's not the case. the blueprint for the highway expression parkway system and new york city laid out and followed and came from the regional plans and the regional plan was a group of people from the business community and private citizens and fdr and going for them on the regional plan.

moses was working on his first project then and he was gaining a public reputation and he had no public reputation at the time. this wasn't something where moses said we have to build all these roadse and new york city said, oh, yes, we have to do what moses said and he enacted what other people, elected officials, governors, mayors wanted and what they continued to want until the 1960s.

the bad man and good woman that prevents us from some successful or achieving the goals and suggest an idea and we can tap this thing and mitigate the impact on the middle south bronx and you sort of just hear oh, well, you know, moses built this road and we're condemned to live inat the world that moses built for us. i mean, moses has been dead for four decades and what are we doing today to litigate the impact of the road and in fact i

talk about in a the book and people in the bronx are working on that.

not just local politics but state and federal. the crime level on the waves have skyrocketed and i need to

understand howgs these two work together and i can't just be talking to people and my own bubble saying all these other people are stupid and that just does not work and there is more and more of that today. i'm not sure what the answer to it is. just sort of being aware that this is not everyone reading the same newspaper and you happen to see the article that matters and you may not see that today. >> so robert moses was able to build a highway through the middle of the bronx and he was unsuccessful in build ago highway, proposed highway through lower manhattan. how much of his success in one area and failure in another was due to the different populations in those areas, wealthier, more gentrified as you say in lower manhattan and more working class in the bronx and how much is due to the fact that by the time that the proposed highway was

being discussed and concern and roles of the impact on site? >> it's ayo combination of both and there's no question that it is easier to force a poorer population of less political capital and less time to focus on activism and it's easier to do that than to build an express way across lower manhattan or midtown manhattan. i think another factor that is less understood is just being the density working in a different way in that if you try to widen a road through washington square park, there's 100,000 people that live right there and they know each other. people live in larger apartment buildings and their kids all go to school together. it is easier to organize versus building the express way across theh central south bronx where

that is a lot of people who are dense but disbursed in density. one of the thins that moses did or rather the wagner administration allowed him to do is build this in three phases. the west phase is already under construction and the east phase about to be under construction.

subway is noted a road where once it's built you spent most ofre the money to build it. you're creating for yourself a permanent new deficit and

operate at a 50% loss forever so moses said, you know, who's going to operate it? there were no ans to the questions and you even then in 1964 or little bit earlier than that, it was very simplistic that oh, we wish mr. missouri moses would do this for us and new york times, business community but if he won't do it, we'll stop thinking about it and these difficult questions that we are still dealing with. how will you fund the operating deficits onhe the subways and build more subway capacity and we haven't dealt with them very at several inflection points including that one.

you don't want the subways to get back in acute crisis like they were in the early 80s in terms o of physical neglect or e early 90s in terms of the crime situation. soso trying to move away from tt environment of acute crisis and only time there's realize during that for the bloomburg area and again, during the cuomo area where cuomo did have, you know, to his credit,some mo customer on major infrastructure projects he wanted to accomplish and very few mayors and garners focus on the long term infrastructure projectsts and long term projecs that the city needs in order to make sure it retains that tax base.

criminal justice focus on our ability to open up pedestrian plazas and on subway ridership and this impact on all the issues you write about. jowski yeah, the third major lesson that i took away from writing the book is as hard as itit is to get new yorkers to experiment with anything, it is much harder if they don't feel a

basic sense of public safety and public order. you have no career of doing congestion pricing with people are afraid to ride on the subways.

regulations harmed commuter cycling and harmed recreational cycle in the tv and

he understand long before anybody else that we needed to get away from increasing the use of automobiles and increasing automobile infrastructure in new york city and so governor

rockafeller stole his idea and other thing lindsey was good on was understanding now they're not locating up in new york and going for the happy about the office work that rebuilds the tax thing and>> how many interview it is you do for the book?

>> around 300. clean air movement and that was basis for the legal agreement to refund the subway system so just making sureng you get the stuff people's own words before it's too late has turned out to be very important. >> anyone that you wanted to interview who you didn't get a chance to or turned you down or wasn't available? >> chuckas schumer, he was every single person on my list who was alive at some point answered me and talked to me.

>> when you think now about the book, who do you imagine the leader was going to be when you were writing it? a general audience or new york audience or urban audience or transportation junkies?

whoo is the reader. >> i'm friends with many transportation junkies and the people that know numbers on the subway cars and when each were put in place and this is not travion green and the same thing with what should be the hourly put on a particular avenue and those kind of engineering issues. i don't get into any of the stuff and it's not very important for some people to

>> yeah, like a 500 page book and sort of broadly speaking anticar and then you've got like these two pages that say well, you know, sometimes you do need to be in a car. i think that is important too and this goes back to the moses myth that there's no american city and no global city that does not have some automobile transportation to and from that city and within that city.

>> the paris koenen pen hagueen central -- cope hagueen central streets and there's cars or free bus service going through the areas and there's other places you want to narrow the roadbed and you want traffic going more slowly, ocean parkway in brooklyn is a good example and not getting rid of the cars but we succeeded with the speed and red lightht cameras that they're not going 25 miles an hour and that in itself is a success. yes, most of us need to be in a car for some time and going for them and we're sitting

themselves into the street scheme rather than dominating them is the goal here.

i think doing those quickly afters good thing for new york recovery. itre would not have been possibe

if they hadn't already proven yes, w we can have a block closd off for pedestrians and we can repurpose a space in the world is not going to fall apart. longer term challenge is you can't just sort of take away traffic on a wide roadbed and declare this to be an open street. you need programming

going for the city and other levels of government just sort of known to do this and people being paid to advocate for transit and going to run the trains pretty frequently and so there are many idiosyncratic legacies and may be too easy to say if we were the political capital of the problems being solved.

the 1966 transit strike was important and first time there was no transit and showed how important transit was to the city and if we hadn't had that strike arguably, we would not have created the mta and eventually refunded the transit system, but that of course, the transit strike was mike quill's strike and head of the transport worker's's union in a much more complex man than i think history gives him credit for. he really understood the subtleties of the changing political environment and wanted

to end the old machine politics way of doing things. lindsey in many ways was a candidate who wanted to reduce the power of the public sector labor unions and one of the reasons tech no cat ick garner in the era that's more spectacle of labor unions and realizing if we go along with this and we're going along with things forever and he refused to go along and that's kind of when the split of weakening private sector unions and strengthening public sector unions really began.

he was much more than the sort of, you no, telling the judge to drop dead.

public law enforcement and the set of laws from which the city operates and when it comes to what does this lane of the street belong to, the mayor can use for good or for will and many for ill and in my ways the city hasn't even got ton yet. so just

taking the property tax along that right of way and use that to defray the cost of east side access.

city controls property tax and state fornc the incentive. there's never a reason to go for the state run transit system and have the governor get the credit to the extent that anyone notices that the transit system is running a little bit better than it was before. >> thank you for being here as well. >> thank you all for coming up. >> we have we have a couple copies of movement left obstructing cerumen the register and if we run out, more on the way to have them reserved and nicole signed bookplates and it'll be here and staff picks

and ope' for another half hour and enjoy yourself and have a great night.