The retrospective on Robert Moses here in New York City has inspired a wealth of re-evaluations of the big man who did so much to alter, build and destroy New York City and its environs. I felt compelled to add my two cents, after seeing the marvelous exihibts at the Museum of the City of New York, where you can see the huge models from Moses’ day that showed how he would have, for example, tore a freeway through midtown Manhattan. Here’s what I wrote, after seeing the exhibit:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a model might be worth a million. This is the thought that came to me as I stared in fascination and horror at Robert Moses’ planned freeway across Manhattan on display at the Museum of the City of New York.

The elevated freeway would have gone from the Lincoln Tunnel across to the Midtown Tunnel and cut just beside the Empire State Building. Robert Olmsted, former planning director for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who happened to be at my elbow, told me that the original plan was for a tunnel. Accommodating it is why the Sixth Avenue line dips going uptown out of Herald Square for no apparent reason, Olmsted said. But Moses got a four-lane tunnel converted into a six-lane above ground freeway – on the drawing board. Neither was ever built.

The model on view is part of the big exhibit on the big builder that is taking place this and coming months at MCNY, the Queens Museum of Art and Columbia University Wallach Art Gallery. Hilary Ballon is the curator and has edited a fascinating accompanying book on Moses with historian Kenneth Jackson of Columbia University.

The core of the exhibition at MCNY is many of Moses’ actual transportation models. They range from coffee-table to room sized. For decades gathering dust in a room under a bridge, the models were rescued from decay or destruction by Laura Rosen, the archivist for MTA Bridges and Tunnels.

The exhibition as a whole is pitched as a reevaluation of Moses, which is certainly welcome. If the exhibition had a motto, it might be “He wasn’t all bad.” Which, of course, he wasn’t. Along with plowing down neighborhoods for freeways and soulless high rises, he also built some elegantly designed bridges and parkways, and hundreds of recreation centers and parks, including Riverside Park on the Upper West Side.

But the models on view at MCNY should serve to remind us that Moses’ transportation and related visions of housing and work were not just poorly or cruelly executed. They were fundamentally flawed, even on their own terms. If Moses had had his way, Manhattan would be crisscrossed with freeways and studded with new parking lots and garages. Which not only would have destroyed many people’s homes and businesses, it would have made the city less prosperous, and ultimately put less money in both private and public pocketbooks.

It all comes down to capacity. Like many people of his generation, I’m convinced, Moses essentially didn’t understand the different capabilities of different modes of transportation, despite his learning and education. A freeway at top capacity can move only a few thousand vehicles per hour, and all those vehicles have to be put somewhere once they arrive where they’re going. That means many lanes of freeways and many parking lots and garages chewing up prime real estate.

By comparison, a subway or commuter train can move tens of thousands of people per hour, and they all arrive without the need to store a vehicle. This essential fact is why Manhattan can have dozens of skyscrapers, which not incidentally produce millions in salaries, profits and taxes, crammed right next to each other without any parking lots.

Moses’ vision of New York, if he had completed it, would have essentially downsized large parts of the city. At the MCNY exhibit, there’s one artist’s conception of what Soho would look like after the highway was cut through it. It essentially looked like Dallas or Houston – a broad boulevard lined with Edge City style office buildings. And whether you love or hate Dallas, it’s a far less productive city than New York, when calculated on a per square foot basis.

This is what happened to much of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which are still recovering from the damage Moses did. The boroughs are not only less hospitable because of the worst of Moses’ freeways; they are also less productive.

Moses thought he was modernizing Manhattan and the boroughs by adjusting them to accommodate the car and the highway. It’s true that on a conceptual level, he was acting similarly to those of the 19th century, who had put in train lines into New York and other cities, adjusting them to that then new mode of transportation.

But what Moses apparently didn’t see is that the car and the highway operate by different rules than modes of transportation past. Despite its behemoth-like size, a highway is actually a low-capacity mode of transportation, particularly when compared to trains.

Moses can’t be forgiven his intellectual errors by the observation that “everyone was doing it.” For one thing, everyone wasn’t. Lewis Mumford, who in the 1950s was a prominent and respected critic, laid out in painstaking fashion just exactly why plowing freeways into cities would not improve overall transportation, even while destroying so much of what was worthwhile in urban centers.

Secondly, Moses was not just part of the pack; he led the pack. Before World War II, the general plan was to put freeways beside major cities, not through them. Moses helped convince the federal government otherwise.

This capacity question still is with us today. It is the governing factor on how much New York City and the region can grow. It is the promise of the three major transit projects on the stage today: East Side Access, which would enable Long Islanders to reach Grand Central Terminal; Second Avenue Subway, which would deliver a long promised second subway line along the East Side with the potential to extend it to the Bronx and Brooklyn; and ARC, which would be another tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey.

The region’s transit system is above or at capacity on most of its key lines. These new lines will add new capacity, and thus create the potential for new growth. Adding them would increase the city’s amazing ability to handle more people comfortably.

I attended a briefing on the Olympics in early 2000 by the urban planner Alex Garvin. He talked about how the 2012 Olympics, if it were held in New York, would need to handle an estimated 500,000 visitors a day. That had crippled sprawling cities like Atlanta and the system of buses and satellite parking lots it set up to handle its Olympics. Oddly enough, Garvin said, New York, with its 8 million people, could swallow an additional half million without a hiccup. Its huge transit system could handle them without any problem, particularly given them most of them would be traveling at off-peak hours.

It was a fascinating display of the logic of New York. Where is the best place to put a lot of people? Where there already are a lot of people. That’s why if we do it right, the city can expand from 8 million to 9 million people over the next 25 years, which many predict, without sacrificing comfort or livability.

So as we evaluate Moses, we should remember that it wasn’t just his means that were unsound; many of his ends were too.

[first published in the newsletter Spotlight on the Region of the Regional Plan Association in New York City. Available at www.rpa.org]