help think. well, that's great because i believe that so thank you all

for coming just two housekeeping things before we get the ball rolling here. so after the conversation and q&a, nicole will be signing copies of movements here at the table behind her. and howard. we do some copies available for purchase. register and we did have some supply chain issues and the order our first order ended up going to a church somewhere in. but we did get some more in. but you'd like a signed copy and we happened to run out. we can certainly put some on hold for you. have more coming. just let my colleagues know that register we have we do some copies at the register but should we run out. we'll order some more and have nicole sign book plates so that you can have your sign copy when they come in. and if you did not in, definitely do so at the end of the event. for those of you got general admission tickets, you're entitled to gift cards for $5 per person on your order. so you ordered for two tickets, your $10 gift card, somebody ordered five tickets under the name. so you have $5 gift card at the register. so definitely get that those

don't expire. you can use for its anything in the store. so you can use towards a copy of movements or any of the books that you may be interested in. so their business spiel. thank you all for listening to that and thank you all again for coming. my name is joe. i'm the events manager here at pnc network. and on behalf of all the staff, we're really pleased to welcome nicole gelinas here to celebrate the release of our newest book movement and to welcome howard wolfson education program leader of bloomberg philanthropies who is here to lead the q and a and talk with nicole recently named among eddie ten best books. you should read this november movement has been a powerful argument for mass transit pedestrian infrastructure, not just for gotham city, but for politicians, planners everywhere. by christian vollmer. author of our trams socialist. my meticulously researched opus that shows us the underbelly of new york, the brinksmanship, the commitment, the the shortsighted self-interest and the long view by. rachel weinberger, director of research strategy and the peter herman, chair for transportation at the regional plant

association and simply the best book on explaining the history of our physical city, the protagonist and the obstructionists view through the nuances of the times by former new york city traffic traffic commissioner samuel l. schwartz, a regular columnist for the new york post's and a regularly quoted source of the new york times, the wall street journal, and a contributing editor to the manhattan institute. city journal. nicole covered new york's transportation issues for over decade and is the author of the 2009 book on the global financial after the fall saving from wall street and washington. and along with his work at bloomberg philanthropies, howard served as the new york city mayor for governor, affairs and communications 2010 to 2013. served as a communications director for hillary clinton's history, making for the presidency in 2008, as chief of staff to congresswoman nita lowey as the executive director of the democratic congressional campaign committee. and on campaigns at every level of government advising charles schumer, kristen gillibrand, andrew cuomo, among others. howard graduated from the university of chicago and received a master's in history

from duke university. it's a pleasure to have these two here. please help me welcome nicole and howard. well, thank you for that warm welcome. this is a really distinguished group of transportation experts and advocates. so it's really a pleasure to be speaking with so many knowledgeable and people. and it's a particular pleasure to be with nicole this evening. this is a terrific book. i loved it. i hope you all either have read it or will read it. it's certainly the best history of transportation in new york. i think ever written and is one of the absolute best books about new york ever written. and i think one of the things we can talk about today is how many areas of life you touch upon in the book in talking about transportation, right. do criminal justice issues, education issues, housing

issues, they are all intersecting with transportation issues. so we'll talk about that i want to open with a an open ended question. i'm curious why transportation policy, how you got in this, why you chose book to write at this time? well, thank you, howard. why transportation policy, because transport nation is the one government thing besides sanitation that we do every single day. it touches on all of our lives and it all of those other issues that you just talked about, why topic as many of you are this year is 50th anniversary of the power. robert caro's classic but we tend to focus in obsess over that era and it's been longer since the power broker was written then the era that power broker covers so you think about the era when the automobile was

in the ascendant in new york city and, in other american and global cities, roughly from the world war one era until, the mid 1960s. it's been longer since then than that era was. so i just got around to thinking something must have happened in these past 50 years. we don't have to constantly about the previous past 50 years. so what has happened in these past 50 years in terms of rebuilding the subway system starting in 1980s, the era of building bike lanes pedestrian plazas starting after the turn of the millennium, the activism involved not only in defeat in the highway era and some street space back from the automobile in favor of pedestrians and bicyclists and other users. how how is this done politically in this applies to other issues

