Derailed: The Postwar End of New York City Subway Expansion

Historical Background

The construction of the early New York City subway was the work of two private enterprises, the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) Corporation. The former developed the earliest lines and created an “H”-shaped network in Manhattan, ² while the latter was more focused on service in Brooklyn and operated a sprawling network of elevated lines serving the borough. In 1913, their fierce rivalry was tamed with the Dual Contracts between the companies and the city, which brokered a compromise between the two enterprises that designated which corridors each would serve. They would continue to receive substantial municipal investment in exchange for an agreement that the city be permitted to “recapture” the lines after the private companies recovered their investment. This compact enabled the companies to expand subway service throughout the city, vaulting the extent of the rapid transit system from 296 to 619 miles of single track and establishing New York firmly as the global leader. Despite these extraordinary achievements, significant divisions remained between the two companies that weakened the overall network. Incompatible infrastructure permanently prevents the running of through trains between the networks of both companies, while pedestrian connections between the systems were scarce and often circuitous. ³ The Dual Contracts ultimately succeeded in their goal of bringing about a vast and rapid expansion of the New York City subway system, but left transit riders and the city as a whole at the mercy of two private corporations with a fierce, though subsumed, rivalry.

The election of John F. Hylan in 1918 brought an official to the office of mayor who was deeply hostile to the private operation of mass transit. By this time, the Dual Contracts’ flaws were becoming increasingly apparent, including unexpectedly poor financial performance that prevented the city from recovering its investment. His hostility went beyond a mere financial dispute, as Hylan saw the cozy arrangement between the city and the privately owned lines as emblematic of a shadow government of political and economic leaders who, meeting in closed social clubs and organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, ruled the city and reaped most of its economic rewards without public accountability. “Public officials gave away the most valuable franchises in the world to the transit corporations of the city,” he wrote in a letter to the New York Times chastising the newspaper for its sympathy toward the private transit companies:

Through this gift the transit corporations have been enabled to take millions upon millions out of the people’s subway and in return give them the most despicable and rotten transit service that any traction corporation could possibly give to the people. ⁴

The mayor’s goal was nothing less than the total government takeover of the city’s transit system and the public financing of its continued expansion, despite overwhelming financial and political obstacles.

Although the weak financial performance of the private transit companies was largely due to the combination of post-World War I inflation with the fixed five-cent passenger fare established in the Dual Contracts, the populist mayor made the maintenance of that five-cent fare the centerpiece of his successful 1921 reelection campaign. The five-cent fare assumed totemic importance in the city’s politics over subsequent decades, which would depress revenues and financially handicap the city’s rapid transit system. ⁵ Once he was ensconced in the mayor’s chair for another term, Hylan announced a stunningly ambitious plan for government-driven transit expansion. Instead of continuing the public-private partnership approach of outward expansion into greenfield development lands and limited intensification of existing routes, all operated by the private duopoly under the supervision of the Transit Commission, Hylan proposed a third system that would be operated and governed exclusively by the city. Its planned routes clearly demonstrated the intent that the new subway network would compete with the privately operated lines; it featured numerous routes that paralleled existing corridors, in many cases, only a block away. In the case of the numerous elevated lines in the outer boroughs, the new city-run system aimed to replace many of them with more aesthetically pleasing underground transit. Many of the mayor’s ambitious plans never came to fruition, despite obvious utility, including rapid transit on the then-planned Triborough Bridge to connect the Bronx with Brooklyn and Queens. ⁶ Hylan recognized the increasing growth of the outer boroughs and sought to improve rapid transit connections between them without forcing riders to pass through Manhattan, a goal that remains elusive.

Hylan’s proposal was clearly designed more with political rather than technocratic transit planning concerns foremost, and, therefore, inevitably faced contemptuous hostility from the professional planners and engineers of the Transit Commission. Nevertheless, he had successfully set the agenda, and the commission—by 1924, transformed into the board of transportation—was forced to respond on his terms with their own plan for a city-run transit network. This plan would form the basis of the “Independent Subway System” (IND) that was ultimately built. It featured new Manhattan trunk lines on Eighth and Sixth Avenues, closely paralleling existing private lines on Seventh Avenue, Broadway, Park Avenue, and Sixth Avenue itself, along with a new line along Queens Boulevard to Jamaica serving the rapidly developing Borough of Queens. Ground was broken with great haste, and construction was underway by 1925.

