But the progressives of an earlier era understood that carrots had to accompany sticks. It wasn’t enough to dissuade or punish. Robert Moses, the master builder of New York, isn’t well-liked by today’s left, mostly due to simplistic readings of Robert Caro’s biography, The Power Broker, first published 50 years ago. But Moses knew that effective urban governance meant delivering tangible goods to citizens, and this was why the great progressives of his era like Fiorello LaGuardia ultimately championed him, even if they resented his imperiousness and megalomania.
Moses built most of the public housing that stands to this day. He built the parks, the playgrounds, and, yes, those disruptive highways and parkways and bridges. Before Moses, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes. Jones Beach was a deserted stretch of sand. The New Yorkers of the Robert Moses era believed in Big Government because Big Government got so much done, and they could see that in their daily lives.
Conversely, congestion pricing had little political buy-in because New Yorkers understood the Metropolitan Transportation Authority—the unwieldy, opaque bureaucracy invented, ironically enough, to depose Moses—has a long history of wasting enormous sums of money and blowing deadlines by years, if not decades. The Second Avenue Subway and the Long Island Rail Road’s extension to Grand Central were grossly late and heinously over budget. The Gateway Tunnel project, overseen by Amtrak and New Jersey Transit, is no better, and will be finished sometime in the 2030s. There is an understandable feeling among tristate-area residents that nothing really gets done.
Moses tolled his bridges, but he could sell the concept to the public because the projects were always getting finished. The sheer number of ribbon cuttings—the George Washington Bridge, Triborough Bridge, Throgs Neck Bridge, Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge—under his watch is still difficult to fathom. The popular view of Moses is that he was an island of power unaccountable to no one but himself; if there is truth to this, it’s equally true that most of his infrastructure projects succeeded because they were backed by organized labor, local politicians, and broad swaths of the public. When he ran for governor, Moses campaigned as a Republican, and his relationship with Franklin Roosevelt was always frosty. But he was, in spirit, a New Deal Democrat, harnessing federal largesse to reimagine the future of his city and state.