besides if you want to get something done politically in new york city, it's not good enough to say, you know, hey, i've got this great idea. you have to know how do you actually get this? in one of the most complex political environs in the world? and it's interesting. 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 be enacted it and be conventional wisdom. so talk about one of those ideas that may actually be on the of being enacted after an idea for quite some time. you talk about in the book congestion pricing we are on the now of it seems congestion pricing being rolled out in new york city after many and starts wondering what your take is on that at this moment and how do

you sort of think about that in the history of this issue which many have attempted? i did not even that this was something that predated mayor bloomberg probably would have been good for to know that when i was at city hall, one of the actual wonderful things in the book is you can learn how many things keep around and about before they occur. congestion pricing being one of the best examples. so we may be on the verge of getting it enacted. what what are your thoughts about that right? well, congestion pricing, this is an idea that actually does date back to the early 1970s. even earlier than that, the first proposals to charge people to cross the free east river bridges were they would have accomplished the goal as congestion pricing. nobody could drive a motor vehicle manhattan for free if you charge those bridges what has happened to it over the years over the decades is

instruct it for what has not happened first of all you need a persistent consistent activism community that just won't take no for an answer. i know sam and charles are both here and so so have been working on this consistently for the entirety of this 50 years but that is necessary it is not sufficient. what else was necessary to? finally making congestion pricing a credible political idea if one that we still don't have in practice was a subway and bus and commuter system that actually worked you can't charge people come into manhattan if they don't a viable alternative in terms of i want to get on the subway i want to on the bus i am not in vengeance by taking mass transit so it took the creation the mta in the 19 in 1968 the

funding of the mta, which didn't come until the early 1980s, the decrease in crime on the transit system didn't come until the early 1990s, before you had a transit system that people wanted to use. so all of those things set the stage for what the bloomberg administra ation tried to do in 2007 2008. that was also necessary. a mayor who was committed to this idea but also sufficient in new york politics. governor, is the key the key center of power in new york state. if the governor is not only not opposed to congestion pricing, but not willing to put his or her political capital behind congestion pricing, it still doesn't happen. that's what we see today. governor hochul inherited, this congestion pricing law from the previous governor, it was never

her project and overall she's been weak governor on many, many. we will see if turns around her pause on. congestion pricing. if so, this will be something that again was was half a century in the making and what's prediction if if it does come to pass this will be groundbreaking it be by the standards of the united states fairly revolutionary. are you hopeful? do you support it? what what is your. but yes by the standards of the united states, it's groundbreaking. by the standards of the rest of the world. you know, we're we're 21 years behind. i mean london did this 21 years ago. stockholm has has had this for 15 years. this is kind of a technology that's almost come and gone in much of the rest of the world predictions. i will you know, as i've from

sam, i won't consider congestion pricing in place until. someone actually drives the first vehicle under those things and pays the first toll. i will say a word of warning. she is a weak governor and that we're not here to criticize politicians. but that is important because you need strong political leadership to enact policies that you support and want be enacted. so something like understanding how the state legislature works understanding what governor is supposed to do, what the governor can do and what the governor has and hasn't done. these things are important. if you want your policy put in place. so in what way is she weak on? she has let herself on many issues be defined by state legislature. this is a place where she already has the law in place. but does she have enough to actually get this stripped

program enacted before january 20th? if you don't understand how these processes work, two months will go by very, very quickly. so a lot of really wonderful person politics. you to life in the book. so if governor hochul is a weak governor who is somebody who sticks out to you as strong leader, who in the face of opposition made a major difference at some point along the way in the story. well i think bloomberg's certainly was a good leader on transportation in that he was willing to take the political blowback for things that now seem to most people like common sense you you have to make some room for bicycles the streets the avenues have five and six lanes for car and truck traffic. it's moving traffic or parking

traffic just take a part one of those lanes away and see what happens. same thing with pedestrian plazas, not just in times square in manhattan, jackson heights in queens, the the the affordable road pedestrian plaza. these things were not they should not been as controversial. they were. but bloomberg was willing to sort of put up with people making fun of him and these these headlines in in in the papers a lot of mayors would say, you know what, i've got three issues that are way more important than this. this is not even in my top problems of the day. so let's just put it aside because i'm just i'm going to get more criticism than. i'm going to get of praise for it. so that's one, i think in terms an appointed official, -- ravitch, in the early 1980s, he was a real developer who became the head of the metropolitan transportation authority.

he was the mta's first leader. i mean, the was, you know, 12 years old or 14 years old by then. who actually had a he had enough capital built up in terms of being a credible person in going to the community, having personal wealth in that if he not get the political support that needed from the governor who appointed him, he could walk away from the job and going to business leaders, real estate leaders, financial leaders in going to the media and saying we need to enact taxes on businesses. so we can rebuild this subway system from decades of decay and neglect if we don't rebuild the subway system, we are not going to be able to rebuild our cities tax base from the decline of the 1970s. but many people it's not to take away from -- ravitch very real accomplishments, but he could

not have done this if weren't for governor hugh carey. he could only be independent because let him be in dependent. and i think that's important for people to think about sometimes governor or mayor is just appointing having a broad strategy laid out in let them do they need to do to accomplish that strategy you by referencing robert moses and the powerbroker those of us who read the book and think about the book often pair robert moses with jane jacobs, one is a hero, the other is a villain. i think your book tells a more complicated than than that. i'm wondering if you can sort of speak to the role that moses and jacobs played in the history of transportation policy in new york and how maybe our understanding of them not quite as nuanced as it should be right and sometimes people say you

know quite understandably do we have to rehash the whole moses jacobs you know, whether you love the you're just tired of it. isn't this the past? but i found in trying to move forward, you do have to go back revisit this era because. what you think you know in what may be wrong impact, what we do today and how we parcel out our responsibility, the decisions that we make today. so the narrative moses being this bad villain who foisted the highways and and expressways onto, a city that did not want those things, that's just not the case. the blueprint for the highway expressway parkway system that new york city laid out and then followed for 40 years, that came from the regional plan. the regional plan was a group of from and it's people from the

business community, private citizens, your fdr uncle was one of the top people on regional plan and like many people in the 1920s, they said, you know what, we to rebuild the car or we have to rebuild york city around the car made. a lot of sense you had we you went from zero cars to half a million cars in years. it seemed unless you reorganize the city around the car you would lose popular and jobs to other places that were building around the car. so again the regional plan came 1929. moses was only working on his first project. then he was gaining a public reputation. he had no public reputation at the time. this wasn't something where moses said, we have to build these roads in new york city. said, oh yes, have to do what? moses said. he what other people elected officials? governors. mayors of wanted in they

continued to want until the 1960s. and as for jacobs of course we should laud the role that she played in the 1960s in killing lower manhattan expressway. but she could not have done if it were not for generation of activists before her know ten years before woman named shirley hayes homemaker. no background in policy, no background in urban planning. she lived in greenwich village. the moses working for the city of new york wanted to expand the already existing road that ran through greenwich village. shirley hayes said, you know my kids play in washington park. i don't want road running anymore through. washington square park. not only we not want an expanded road, washington square park, but we don't even want the road that already runs washington square where? square park.

so she defeated moses, not alone. she got 30,000 petitions. signatures in greenwich village. but she didn't defeat moses by beating moses. she cracked the code, which is don't focus on moses. focus on the elected officials who control? moses. so she put pressure on the mayor. she put pressure on the borough president. she got enough votes. it was credible that she could move election with this coalition, and that is what forced mayor wagner to cancel the road in washington square park and actually get rid of the road that was there. that technique would continue to work and would work for jane jacobs as well. don't focus on moses focus on the elected officials. so not having that history and background, just of the bad man and the good woman that us from some successful or from achieve

doing as much as we can with our goals today. you know for example if you talk about cross bronx expressway, you suggest an idea, you know, can cap this thing and mitigate the impact on the middle south bronx. you sort of just hear, oh, well, you know, moses this road where condemned to live the world that moses built for us. well i mean moses has been dead for four decades. what we doing today to mitigate the impact of this road in in as i talk about in the book, people in the bronx are working on that you give a lot of credit to the role the village voice played in killing some of those. robert proposals in lower manhattan greenwich village. and then you also talk about the role streetsblog plays in advancing the issues around safe. i'm wondering, given the sort of

very fractured media environment that we face, you know what i began my career in new york. it was four daily newspaper town, village voice had enormous impact. now, are not a foreign newspaper town anymore. the readership has declined participate ously is there still a role for media to play influencing kinds of outcomes? can you talk a little bit about the role that advocacy journalism has played in the history of these fights right are aa1 newspaper town today but yeah the village voice there very first front cover was the battle over washington park. they they created to meet new need in greenwich. if we were talking about today, we would say that the village was gentrifying and the longshoremen and the factory workers were moving out.

people who a more bohemian lifestyle and more affluent couples were moving into the village. and so they kind of wanted arts, culture and policy, newspaper, and they had the resources to sort of redesign a city that they wanted which the longshoreman and the factory workers had not had. so the media of followed that demand was a very important voice for that whole 13 year saga of getting rid the road through washington square park. has the media changed? yes. can it still make a difference yes? but it's much harder. it's not just it's the fracturing. i has a different result that don't think about as much. it's not just less coverage, but people who may be focused on. i want to reduce traffic deaths or i want i want to encourage

more bicycling or i want i want more bus lanes to get more people on the busses. that's wonderful and laudable to be focused on that one thing or congestion. but if you don't, the political context in which you're pushing for this one thing, not local politics, but state politics and federal politics. so if i'm pushing to get more on the subways, but the crime level in the subways has skyrocketed. i to understand how these two things work together. i can't just be talking to people in my own little bubble and saying, you know, all these other people are stupid. that just does not work. and there is more and more of that, i'm not sure what the answer to it is, just sort of being aware that this is not everyone reading the same newspaper. you happen to see the article on a different topic that actually matters a lot to what you are trying to do and. you may not see that today.

so robert moses was able to sort of build a highway through the middle of bronx. he was unsuccessful in building a highway, a 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, lower manhattan, more working class, the bronx? or how much of it is due to the fact that by the time that proposed highway in lower manhattan was being discussed there was more concern about the role and the impact of cars, society? it's a combination of both you know, there's no question that it easier to force a poorer population with less political capital and less time to focus on activist ism. it's easier to do that than is to build an expressway across

lower manhattan or midtown manhattan. but i think another factor that is less understood is just the density in a different way. and that if you try to widen a road through washington square park, you've got 100,000 people who live right there and they they each other people live in larger apartment buildings. their kids all go to school together. it is easier to organize versus building the expressway across the central south bronx where that is a lot of people who are dense but dispersed in density. so one of the things moses did or rather wagner administration allowed him to do is build in three phases. so the west is already under construction the east phase, is about to be under construction. these people don't know each other at all. they can't together and say we are going to defeat this road.

by the time the people in the central area even found out about. you've got two parts of it that are already under construct. so that matters to that it is somewhat a generalization, but it is to be successful activist if you are more densely populated. when you think about no pun intended or pun intended, roads not taken in the history of policy in new york. if you could go back in time a wand sit down across a mayor or a policymaker and say, you know, you really ought to do this and not that or that and not this. well, what would what would be the one or two things that you would go back do or undo? yeah. i mean if we go way back, i would say getting rid of the streetcars and the trolleys was a big mistake in some european cities. toronto still have of their

streetcar and trolley network intact and. this was another decision a to rip up the trolley tracks the streets of new york city replace them with busses that happened before moses this time you three mayors starting just after the turn of the 20th century that said we're to get rid of the trolleys, replace them with busses. did they do that broad? lee speaking. it was because there was pressure to give this road space to the car and it was thought the busses can weave way through the car traffic. so will be better for because they won't have these trolley tracks the way they will have to be stuck behind. the trolley and the transit people get around anyway because they can just go around the car. so that obviously did not work out and we see the repercussions today that it's still very, very difficult to. get dedicated space for a bustling and we had a billion

people here riding trolleys i mean this an intact and streetcar system would rival the and moving people around efficiently. is there another moment where the city could have built more lines we could have had more subway lines going to more places, you know, more like london. our current version here. yes, there are different points in time where we could have made different decisions about, the subway. so, for example, staten island, no subway service across the verrazano bridge. that is something that is often blamed on moses. you know, moses built the bridge. it was his last big bridge project. people said you should you should build it with the capacity for four tracks. and he said they in the short version he said no but in the longer more complex version he well the subway will go into brooklyn but the brooklyn

subways even in a deteriorated were running at capacity there wasn't any capacity to take new passengers onto the brooklyn subways from staten island and once we've got the verrazano bridge built with capacity for subway service who is going to pay to operate the service know a subway is like a road where once it's built you've spent most of the money you need build it you need you're actually creating for yourself a permanent new deficit. you have to operate at a 50% loss forever. so moses said, you know who's going to operate it. there were answers to those questions. you even even then in, 1964 or a little bit earlier than that, it was very simplistic that, oh, we wish mr. moses would do this for us. you know, new york times community. but if he won't it you know, we're just stop thinking it so these difficult questions we are still dealing with how do you fund the operating deficits, the

subways, how do you more subway capacity? we haven't dealt with very well at several inflection, including that one. new york city seems to of whipsaw between problems, scarcity and problems of abundance. we either have not enough people or too many. we either have not enough subway riders, too many. we struggle with sort of finding the equilibrium. where do you think we are now in cycle? do we have the population has declined since covid subway ridership was declining. i think it may have come mostly, maybe not entirely. sort of. how you see the problems of the city today. we have too much or not enough, right? in that it goes back to pricing. it's either the city is doing too well and we can't congestion pricing because we can't fit any more people subways or the city

is doing so terribly that we can't have congestion pricing because people don't want to be on the subway. so it's it's kind of one or the other over the past five years, i think one important lesson to take away from the book is, doing anything new york city, even the simplest, takes a long and i'm not talking about construction permits to build second avenue subway. i mean just something like moving lane of traffic away from drivers and into bicycle or trying to put in place a new bustling these things or even something like the rules for open dining you know would actually implementing open dining during the pandemic was a good example of, doing something very quickly and the kinks out later and think it actually worked very well and now we're in this long bureaucratic

process. we may not get the open dining program that the city could have and be like other global cities. so doing anything takes a long time and it requires full time persistence on the part of dozens, hundreds of activists in different areas. the other lesson is we tend not think about things politically unless we are in an acute crisis, and that's unfortunate isn't it. you don't want the subways get back to an acute crisis like they were in the early eighties in of physical neglect or the early nineties in terms of the crime situation. so trying to move away from that environment of acute you know frankly the only time we have realized that recently was during the bloomberg era in and during the cuomo era where cuomo did have you know to his credit

some focus on major infrastructure that he wanted to accomplish. unfortunately, very few mayors and governors focus on these term infrastructure projects. you know, long term the city needs in order, make sure it retains that tax base to deal with many of the other issues. so you mentioned crime and its impact on transportation and the possibilities of changing the streetscape. thomas danger recently wrote a book called new new york, new york it's a wonderful history of new. and he talks about cycles of order and disorder at some points in new york. feels more orderly, and people get a little tired of that. and we sort of get a more disorderly point and then snaps back. people are tired of the disorder. they want order again. i'm wondering if you can speak to sort of the importance of

order, criminal justice, focus, our ability to, open up pedestrian plazas on subway ridership and its impact on all of these issues you write about. yeah, i think the third major lesson that i took away from writing book is how hard is as it 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. so again you know you have no prayer of doing congestion pricing when people are afraid to ride on the subways and the argument that oh you know more people die cars. that's true but if you are thinking about that decision i get on the subway and risk something unpleasant happen or do i get in the car and certainly have a perfectly pleasant ride? i mean, these are the decisions that people make on a day to day

basis. if you don't feel a sense that you can walk down street, then you don't feel the street belongs to you. so without that sort of base of public safety and public order that built up over, you know, the beginning in the early 1990, going into 2019, so built up 30 years as felt safer in and more willing to experiment. and we had elected officials who could actually take some time away from constantly thinking about crime. that's when we started to see some positive changes and we started to slide away from that where, partly because of poor political direction, partly because of how people feel and walking the streets riding, subways riding bike. we have lost very real progress in the past five years in just having that sort of basic sense

