A thing this reminds me of is that Robert Moses (city planner for early-mid 20th century NYC) did a bunch of horrible destructive (and often racist) things in the service of, among other things, highways. And those things were horribly destructive (and often racist), but I kinda suspect that if he’d done them in the name of mass transit a lot of the people condemning him would be saying “man of his times, what can you do?” and “can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs”, unless people were unhappy with the results of more mass transit/fewer highways in this alternate NYC, at which point they’d go back to condemning him for all the things we condemn him for now.
I would rather Moses had built mass transit rather than highways in the 30s, but I don’t think it was obviously the wrong trade-off at the time. A bunch of things looked like good ideas in the 30s and didn’t pan out.
A thing this reminds me of is that Robert Moses (city planner for early-mid 20th century NYC) did a bunch of horrible destructive (and often racist) things in the service of, among other things, highways. And those things were horribly destructive (and often racist), but I kinda suspect that if he’d done them in the name of mass transit a lot of the people condemning him would be saying “man of his times, what can you do?” and “can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs”, unless people were unhappy with the results of more mass transit/fewer highways in this alternate NYC, at which point they’d go back to condemning him for all the things we condemn him for now.
I would rather Moses had built mass transit rather than highways in the 30s, but I don’t think it was obviously the wrong trade-off at the time. A bunch of things looked like good ideas in the 30s and didn’t pan out.
[Source: primarily The Power Broker].