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Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car
A gripping account of how the automobile has failed NYC and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to its post-pandemic recovery
In 1969, as all students of New York City history think they have learned, master builder Robert Moses lost his long battle to urbanist Jane Jacobs over his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway. The ten-lane elevated expressway would slice across SoHo and Little Italy, demolish historic buildings, and displace thousands of families and businesses. Jacobs and her neighbors defeated Moses, and as a result, New York became the only major American city with no interstate highway running through its core. Like many global cities, though, New York spent fifty years during the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to tame its heavily populated landscape to fit the private automobile. New York has now spent more than fifty years trying to undo those mistakes, wresting back city space for people, not cars.
New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car chronicles the earlier, less-known battles that preceded the cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Jacobs became an example for generations of urban planners, but whose example did Jacobs emulate, in an earlier victory that saved Washington Square Park? Moses may serve handily as New York’s uber-villain now, but who, before him, was responsible for destroying a critical part of New York’s transit system?
Written by a well-known urban writer who has focused on New York’s transportation system for more than a decade, author Nicole Gelinas resumes the story where Robert Caro’s landmark The Power Broker ended. Movement explores how, in the half-century leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, New York's re-embrace of its mass-transit system and a livable streetscape helped save the city. Gelinas tackles the 1970s environmental movement, the 1980s rebuilding of the subways, and more contemporary battles, from Mayor Bloomberg's push for more pedestrian plazas and bike lanes in the early 2000s, to transportation advocates' protests to prevent traffic deaths in the Mayor de Blasio era of the 2010s, to the battle against Uber and Lyft to take back New York's streets from reemerging gridlock over the half-decade leading up to the pandemic.
Introducing a cast of new transportation heroes to rival Jane Jacobs (Shirley Hayes, Hazel Henderson, Richard Ravitch, Nilka Martell), and puncturing the myth of Moses as New York’s anti-hero, Movement explores how New York City has helped redefine what it means to be a global not a place that is easy to drive through, but a place where people can take transit, walk, and bike to work, to school, or just for fun.
In 1969, as all students of New York City history think they have learned, master builder Robert Moses lost his long battle to urbanist Jane Jacobs over his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway. The ten-lane elevated expressway would slice across SoHo and Little Italy, demolish historic buildings, and displace thousands of families and businesses. Jacobs and her neighbors defeated Moses, and as a result, New York became the only major American city with no interstate highway running through its core. Like many global cities, though, New York spent fifty years during the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to tame its heavily populated landscape to fit the private automobile. New York has now spent more than fifty years trying to undo those mistakes, wresting back city space for people, not cars.
New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car chronicles the earlier, less-known battles that preceded the cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Jacobs became an example for generations of urban planners, but whose example did Jacobs emulate, in an earlier victory that saved Washington Square Park? Moses may serve handily as New York’s uber-villain now, but who, before him, was responsible for destroying a critical part of New York’s transit system?
Written by a well-known urban writer who has focused on New York’s transportation system for more than a decade, author Nicole Gelinas resumes the story where Robert Caro’s landmark The Power Broker ended. Movement explores how, in the half-century leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, New York's re-embrace of its mass-transit system and a livable streetscape helped save the city. Gelinas tackles the 1970s environmental movement, the 1980s rebuilding of the subways, and more contemporary battles, from Mayor Bloomberg's push for more pedestrian plazas and bike lanes in the early 2000s, to transportation advocates' protests to prevent traffic deaths in the Mayor de Blasio era of the 2010s, to the battle against Uber and Lyft to take back New York's streets from reemerging gridlock over the half-decade leading up to the pandemic.
Introducing a cast of new transportation heroes to rival Jane Jacobs (Shirley Hayes, Hazel Henderson, Richard Ravitch, Nilka Martell), and puncturing the myth of Moses as New York’s anti-hero, Movement explores how New York City has helped redefine what it means to be a global not a place that is easy to drive through, but a place where people can take transit, walk, and bike to work, to school, or just for fun.