of, you know, i feel good about myself and about the city, so let's try this new thing and know if it if it works, great. if it does work, know who cares? so we've moved away from that sort of base where we can try something new. one of the things you write about is the phenomena elected officials and public officials of playing catch up new technology. so when when i was at city hall, we were huge advocates of lanes. we didn't really envision that they would be used as extensively as they are now by people on very fast going e-bikes we try to promote outer borough taxis. we didn't envision that would serve or say they served that function. i'm wondering if you can sort of speak to the ways in which technology and new technology and uninterested pay the technology has driven so many of

the innovations, changes and challenges that you write about. right. i think one challenge with elected officials is they don't to feel that they are behind on a technology. they don't want to look stupid. so they over embrace technology where, you know, for example, the e-bikes e-bikes have their place new york city both for people commute if you have bad knees if you if you don't want to just be exerting you know you don't want to be you know all sweaty getting to work they'll taking the e-bike on that day may some sense but you have entire commercial industry build itself up around that should be treated as commercial vehicles but they are not insured they they don't have liability insurance for when they someone or for when the e-bike operator is is injured to have industry

sort of take over with belated in inadequate regulation has harmed commuters cycling and harmed recreational cycling the city. so that's an example of elected officials being cowed by the technology rather than controlling the technology in the same now you know you talked about uber, lyft the issue now is electric vehicles. there is a tendency to say, oh, it's an electric vehicle. so it should be exempt on the cap for for for hire vehicles. maybe it should be exempt from congestion pricing. but an electric is still a car. it it is not a thing to encourage more automobile use in a denser and you so when you see people being sort of bullied by the technology rather than controlling the technology it goes back to the city's original embrace of the automobile. you know, this is something that

has to be fit the city. we should not be fitting the 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 like paris or london or budapest which have better transportation systems? many ways, but they are political capitals of their countries, not just the capital. so business travelers oh, i guess the short answer is i don't know. there are we don't wash ington has a transit system. it is not as much a transit city as new york is, london, paris.

you mentioned budapest some i haven't been there. copenhagen, stockholm. it is strikingly more easy to fund and run an efficient transit system in those places. it is to do here and so that has to do with all sorts of things from funding to splitting the politics between or among three different levels of government. you know, there's no real transit advocacy community, paris, in london, there's not much a bicycling advocacy community, but the city and in other levels of government, just of know to do all of these things, you know, you don't need 50 people being paid to advocate for transit to know you should kind of run the trains frequently. so there are many ideas creative differences among these places. i think it may too easy to say

if we were the political capital, our problems would be solved. yes, this is it's not just about policy history. it's also about people. shirley hayes was such a dynamic character. but can you speak about some of the other more colorful characters in the movement involved with transit? yeah, i think so. yeah, we we talked about shirley hayes, the washington park flight. we talked lindsay, another one, of course, is mike quill. and that's another know similar to lindsay. i have much more nuanced picture of quill than i did when. i started out researching the 1966 transit strike. so the 1966 transit strike was important. and that that was the first time we had transit. and it actually showed how transit was to city. if we hadn't had that strike, arguably, we would not have

created the mta and eventually refunded the transit system. but that course, that transit strike was mike quill's strike. he was the head of the transport workers union in a much more complex man that i think history gives him credit for. he really understood the subtlety of the changing political environment that of the things that lindsay ran and won on was. he wanted to end the old machine politics way of things lindsay in many ways was a candidate who wanted to reduce the of the public sector labor unions. one of the reasons the police didn't like him was he wanted police to work more hours at night. you know, very reasonable. an era of rising but he wasn't able to accomplish so just

seeing how mike quill kind of saw this as labor's last stand against a technocratic governor in an that would become a a era more skeptical of labor unions and realizing if we go along with this will be going along for things forever. so he refused to go along and that's kind of when the split of weakening private sector unions and strengthening public unions really began. so he he much more than the sort of, you know, telling the judge to drop dead. i mean, these were very well thought out strategy and tactics, even telling the judge to drop dead. he understood new york an attention economy unless can get that sound bite you are not winning in new york city for better and for worse as our current president knows. yeah. do you think self-driving, for

