Kenneth Jackson: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we could get Robert Moses back again today, what major mega project do you think New York needs today that a Moses-like figure could build? If you think really broadly and you take climate change seriously, as I think most people do, probably to build some sort of infrastructure to prevent rising water from sinking the city. It's doable. In order to save New Orleans you had to flood Mississippi and some other places, so usually there is a downside somewhere but you could. It would be a huge project to build a land bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan to prevent water coming in from the ocean because New York is on the ocean. Another big infrastructure project is they're talking about another tunnel under the river, Hudson River from New Jersey to New York. The problem with that is there are already too many cars in Manhattan. If you've not been to New York you don't really understand this, but there's no place for anything. And if you bring more cars in, what are you going to do with them? If you build parking garages for all the cars that could come into the city, then you'd be building over the whole city. There'd be no reason to come here because it would all be parking garages or parking lots. New York City simply won't work if you reduce the density or you get rid of underground transportation because it's all about people moving around underneath the streets and not taking up space as they do it. So it won't work. And of course, it's not the only city. Tokyo wouldn't work either. Lots of cities in the world won't work increasingly without not just public transportation but underground public transportation where you can get it out of the way of traffic. Moses probably could have done that. He wouldn't have loved it as much as he loved bridges because he wanted you to see what he built. And there was an argument in the power broker, but he didn't really want the Brooklyn battery tunnel built because he wanted to build a bridge that everybody could see. So he may not have done it with such enthusiasm. I actually believe that Moses was first and foremost a builder. He really wanted to build things, change things. If you said, we'll pay you to build tunnels, I think he would have built tunnels. Who knows? He never was offered that. That wasn't the time in which he lived. Today to get rid of the red tape and the NIMBYism, would it just be enough for one man to accumulate as much influence as Moses had and then to push through some things or does that need to be some sort of systemic reform? Because when Moses took power there was also the Tammany Hall machine that he had to run through. Is that just what's needed today to get through the bureaucracy or is something more needed?…

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