Yes, 100%. He understood someone was going to build a ton of roads and if someone was going to build them, then in NYC/NYS he wanted it to be him.

Oh, absolutely. Once he was on top, he wasn't able to change with the winds. But he seized on cars and highways at precisely the right moment to build an empire out of them, and I think he'd have built it out of whatever was convenient at the moment.

But certainly, early in his road-building career, he saw them as a way for the urban middle (not working) class to reach suburban recreation places, not a means of large-scale urban transportation for the masses.

Perhaps, although to take a page from André Gorz, they were really only a boon to people like him when only people like him could afford them! But whether he realized that was another matter.

If you think about all the other things he built—parks, public housing, and so on—it seems apparent he’d build whatever he could convince the government to fund. And in the 20th century, highways were at the top of that heap. He knew it and he took better advantage of it than anyone else.

That’s not to say that he was anti-car or anything, just that he was going to grab onto whatever the easiest lever for power would be. 50 years earlier it would probably have been streetcars, 50 years later…unclear, in part because amassing that kind of power became harder, but not highways.

I think cars and highways were largely a means to end (power) for him, not the end itself. In the early- to mid-20th century, if you wanted to reshape the urban landscape and amass a lot of power, harnessing yourself to this booming technology was the obvious thing to do.

People often think of Moses as a guy who was obsessed with cars, but really he was obsessed with power and would have championed (and possibly even anticipated) whatever trend of the day he thought would win him more. 2026 Moses might be megalomaniacally pursuing highway demolitions.

(You can also see a little bounce associated with the phrase's origin in 1930s economic theories, before it became actually popular, but when it was still measurable!)

A peak in 1971 followed by a long decline that doesn't reverse until 1990 seems intuitively correct to me. We're in the second age of concerns about planned obsolescence, the first coming with the post-1950 boom in manufacturing consumption, the second the post-1990 boom in computing consumption.

And the postwar era was the first time anyone other than the very rich could afford to replace "obsolete" but not yet useless items, so it was a novel idea worth commenting on. By the 1980s it was just normal. I do think the idea had revival with the rise of personal computing though.

Indeed, it was popularized by Brooks Stevens in 1954, and I suspect reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s as environmentalist-adjacent concerns about a mass consumer economy where people would replace things like cars or appliances before the true end of their useful lives came to the fore.

OMG!!!

I’m willing to buy Amazon Basics stuff, but too often I find no recognizable brand available, that included, and/or no item that is even sold by Amazon. (For that matter, the “sold by” filter only even appears intermittently…)

And sold by the actual store, not potentially shady third-party sellers.

I guess we’re mostly just describing Amazon 20 years ago…

Inside the NYC Power Stations That Keep Trains Moving — or Bring Them to a Halt (Gift Article) Transit officials are spending billions of dollars to upgrade New York City’s aging electrical substations, the mostly invisible backbone of the subway system.

Some good old fashioned infrastructure porn for a Monday morning. @stefanoschen.bsky.social goes inside the subway substations powering your rides.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

It is, but it’s a pretty frequently violated law, sadly. 😬 This is something a bit different though, a bigger bathroom with a bank of fully-enclosed stalls opening onto a hand washing area. I think a lot of places would have (non-single-occupancy) gendered bathrooms in that amount of space.

The state of restaurant bathrooms in this city is awful.

I just had dinner at a not-especially-fancy place with *excellent* bathrooms—gender-neutral, all individual stalls with full-length doors and vacancy indicators, everything clean and nothing broken. I ate at the bar, and it has hooks for jackets/bags and outlets to recharge your phone. This is good!

I have become the kind of person who really appreciates when a restaurant's interior is well-designed and well-kept. I feel like this is a somewhat socially unacceptable opinion, and one is only supposed to care about the food, but it makes a difference in the pleasantness of the experience!

I think our industry doesn’t have anything like this for a number of reasons, some more surmountable than others, but a big one is that there’s just less money in it.

For sure, but that’s small potatoes compared to the kind of money the aviation and automotive industries spend on marketing. Transit agencies are generally cash-strapped state/local governments, and their vendors are generally smaller and lower profile, or secondary business lines of big companies.

When it comes to aviation or, I hate to say it, road transportation a lot of this stuff is really sponsored by the industry as a way to promote itself…are our vendors as interested in doing that as Boeing or Ford or whoever?

I like these places and I think it’s important to preserve that history, but even the “modern” history of anything past the 1950s or so is hard to get a lot of existing institutions interested in, never mind actually showcasing the present.

There are very few transit/transportation museums in the first place; we mostly have trolley/streetcar and railroad museums that were founded when these things were disappearing and are thus very focused on preserving old things…and many aren’t even that interested in *newer* old things.

No, although they clearly don’t have the faintest idea what’s in stock. They at least refunded my money when they couldn’t deliver the stuff I ordered while home sick recently though.

No, it’s a (relatively) large corporation, not a local business.

Like “I gave them money, they did not deliver the literal goods, they lied about it multiple times, and on Monday I’ll probably have to get my bank involved to get my money back” levels of bad.

There’s a weird kind of whiplash that comes from being a reasonably satisfied regular customer of a company and then out of the blue having such an inexplicably awful experience that you’ll almost certainly never buy anything from it again.

I’m an adult who isn’t normally especially afraid of heights and I do find doing that *at best* disorienting.