Damn You, Robert Moses or: A Feather in the German Cap

Thus far, my exultations of German culture on this site have been... restrained. Perhaps a symptom of culture shock is reticence to laud one's new home's achievements. Maybe it's because they're weird foreign people who smell funny. Whatever the cause, today I break my silence. Today, the Germans get their due.

Public transportation in this country is awesome.

You may find this a mild source of adulation, but I give this complement with a healthy amount of perspective. I grew up on Long Island, New York. It is not hyperbole to say that Robert Moses designed modern New York as we know it. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the man, Moses was a civil engineer whose vast political influence allowed him to design the New York transportation system as it is today. He is not, however, remembered particularly fondly. Though he managed at one time to amass a full 25% of the federal urban planning budget in New York projects, the results of that work, as New Yorkers would say, pissed off a lotta people.

Forget Levittown; it was Moses' decision to favor highways over railways that led to New York becoming the largest commuter culture in the world of its time.¹ It was Moses who designed the Long Island public beaches (one is even named after him), and it was Moses who decided to build his highways through neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, eventually leading to a generation of urban decay. A lot of people have never forgiven Moses for the ramifications of these decisions. It's said he deliberately made the toll bridges to the beach too low for buses in order to keep the black community out. My grandfather's just mad he made the Dodgers skip town.²

Obviously, I come to bury Robert Moses, not to praise him. But I raise his example not because of his bigotry, but because of his single most influential decision: he favored automoblies as a mode of transportation over trains. I can only imagine this seemed a forward-looking perspective in the thirties and forties. Today, however, the result is near unfathomable congestion and traffic completely surrounding the city. Long Island alone -- which, by the way, is geologically nothing more than a silt deposit scraped off a passing glacier's shoe -- has over 7.5 million inhabitants. That's more than Ireland, and they all live on a strip of land the size of Yellowstone National Park.

Urban planning has a better history here in Germany. Following the near total destruction of the country's major cities in World War II, the Wessis³ advanced on the old railway system to produce thorough transit lines around all of the densely populated areas, as well as an efficient system of connections between all of Germany's medium- and large-sized cities. Modern consensus is the latter was either a wise investment or a Keynesian Wunderwerk. In either case, the trains streamlined reconstruction, and make travel around Germany an inexpensive and relatively environmentally friendly affair.

I raised this topic now not despite the strikes going on at Deutsche Bahn, the national train line, but rather because of them. The recent series of strikes is the first in the company's history, and while the German press has been in quite a huff, it is still possible to get pretty much wherever you want to go. Since arriving, I have not once found myself thinking, "I wish I had a car." Regional travel is cheap, accessible, and even during a strike, service is reliable. I'll miss that.

As a last note on the subject of civil engineers with bad reputations: Cologne's current most influential civil architect has the unfortunate burden of being named Albert Speer Jr. If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because you've heard of his father. Please note Speer the younger had apparently little relationship with his father and is highly respected for his work throughout the architectural community.

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¹I don't have the figures, but having braved LA freeways, I have to think the City of Angels has since claimed this title. If they haven't, I really don't want to know who has.

²For the full story on Moses, read Robert Caro's biography. I've only read portions of this 1300-page tome, but the book gets almost nothing but praise, and is the definitive work on Moses.

³West Germans.