Blog: Cars

Most of AAA's 43 million members have no idea their emergency tow-truck service also uses membership money to lobby for more roads and against environmental standards for cars. Streetsblog discusses how New York State's AAA organization (nationally it's a federation of individual state groups) is also opposing the congestion charging plan to cut down on traffic and pollution in New York City. In an article in their magazine, they parrot anti-congestion pricing talking points and even come out against walking as a good form of exercise. As our air gets more polluted, AAA is there making sure it stays that way.

It's almost impossible to get into New York City from the north without traveling on a road built by Robert Moses. In addition every expressway and parkway criss-crossing the Bronx and Westchester, he built the Henry Hudson, Triborough, Whitestone, and Throgs Neck bridges - all the major crossings from the north.

Driving home from Boston with Justin and Meredith, the subject came up of whether it was possible to avoid Moses' roads. In a stroke of supreme irony, not too long thereafter, just north of New Haven, the van we were driving developed transmission problems forcing us to do just that.

The trouble manifsted itself as a loud grinding noise and strong vibration which continued anytime we accelerated beyond about 35 miles per hour. After conferencing with the owner of the van, we decided to drive - very slowly - back to New York. By New Rochelle the problem had worsened such that accelerating past 20 caused the grinding, so we exited at Route 1 and proceeded to travel all the way from the city line to the Third Avenue Bridge to the West Side without utilizing a single Moses creation.

Driving down Boston Road (so named, I'd surmise, because that's actually how people used to get to Boston), it was abundantly clear what a destructive effect the indiscriminate blasting of neighborhoods to build the parkways had. When traveling through the Van Nest and West Farms neighborhoods, we passed the Bronx River Parkway, running beside streets which had old residential buildings and stores on one side, and chain link fences with scrub growth (the embankment for the Parkway) on the other. We could easily imagine the populated side of the street continued on the other side and through to the blocks on the other side, once a single community, riven in two in the late forties by the Master Builder.