The new system also featured a new philosophy of transit design: in contrast with the existing routes that maintained consistent spacing of express and local stops, the new system’s express trains would skip long stretches of stations through the outer reaches of the city while making most stops in Downtown and Midtown Manhattan. This approach addressed the long travel times experienced by riders from the outer boroughs commuting to their jobs while also tacitly accepting that the intensity of development in Manhattan would not be sustainable in the rest of the five boroughs.

Given city policy preventing the expansion of the existing privately owned routes and the Manhattan-centric nature of the initial IND plans, calls for additional expansion into the outer boroughs became increasingly prominent. In 1929, as construction of the initial system was underway, an even more ambitious program of expansion was proposed, termed the “Second System.” It sought to remedy the deficiencies of the initial network, particularly with respect to its limited service to the outer boroughs and to the East Side of Manhattan. A vast new network of multitrack trunk lines would blanket all of the boroughs except Staten Island, with a particular focus on the underdeveloped areas of Queens. While many subways would parallel elevated lines with the goal of removing their unsightly structures, controversy was sparked by plans to build some of the outer borough routes on elevated platforms with the attendant aesthetic impacts. ⁷

These ambitious plans would swiftly become little more than fantasy after the crash of financial markets later that year. The city struggled to pay for the completion of the initial system, given the collapse in fare and tax revenues caused by the Great Depression. New Deal funding from the federal government filled the gap, setting the precedent that the city of New York would not be able to pay for subway construction alone and would, instead, need to rely on building a political coalition for subway funding at the state and even national level. ⁸ That would prove to be a considerable challenge. The expansion plans were reintroduced and updated in 1932, but the lack of funds impeded progress, and they were fated to be abandoned after 1941 as all available resources were allocated to the war effort (Figure 1). ⁹

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Figure 1.

A 1939 map of proposed IND expansion (in red).

The new system gradually replaced the elevated lines blighting several of Manhattan’s avenues, as well as Fulton Street in Brooklyn. ¹⁰ December 4, 1938, was a long-awaited day for merchants on Sixth Avenue, as demolition crews could begin to dismantle the ungainly metal structure covering the road after it was made obsolete by the brand-new subway line nearing completion underneath. ¹¹ Two years later, news of the abandonment of two more elevated lines on Ninth and Second Avenues were crowded out by ominous stories about the war in France. The New York Times headline of the day notes that their demise was not mourned, but this joyous event was also ominous for transit in New York: the Second Avenue line was the first to be abandoned without direct replacement. ¹² The last full elevated line in Manhattan, traversing the island along Third Avenue, was abandoned on May 13, 1955, with the promised subway replacement on Second Avenue still existing only on paper—as all but three stations of the line remain today (Figure 2). Surprisingly, the Times article marking its last trip made no mention of the reduction in capacity that would leave Manhattan’s East Side with only one rapid transit route, in contrast with four lines on the West Side, even though East Midtown would emerge as the city’s foremost business district after the war. Instead, the elevated train was described as outmoded, and its passing inevitable. ¹³ The mentality of retrenchment in New York City transit was already present.

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Figure 2.

The 1939 map of IRT routes; all elevated routes (in blue) have been abandoned.

While the IND system is a tremendous asset to the city, relieving older lines that would otherwise be woefully overcrowded and connecting many previously unreached neighborhoods, it is beset with serious flaws. The vast expenditure of resources on duplicating existing routes in Manhattan and Brooklyn diverted resources that could have extended rapid transit to unserved areas of the outer boroughs. Two trunk lines were added to the West Side of Manhattan while none were built on the East Side, resulting in extreme overcrowding of the Lexington Avenue line over subsequent decades. The planners overestimated intraborough traffic and underestimated commuting to Manhattan, resulting in inadequate capacity under the rivers and unused capacity on many of the trunk lines. ¹⁴ The lines were also built to an extraordinarily high standard, including vast concourses above the tracks to distribute passengers and complex flying junctions at line intersections. These choices served the desirable goal of ensuring that the system would never find itself unable to accommodate ridership growth, but has resulted in excess capacity in many corridors and dramatically higher construction costs that hindered further expansion.

The growth of the subway system was stalled by the Great Depression, which rendered the city barely able to afford the completion of the lines then under construction. The last of them was completed shortly before the American entry into the Second World War, for the duration of which all talk of subway expansion was suspended. When the war ended, however, the New York system faced a confluence of factors that would make it very difficult to revive the pace of growth that had prevailed in the prewar years.

The 1951 Transit Bond Issue

The 1951 Transit Bond Issue was a watershed event in which the city decisively abandoned its prewar pattern of continuous subway expansion. The redirection of most funds raised through the bond issue to maintenance of the existing system, instead of to the promised growth of the system, clearly illustrated the forces of deferred maintenance, political challenges, and financial constraints that arrested expansion.

After 1945, the city of New York found itself in constrained financial circumstances. The growth and modernization of its infrastructure necessitated substantial borrowing, but it faced a limit on its debt mandated by the state constitution. In November 1948, the board of transportation recommended that the city seek an exemption from the debt limit to permit the revival of the Second Avenue Subway plan. It was touted as the key to relieving congestion and eliminating the disparity in track capacity between lines in Manhattan and the outer boroughs. The state agreed to a $500 million exemption for transit expansion, and the change was approved in a statewide referendum on November 6, 1951. The capital program rapidly grew beyond merely the Second Avenue Subway, to encompass capacity improvements throughout the city, new subway lines on Nostrand and Utica Avenues in Brooklyn, and the conversion to subway of the Long Island Rail Road’s Rockaway Spur. ¹⁵ Although beneficial to the city, the plans would have only added to the financial pressure faced by the transit system as their cost of operation was expected to be 17 percent to 20 percent above revenue in a time when transit was expected to be self-supporting. ¹⁶

By 1951, the oldest lines in the subway had already served for nearly half a century. Many elements required major rehabilitation, particularly given the legacy of limited maintenance budgets left by the long-ailing BMT and IRT. The Citizens’ Budget Committee discussed a backlog of basic maintenance totaling $63 million, in addition to longer term needs of $225 million for upgraded power plants and $384 million for “rehabilitation, modernization and improvement” of the rails and stations. The burden of deferred maintenance on the perpetually financially straitened system had become inescapable. ¹⁷

New York’s subway is hardly alone in facing a maintenance crisis as it passed four decades of operation. Washington’s Metro, for example, has experienced a maintenance crisis in the 2010s as the once high-tech showcase ages. ¹⁸ However, though Washington’s expansion has slowed, it is still undertaking the ambitious Silver Line expansion to Dulles Airport, owing in part to the greater state and federal funding available for that suburban-oriented rapid transit system.

Unsurprisingly, the enormous demands placed on the limited bond issue forced ambitions to be tempered. By 1957, an angry state senator was describing the outcome of the bond issue as a “transit mess” and called for a public inquiry. While this was merely political posturing, the disappointment with the visible outcome of the bond issue was understandable. Of the total, $392,265,730 was spent not on new subway lines, but on rehabilitating the existing system as the Citizens’ Budget Committee had predicted. ¹⁹ Still, the concerns about the dilapidated state of the subway persisted. The Transit Authority, in response to complaints about decaying service, vigorously defended its performance and the state of the subways, claiming in a 1960 report that most of its delays were due to overcrowding—despite the precipitous drop in ridership over the previous decade—but the impending maintenance crisis of the 1970s belied their sanguinity. ²⁰

The pattern set by 1951 was repeated in the late 1960s, with the newly established Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s “Program for Action.” Despite the support of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the crippling deferred maintenance burden—including an epidemic of track fires and signal failures—and the parlous state of the city’s finances limited construction to only a few small segments of the ambitious plan. ²¹ While modest improvements to the existing system were constructed, primarily to improve connections between the formerly separate systems, the pressing need for maintenance of an increasingly dilapidated system crowded out any major expansion plans and would continue to do so to the present day.

Populism and the Preoccupation with Jurisdiction

The first reason for the end of subway expansion in the postwar period is the enormous expenditure of political and financial capital on disputes over the administration and financing of the subway system. For two decades after the signing of the Dual Contracts, the city leadership was fixated on ways to pry the system out of the hands of the private IRT and BMT. It was equally preoccupied with retention of the five-cent fare, which was highly popular but crippled the operating companies’ finances. Furthermore, the IND was built primarily to compete with the existing private lines rather than to expand service to new areas. Rather than maintain the pace of steady rapid transit expansion, the city of New York and its various transit authorities felt obliged to focus their energy on populist battles for low fares and public control.

Within a few years of the signing of the Dual Contracts, the city was already seeking an escape. Many civic leaders were dissatisfied with the financial return the municipal government was receiving from its investment in the subway lines. ²² Thanks to the rapid wartime inflation and fixed fare, the revenues of the private companies were inadequate to make virtually any of the expected payments to the city, which were to have been used to pay off the city’s contribution to the construction of the lines. The dispute went beyond mere finance, however: it became a symbol of the battle between public and private interest, and a populist touchstone for a succession of New York mayors. Foremost among them had been John Hylan, whose vituperative opposition to the private transit interests was the centerpiece of his administration. As he built the IND to compete with them, he never wavered in his ultimate goal of unifying the three systems under municipal ownership, which was carried on by subsequent administrations. His goal was finally achieved on June 1, 1940, when Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia took advantage of the disastrous finances of the BMT and IRT to acquire both companies. ²³ The success was taxing on the city’s strained Depression-era resources, with a total price of $326,248,000. ²⁴ The cost was not much lower than that of the entire IND system, and it did not produce a single additional mile of subway.

The operational unification of the different systems then proved to be a considerable challenge. Even seven years later, the chairman of the board of transportation acknowledged that the “slow and lengthy process” was far from complete. ²⁵ The infrastructure itself remains incompletely integrated in 2019, with many missed and awkward connections between the previously separate systems, and incompatible loading gauges between the former IRT and the rest of the system.

The most heated political dispute centered on the five-cent fare. The IRT and BMT perpetually sought to escape the straitjacket of the tariff to which they had agreed in the Dual Contracts, but that made profitability increasingly unachievable, no matter how much they cut corners on matters such as workers’ safety and built up a legacy of deferred maintenance that burdens the system to the present day. ²⁶ Mayor Hylan was the first to make the five-cent fare the centerpiece of his reelection campaign in 1921, and in so doing made it a symbol that would be exceedingly difficult to overcome—a “third rail” in the city’s politics. ²⁷ City politicians continued to campaign on the five-cent fare for decades thereafter, and any discussion of an increase was met with public outrage. ²⁸

The effect of inflation meant that the maintenance of the five-cent rate resulted in steady erosion of the real value of the fare. In continuous 1904 dollars, the operators were receiving only two cents by 1948. The five-cent fare of 1948 would equate to only 54 cents in 2019 dollars. Even in 1867, a ride on the then-new elevated trains cost ten cents, which was equivalent to seventeen cents in 1948. Combined with the steady increase in wages obtained by transit workers, ²⁹ such a path was clearly unsustainable unless the city and the state were willing to provide a substantial annual subsidy in return for the social benefits of a low and stable fare to ride across the city.

Through the Second World War, subway workers’ wages increased by 27 percent, and the annual operating surplus declined from $27 million to $13 million. By 1946, the need for change became apparent, and LaGuardia—long a stalwart guardian of the five-cent fare—finally broached the possibility of an off-peak fare increase in a broadcast to the city. ³⁰ The system was looking at an operating deficit of $18 million for 1947, ³¹ reversing an operating surplus of $7.5 million in the previous year. ³² The city, however, still retained the mentality that the system should be self-sustaining, leaving it starved for resources. In 1948, an increase to ten cents was finally brokered but, by then, it could only exacerbate problems of declining ridership and was not sufficient to overcome years of deferred maintenance. ³³

Largely to ensure that fare policy never again became captive to electoral politics, many civic leaders increasingly advocated for the creation of an independent state authority to administer the city’s transit system, comparable to the Port Authority or Robert Moses’s Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA). Unfortunately, as Moses presciently stated in a scathing assessment of the plans for a state-led independent authority, the proposal never granted the authority the financial resources that it required to be genuinely independent and self-sustaining. It would remain perpetually dependent on other levels of government for its financing, hindering any long-term planning efforts. ³⁴ When the system was finally folded into the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) in 1953, and then into the wider regional Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968, the new state-controlled agencies did nothing to integrate the disparate transit systems in the broader metropolitan region or to expand subway service outside the city boundaries.

New York’s transit system found itself trapped by an ideological dispute that consumed its resources and distracted from efforts to plan over the long term. Populist city politicians, while admirably supportive of public transportation, focused almost all of their energy on keeping fares low and combating private interests. Business-oriented civic groups promoted the idea of a technocratic administration that would take the subway out of political hands and assign it, instead, to an arm’s-length state agency; rather than facilitating growth and planning, however, their primary aspiration for such an administration was to facilitate fare increases and to reduce pressure on the city’s tax base. There is no question that sustained subsidy would be needed to maintain the system without the need for fare increases that would further drive riders away, but such a policy was anathema to many political and civic leaders. For years, the city’s transit debates were consumed by battles over jurisdiction. Municipal leaders pursued incompatible objectives, insisting on the need to retain the five-cent fare while also rejecting the idea of subsidy. This left the system burdened by an annual operating deficit and an overwhelming debt that was substantially accumulated to pay for unification of the system under public control, rather than on construction of new infrastructure.

Weakened Postwar Finances and Rising Costs

The second principal cause of the shift away from subway construction was the parlous state of the city’s finances after the war, combined with declining ridership and significant inflation in the cost of construction.

Subway ridership peaked in 1946 and began a precipitous decline through the late 1940s. The busiest station in the system, Times Square, saw its traffic drop from 102,511,841 riders in 1946 to 66,447,227 riders in 1953. Similar declines occurred throughout the system, exacerbated by fare increases seeking to make up for revenue from the lost fares. ³⁵ Subway expansion was difficult even during the period of stable ridership before the Second World War; it would become increasingly difficult to justify as New Yorkers were rapidly abandoning the existing system. ³⁶

The IND lines were built to a much higher standard than the preceding Dual Contracts lines. Most of the early IRT stations were comparatively simple structures, built just below the street with staircases from the sidewalk to the platform and no crossover between platforms. At junctions, some of the tracks cross at grade, reducing capacity as trains are forced to wait for others to pass. The newer IND stations, by contrast, were often built with full mezzanine levels above the tracks, doubling the floor area of the station. The lines also included complex flying junctions that separated trains as they transferred from one line to another. These improvements were aimed to ensure that the capacity constraints of the earlier lines were not repeated, but they came at significant financial cost. The areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx served by the new lines did not develop at the Manhattan-level densities that were anticipated. The most lucrative locations for subway lines were captured in the earliest stages of development by the IRT and BMT, often relegating the IND to less-central corridors. This combined with the high standard of construction to produce significant excess capacity in the new system. This was reflected in its operating costs, as each five-cent ride actually cost the city fourteen cents when the system opened. ³⁷

Building the IND lines cost an average of $9 million per mile, which was 125 percent higher than the Dual Contracts lines. There was ample criticism of the city-built subway’s costs: in a private letter to LaGuardia, the prominent lawyer, Samuel Untermyer, who had served as special counsel for the city in suits with the private subway operators over the five-cent fare, described “the startling cost, recklessness and wastefulness of the construction of the City Subways (almost three times per mile that of the old subways, with due allowances for added capaciousness of the new City Subways).” ³⁸

Construction costs continued to escalate in the postwar period. In 1929, the Second Avenue Subway was expected to cost $87.6 million. ³⁹ By 1952, a much less ambitious Second Avenue line was budgeted at $290.22 million, or $186.95 million in constant 1929 dollars. ⁴⁰ Even adjusting for inflation and ignoring the more limited extent of the later proposal, the cost had more than doubled.

Part of the explanation for the increased cost of construction was the rising cost of land, greater concern for workers’ safety, and diminishing tolerance of the highly disruptive cut-and-cover method of construction employed in prewar subway projects. This process involves digging down from the surface to build tracks and stations, and then covering them to create a tunnel. It has largely been replaced in New York by tunnel boring machines, which are usually more expensive but produce far less destruction on the surface. The construction of the IND, for example, required multiple blocks of Greenwich Village to be demolished so that Sixth Avenue could be extended south. All of the buildings on one side of Houston Street were razed for subway construction, and the road retains a comparatively barren streetscape to the present day. ⁴¹ In the 1930s, residents were relatively tolerant of such massive urban upheaval in the name of progress:

Some workers have been living in the flats for a score or more of years and bow to the inevitable march of progress now without a tinge of regret at leaving the neighborhood which has been a part and parcel of their lives for so long,

the Times wrote of the Houston Street demolitions. “They think of the days which are no more.” ⁴² As property costs rose during the postwar boom and community groups became more organized, mass demolition in the name of subway construction was also relegated to the days which are no more.

Suburbanization and the Automobile

The world was forever changed in 1947 as the first veterans and their families moved into their new, uniform bungalows in a former potato field in Hempstead, Long Island. The new Levittown was not the first or the only residential subdivision being built at the time, but it has become a symbol of the achievement of the ideal of home ownership for the broad middle class and the dispersion of the crowded cities. Any examination of postwar public transportation cannot ignore the explosive growth of single-family homes in suburbs ringing America’s major cities, including New York. The subways had allowed people to escape Manhattan tenements into somewhat larger apartments in the outer boroughs. These new subdivisions, however, were designed to take advantage of the automobile, allowing people of modest means—as long as they were white—to afford to leave crowded city apartments and settle in a detached house surrounded by a lush green lawn. Their population density was far lower than the neighborhoods of New York City, which had sustained the growth of subway lines, and they spread tens of miles from the central city.

By the postwar period, the majority of population growth in the New York region was taking place outside of the five boroughs. None of the numerous postwar subway plans offered anything to the exploding populations of Long Island, New Jersey, and Westchester County. They continued to focus primarily on neighborhoods in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn that were experiencing population stagnation and even decline. Instead, governments took advantage of ample federal funding to expand highway infrastructure to serve the new suburbs. Transit service in the suburbs was largely limited to the commuter service of the financially fragile private railways. None of these routes offered the type of frequent rapid transit service that would allow car-free living and, more importantly, that would encourage the development of new housing and business communities around rail stations rather than around expressway interchanges. City transit service, including the subways, was built with limited options for interchange with regional rail networks, and fare systems were completely incompatible. New York City ignored the growing political and economic power of the outer suburbs by continuing to plan subway expansion on the same model that had existed since the Dual Contracts. The municipal boundary of the five boroughs remained an insurmountable boundary for subway planning, even though hundreds of thousands of commuters increasingly crossed the boundary daily. ⁴³ Expensive new subway lines were being planned for neighborhoods that were no longer experiencing the explosive growth of the 1920s, with terminal stations sited at the city limits. This failure to recognize the changing shape of an urban region that increasingly transcended municipal boundaries played a critical role in hindering the continued growth and development of the New York rapid transit system in the postwar period.

Accompanying suburbanization was the increasing view that subways and other rail transit were archaic while automobiles and expressways were the height of modernity. Hood writes that even in the 1930s, “to LaGuardia the automobile, not rail rapid transit, embodied New York’s best hope for the future.” ⁴⁴ These positive feelings about automobiles were met with actions by all levels of government. The federal government, which had largely abstained from rapid transit funding since transit was expected to be a self-sustaining business, funded up to 90 percent of the cost of expressway construction. While transit development stagnated, the 1950s saw the construction of the Major Deegan Expressway, Conduit Boulevard, Harlem River Drive, the New England Throughway, the Throggs Neck Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Bruckner Expressway, the Trans-Manhattan Expressway, the Clearview Expressway, the Long Island Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Prospect Expressway, the Gowanus Expressway, and the Sheridan Expressway. This was a construction program that rivaled or even exceeded the earlier subway boom, and all of it was enabled by federal largesse. ⁴⁵

Celebrating the completion of the Bruckner Expressway in the Bronx, Mayor Wagner boasted that “This two and one-half mile stretch of elevated expressway cost more than $34 million, of which 90% was put up by the Federal government.” ⁴⁶ No such support was forthcoming for urban rapid transit, which was long expected to operate as a self-sustaining business, until transit had long since decayed and new neighborhoods had been built around the car. Postwar neighborhoods were not all unfriendly to transit. In parts of Queens, thousands of people walk or take the bus from their 1950s houses to the subway. But people in the suburban counties were never provided with that option.

The great bridges of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries invariably included a rapid transit component. The Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges retain that function. The Triborough Bridge, completed in 1936, was the first to exclude rail transit. This practice was continued with all subsequent bridges, whether built by Moses’s TBTA, the Port Authority, or the Thruway Authority. Most unfortunately, this included the George Washington ⁴⁷ and Verrazano-Narrows Bridges, ⁴⁸ which would have added important rapid transit connections to previously unserved areas.

The symbolic power of the modern automobile was not the only hindrance to obtaining transit funding. The increasing population and, therefore, political power of the auto-oriented suburban municipalities became an important factor in the postwar period. New York City no longer dominated the region to the same extent that it had, and it, therefore, faced greater difficulty in obtaining financial support for subway projects that many suburbanites believed did not benefit them. New York County (Manhattan) shrank from 1,889,924 residents in 1940 to 1,698,281 in 1960, while Kings County (Brooklyn) saw its population decline from 2,698,285 to 2,627,319 in the same period. Nassau County, by contrast, more than tripled in population from 406,748 to 1,300,171, and Suffolk County grew from 197,355 to 666,784. ⁴⁹ As the population of the older areas declined, the percentage of racial and other minorities increased, further contributing to the areas’ political marginalization at the state and national level.

The real estate industry was one of the most important constituencies supporting the development of the subway system in the Dual Contracts era. Developers enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the subway, which was extended into empty fields that were then swiftly and profitably filled with apartment houses. That bargain began to break down with the construction of the IND, which mostly served areas that were already developed. In the postwar period, most greenfield real estate development shifted out of the city entirely and into suburban communities in the surrounding counties. Instead of being built around subway lines, new developments were centered on expressways. Developers increasingly saw the subway system as a drain on the city’s finances that would result in higher property taxes. In a few short years, the real estate industry had been transformed from the biggest booster of the subway system into a powerful opponent. ⁵⁰

New York’s subway technology was revolutionary in its time. It was capable of moving millions of people rapidly throughout the city, and it made possible the city’s dense urban fabric of apartment houses and office skyscrapers. As development in the postwar period expanded far out into the suburbs, the subway technology began to reach its limits. Even using New York’s unique express subways, a trip from Far Rockaway to 42nd Street requires one hour and ten minutes to cover a distance of twenty miles. With new suburbs being built more than thirty miles from the center of the city, traditional urban subways could not hope to compete.

Other countries created a new level of regional express service that combined the speed of commuter rail with the frequent service and accessibility to diverse urban destinations of rapid transit. These systems include the Réseau Express Régional (RER) in Paris and the S-Bahn in many German cities. In New York, however, the regional rail lines remained highly fragmented in the postwar period, and most were in the hands of ailing private railway companies. The largest commuter railway was the increasingly dilapidated Long Island Rail Road, which had actually decreased service from fifty trains per hour into Manhattan in the 1920s, to twenty to thirty trains per hour in 1965, despite the explosive population growth in its service area. The trains that did operate were in an astonishingly parlous state. ⁵¹ The federal government provided modest funding to the commuter railroads in 1958, but it was barely enough to keep them on life support. ⁵² While rail transit had been expanded in lockstep with development in the prewar period, the fastest growing regions by the 1950s saw virtually no transit investment at all. A genuinely regional rapid transit system could have restored the support of the real estate interests for transit expansion, as they could build development around the suburban stations that would, in turn, provide riders to the rapid transit system. Such a model has brought considerable success for the Washington Metro, which benefits from substantial transit-oriented development in both the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. ⁵³ Certainly, such a system would have required substantial government subsidy, but that support would have been easier to obtain from higher levels of government if it also served the vast suburban population, as was the case for Washington’s Metro and San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit.