example, changed that equation or whether you how many more things because profit taxes that like so many you i think self-driving cars can they they certainly can and will change urban environment whether do that for the better or for the worse will be up to the elected and appointed officials in that there are sam lays in his book of a few years ago. you don't want a scenario where it is so cheap to procure and use self-driving car that can put my kid in a car and have that child driven to one school and then put my kid in another car and have that you you proliferating the number of cars

on the street. so unless they are adequately priced for all of the externalities that create and we have to resist the temptation to say, oh, we can can have these cars going very quickly in a caravan if don't let pedestrians cross the streets as often or in other words going back to redesigning the streets around the car rather than the other way around. so as long as they fit into a successful environment, yes, they may improve safety again, as sam notes, the subway car is the safest mode. transportation known to even safer than commercial airline flights from an operational point of view, anything that takes people off of subway and puts them in a car has to meet a very high bar in terms of the safety as well. the question here. yeah, thank you.

first of all, congratulations. thanks for taking my my question. is the transportation policy need to be in a left right political and how do you get people on all sides to embrace new transportation policy? yeah, no, i think that's that's a great question and i know you've had your own run ins with this. i hope that it doesn't have to fit in a left right divide. i think new york is a unique environment where in in much of the country, although cities like l.a., nashville have been at least marginally embracing more transit over the past 20 years in a lot of the country people don't think about transit. 100% depend on their car. you're from my perspective although i respect the other perspective of just leave those people alone i am not going out and saying going to take away your car and your person you know wherever you live.

suburban america this argument is about new york city and similar dense cities that have a have a transit infrastructure in place. how do we marginally weigh the scales in favor of transit traffic, foot traffic and cycle traffic and away from the cars hopefully people on the left, on the right in the middle can see pragmatic arguments for some of these issues without the sort of, you know, conspiracy izing over the 15 minute city on one hand and no no crime on the subway on the other. you know, the these issues succeed on some middle ground. yeah, yeah. challenges to the tribalism stage city mta port authority jersey transit how do you get everyone on the same. i it's very difficult and i

think that points up why this has been a battle of inches i think the biggest was that the bloomberg administration understanding okay we can't get congestion pricing but we do control the physical streets there is a lot that we can do on the physical streets with just the mayor so the mayor may depend on albany a lot of things from most of the city's tax revenue sources to the public law enforcement. the set of laws under which city operates. but when it comes to what does this lane of the street belong to. the mayor can can that very quickly, just having mayor, who will stand up for his or her appointees on just a landscape of the streets itself. can be used for good or for will and in many or for ill, in many

ways, it's a city hasn't even gotten to yet. so just that design the streets is a good place to re remember and to to start with i think our time is coming short. we'll one more question. yes, sir? how many cities have a relationship, a robust transit and the economic attacks created from that with the transit or, you know, sometimes as a system or groups or as a japan that the entity managing director knows that we will see some of that this government potentially. so why why is and what are challenges that having more of that. yeah and i think that goes to paul's question it it would make a lot of sense to a transit revenue source is based on the value of the property. so if you're half a mile out

from a major transit trunk line part of your property tax goes to operating that transit line something like east side, for example, it would have made sense to take a little bit of those long island property taxes along that right of way and use that to defray the cost east side access why it done you know again as paul brought up or alluded to the city controls the property tax the state controls the transit system. so there is never any incentive for the city agree to increase its own to fund this state run transit system and have the governor get the credit to the extent that anyone that the transit system is running a little bit better than it was. nicole, any last words anything that you were not asked that you would like to say? oh, no. i just want to say thank you again, howard. think you pretty much covered it. and you know, happy to talk

afterwards. if anyone has thoughts and questions changes, i hope everybody buys a book buy one for your friends and thank you to patti as well. and thank you all for coming out. thank you, nicole thank you, howard. so we're going to have the signing portion of tonight's we do have a couple copies of movement left at the register in the event we run out. more are on the way. we have one reserve for you and nicole assigned book plates this time and i will start me here at staff picks. we'll open for another half hour or so, so please enjoy yourselves and have a great night.