… would probably be dotted with parking lots the size of Greenwich Village in order to accommodate all the daily commuters driving into the city on the equivalent of 84 Queens Midtown Tunnels, predicts Michael Frumin at the Frumination blog. (HT: Kottke) [%comments]
New York City Without Its Subway …
TAGS: New York City, transportation
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I had thought we were supposed to think about the effects of incentives here, and how people, having to put up with a horrible, costly, no-subway commute, would simple do something else. The point should be that New York wouldn’t be the New York that we know without it’s subways; it would be something else. Alternatively, if subways didn’t exist, someone would have invented them.
New York City w/o its Subway = Los Angeles or Houston: Large 6-12 lane parking lots during rush hour. Suburban sprawl. Air pollution. Cities that regularily score low on quality of life measures.
New York would be a non-entity in world cities without the subway. I live in London now and can say without qualification that this city would be largely irrelevant without the tube network. Getting around is bad enough with it and from experience from the days it isn’t running I can say that without it this city would be unlivable.
I’d love to live in a city that is ahead of population expansion with their public transport, but I suppose this never happens.
This is a wild hypothesis based on the idea that things that grew as a result of having subways would still be there if the subways had not been built.
Excuse me, why should anyone care? NYC would not look like NYC if steel beams had not been invented. If stones didn’t have huge compressive strength there wouldn’t be stone piers and buildings.
If the South had had atomic weapons in the civil war they would have bombed NYC flat.
Why should we care? Someone has way too much time on their hands.
That’s a pretty compelling (but shallow) case for increased funding for urban mass transit systems. Those parking lots would be visible from space.
If everyone had to drive, I get the feeling that there’d be a few more than 1.2 people per car.
And Lincoln Center, the UN, and the Chrysler Building would be in Brooklyn….
Saudi Arabia, without petroleum exports, would have to cover the entire planet Earth with date trees to export enough dates to maintain it’s trade ratio.