933 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 5, 2024
11 people are currently reading
148 people want to read
About the author
Nicole Gelinas
3 books12 followersNicole Gelinas is the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Gelinas writes on urban economics and finance, municipal and corporate finance, and business issues. She is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder and a member of the New York Society of Securities Analysts.
Gelinas has published analysis and opinion pieces on the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union Tribune, the New York Sun, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the Dallas Morning News, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Boston Herald. She has also written for Crain's New York Business and National Review Online.
Gelinas graduated from the Newcomb College of Tulane University with a B.A. in English literature. She and her husband live in Manhattan.
Gelinas has published analysis and opinion pieces on the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union Tribune, the New York Sun, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the Dallas Morning News, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Boston Herald. She has also written for Crain's New York Business and National Review Online.
Gelinas graduated from the Newcomb College of Tulane University with a B.A. in English literature. She and her husband live in Manhattan.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 3, 2025
This is a dream book for a transit nerd and/or NYC history lover. She does not hold back on her anti-car bias so it's not really a neutral tale, but it's a heavily researched and well argued one. Since it is opinionated, she does have a few funny opinions including some Moses revisionism (I mean, not really, she just thinks it all wasn't as much his fault as we now like to say and there were a lot of other people to blame too), plus she was very dismissive of autonomous cars (including saying that we don't know that they will actually work in the real world... in 2024... when they've been working in the real world for a while). It's not quite an optimistic book since she ended in the depths of post-pandemic subway crime, but it is a book with a lot of evidence that if enough people are willing to work hard, we can keep doing better.
It is also amazing to think how quickly we get used to things. They only closed Prospect Park to cars in 2018! And now I can't even imagine that!
It is also amazing to think how quickly we get used to things. They only closed Prospect Park to cars in 2018! And now I can't even imagine that!
November 5, 2025
Comprehensive.
If anyone wants to learn the whole story of NYC transportation history, across modes and time periods, this is the book for you. And since New York City is transit, this a book about the history of NYC itself.
The book is organized by mode of transportation which reveals the patterns that repeat themselves over time and also is a great introduction to the players of NYC gov.
A highlight for me was the section on taxis, a particularly interesting study of political economy.
In Gelinas’ quest to be comprehensive it is as at moments dry, but necessarily so.
The end of this book is perhaps a bit too wrapped up in the pandemic, which makes sense as that is the context in which it was written. It is exciting to see how even just a few years after the book was written, things are starting to change in NYC, such as Congestion Pricing finally being implemented. The times are exciting and rolling along.
If anyone wants to learn the whole story of NYC transportation history, across modes and time periods, this is the book for you. And since New York City is transit, this a book about the history of NYC itself.
The book is organized by mode of transportation which reveals the patterns that repeat themselves over time and also is a great introduction to the players of NYC gov.
A highlight for me was the section on taxis, a particularly interesting study of political economy.
In Gelinas’ quest to be comprehensive it is as at moments dry, but necessarily so.
The end of this book is perhaps a bit too wrapped up in the pandemic, which makes sense as that is the context in which it was written. It is exciting to see how even just a few years after the book was written, things are starting to change in NYC, such as Congestion Pricing finally being implemented. The times are exciting and rolling along.
September 3, 2025
A remarkably comprehensive history of sustainable transportation advocacy in New York City. Covers everything from the fall of the streetcar companies to the expansion of Citi Bike to the ongoing war over congestion pricing. Maybe a bit too much of an activist angle, resulting in missing context from municipal staff and some broad assumptions about what people in power were thinking. Still a valuable chronicle nonetheless.
February 18, 2025
Nicole Gelinas presents with clarity, conviction, and power alternative futures for New York City and does so with loads of real-world data, examples, and observations. Her book is essential reading for anyone interested in the ongoing life of this city.
July 23, 2025
This novel was skewed on the political spectrum but was interesting to learn where a lot of the relatively recent changes in NYC stem from.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews