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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

It’s common wisdom to say these projects were dubious. There’s no question they came with costs—-but would we rather not have the BQE, Cross Bronx Expressway, or Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? I don’t think we would. It’s easy to fantasize about public transit alternatives but even with Robert Moses NYC is a significant outlier in the US for public transit both in the city and in the region.

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There’s a tail wagging the dog factor to the highway stuff. The FHA sealed the fate of those neighborhoods by cutting off the oxygen.

I live in a small city that was carved up by redlining. My block was in the “yellow” zone, and the houses built after 1935 or so are very different than the houses on the next block, which is in the “green zone”.

Yellow = Italians and Greeks, 1 and 2 family small houses. Green = old money types, bigger houses on fancy lots.

BQE and Cross-Bronx Expressway definitely not. Building highways through cities is extremely damaging and exist only to ferry suburbanites into and out of the city. Moses wanted to build a highway through Greenwich village. That would have been devastating for lower Manhattan. Intra-city Highways destroy the very vibrancy required for them to adapt and change.

Brooklyn Battery Tunnel? That is a good project. Connecting different areas across bodies of water is good.

That’s ideology over common sense. Which suburbanites are being ferried in and out of the city over the BQE?

Hint: what it connects is right there in the name.

Fort Lee, NJ to Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Easy to say when your neighborhood wasn't the one destroyed.

NYC is about change. If you want stability there’s the whole rest of the country. I have no patience for people that want it both ways.

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