The need to build rapid transit to serve the rapidly growing suburbs did not escape the notice of many planners, but their ambitious schemes were never seriously considered. As early as 1929, the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs produced by the Regional Plan Association, a private organization involving many prominent civic individuals and institutions, included a network of suburban rapid transit lines that would transcend municipal and even state boundaries (Figure 3). ⁵⁴ The Port Authority was a seemingly well-suited vehicle for a regional passenger rail network, but it was usually more focused on freight, and, in any case, it was never able to bring its ambitious rail plans—developed as early as the 1920s—to fruition. ⁵⁵ In 1960, Colonel S. H. Bingham, the former chairman of the New York City Board of Transportation and a prominent transportation consultant, developed a plan for incorporating a number of the tri-state region’s existing rail lines into a modern regional rapid transit system through the construction of short connections in Manhattan. ⁵⁶ It, too, went nowhere. Robert Moses also frequently discussed regional rail expansion, and his TBTA produced colorful brochures promoting vague concepts of combined rail and road improvements, but he never pursued the transit plans with the zeal that produced his immense achievements in park, housing, and road construction. In remarks at a luncheon of the National Highway Users Conference on May 9, 1962, Moses discussed commuter rail at length. Rather than proposing a visionary solution comparable to his approach to highways, he merely criticized the private management of the railways and warned governments about the hazards of subsidizing them. His sympathy toward the automobile was evident when he said, “We are becoming hysterical and prodigal about aid to ailing commuter railroads, and tend to exaggerate the advantages of mass transportation.” ⁵⁷

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Figure 3.

Ultimate suburban rapid transit plan from first RPA regional plan.

Even after the creation of the independent Transit Authority by the state in 1953, there was no genuinely regional body planning, coordinating, and funding public transportation throughout the New York metropolitan area. Moses and his TBTA had a substantial independent source of revenue from bridge and tunnel tolls and were effective at developing infrastructure, but Moses demonstrated little genuine interest in public transportation. The Port Authority developed a vast portfolio of infrastructure, and uniquely straddled state boundaries, but its investments were largely limited to automobile bridges, airports, and the port. Even after it acquired the bankrupt Hudson and Manhattan Railway, little effort was made to integrate the renamed Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) into the broader regional transit system. ⁵⁸ The City of New York showed little interest in the commuter railroads, even though they brought workers that were essential for Manhattan’s status as a premier business center. ⁵⁹ Effective development of rapid transit throughout the metropolitan area in the postwar period would have almost certainly required an authority with a strong independent revenue source that transcended political boundaries and had a strong drive to plan and build an integrated transit system.

The greatest missed opportunity came in the late 1950s, after the governors of New York and New Jersey appointed a Metropolitan Rapid Transit Commission, which recommended the creation of a bi-state regional transit authority that would implement a regional rail rapid transit system on the existing commuter railroads. ⁶⁰ Although it received substantial support in both states, it was defeated by local opposition in New Jersey. ⁶¹ Governor Nelson Rockefeller created the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968 to fulfill the regional transit role, at least east of the Hudson, but after decades, it remains dependent on external funding and has not made any serious steps toward regional service integration. It took over the NYCTA, but retained it as an independent entity limited to the city and not integrated with the commuter railroads. As the majority of the region’s population now lives outside the five boroughs, and as low-income and marginalized communities are increasingly pushed into the suburbs by urban gentrification, the lack of meaningful suburban transit service remains a serious problem.

Conclusion

New York City built the world’s largest urban rapid transit system in only a few decades at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the decades that followed, the extraordinary growth ground to a halt. As the Second World War ended, New York City found itself still struggling to overcome the legacy of debt from the Great Depression while the pressure to rehabilitate aging infrastructure and to accommodate postwar growth placed enormous pressure on the city’s budget. City and state politicians became preoccupied with disputes over administrative control, rather than with continuing the steady expansion of the system, while populist politicians repeatedly secured their electoral mandates with promises to retain an unsustainably low five-cent fare. Finally, transit officials continued to focus almost exclusively on the five boroughs to the exclusion of the rapidly expanding suburbs of the metropolitan region, preventing the development of a regional rapid transit system to rival the then-glamorous automobile at a time when the federal government was paying ninety cents of every dollar for new interstate highways. These three convergent factors prevented New York from maintaining its enviable prewar record of transit construction, and have condemned millions of its citizens to getting behind the wheels on severely overcrowded highways. The early postwar decades were an unprecedented opportunity when the built form of suburbs was first being established, the country was experiencing extraordinary growth, and major infrastructure investments were still occurring—albeit mostly for the automobile. In the twenty-first century, the city struggled for more than a decade to build a mere three-station extension along Second Avenue. In the 1920s, far more mileage was opened every year. In missing the opportunity to extend its celebrated rapid transit system into newly developed areas, New York lost its extraordinary capacity for subway construction, a failure that haunts the city to the present day.