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Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car
576 pages, Hardcover
Published November 5, 2024
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15 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 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 14, 2025
What a tremendously useful book. The past century of New York City politics provides a lot of great stories and characters. Movement by Nicole Gelinas, includes many of them, but this book is much more than that. The rich information provided offers a blueprint for bringing about actual political change, and quietly, methodically makes a nearly bullet proof case for a particular kind of political change.
The book is mostly chronological, moving us from the city's "original sin" of pro-car policy making in the early decades of this century down to our current era of Uber and bike lanes. But the focus is on the fights. Each chapter focuses on a single issue, or related set of issues, and how they were raised, agitated around, and resolved, or at least settled for now. Some chapters focus on a Mayoral administration or two, but others can span across as many as 8 decades.
Gelinas is a spirited editor and columnist for the New York Post, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Recent politics might lead you to believe that a conservative political profile like that would make her pro-car, but she seems to be a New Yorker first. And she builds a compelling case, anecdote by anecdote, and fatality statistic by fatality statistic, that cars are a menace to our city.
One of the most illuminating aspects of this book is the way that it lifts the hood on the basics of the city's functioning. By looking at transit and all (or just most) of its components in detail, Gelinas provides a greater sense of the possible. Things can be changed in serious ways, and they have been. It's easy to take things like Citibikes, or pedestrian areas around Times Square for granted. Gelinas lays out how it took decades, and a lot of hard work and careful planning to make those things happen.
When I moved back to New York City in 2018, I quickly became enamored of a bicycle loop in the city's iconic central park. It had clearly once been a road for cars, with street lights that still functioned in a vestigial way. Guests often asked me how long it had been since the bikes had taken over. The volume of bicyclists using it, and the sheer normalcy of it all led me to believe that it must have been established as a bike lane for at least a decade. This book let me know that it was established in 2018. My first months on that bike lane were its first months as a car-free road.
This is a theme throughout the book. Political change is very, very difficult. But once a change is achieved, it can quickly become part of the furniture. Decades of opposition to bike lanes made them seem impossible, but the commitment of the Bloomberg administration made widespread implementation possible, and the growing presence of bicycling in the city now seems irreversible. The shift from impossible to inevitable seems clear in retrospect, but not at the time. Not at all.
Gelinas's account of the birth of car-centric New York is an illustration of this process. It shouldn't be a revelation, but it was surprising to me to think about the way that street lights post-dated the invention of the automobile. Prior to the car, New York traffic largely managed itself. Nothing was moving quickly enough, or in a form that was heavily-armored enough, to necessitate further regimentation.
It was clear from the start that motorists were a privileged minority. When cars started taking over, only the very wealthy could afford them. In the rest of the United States, this changed, but New York's density, the cost of parking, and the sheer day-to-day frustration of car ownership meant that it has remained primarily an upper-middle-class affectation. We certainly hear a lot about the tradesmen who need their cars to go build things during political fights, but fundamentally, drivers are people who are too snobby for, and can afford to stay away from public transit.
Rich people will tend to get what they want, though, so in the space of a few decades at the beginning of the 20th century, they were able to completely warp the character of the city and its streets. The most frustrating thing about this, which Gelinas emphasizes over and over, is that the city can't function based on cars. Even at it's lowest points, the subway and bus systems moved vastly more people. All of the road infrastructure we have built has a pretty hard limit of under a million vehicles. In the one-driver car culture that suffuses most of these trips, there is no way to support the city's 3-4 million jobs with cars alone. Two transit strikes, in the late 1960s and early 1980s underlined this for all, and helped vault appropriately anti-car attitudes into the halls of power.
Gelinas's work is laser-focused on policy changes, but it's about personalities too. She helped to revise my estimation of two massive figures in New York history, one in a minor way, and another quite significantly. The author, and the trade dress of the book, emphasize that they are offering a sweeping re-estimation of Robert Moses. Moses, immortalized in Robert Caro's monumental book "The Power Broker" is blamed by many for New York City's car culture. He used his unelected position to guide NYC planning, and build infrastructure for decades. Gelinas confidently explodes the idea that Moses was personally responsible for these changes. The highway-ification of NYC was the plan long before Moses was calling the shots.
I'm not that convinced by this argument. Yes, the straw-man picture of Moses as a Colossus bending the city to his car-mad will is ridiculous. It was not surprising to me to find that Moses was a tool of powerful interests as well as being one himself, though it was nice to have this argument laid out so succinctly. Moses remains one of the most powerful and interesting figures in New York history. No, he didn't formulate the plans, but he is the guy who figured out how to carry them out, and he exercised abnormal levels of power to do so.
The depiction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg was most surprising to me. I did not live in New York during his tenure from 2002-2013, though I did visit a lot. As a politically-aware adult, I certainly knew that he was a publicity-hungry mayor at the time, and my impressions were mostly negative. He was the nanny-Mayor, who wanted to tell people how to live, and used his wealth to pressure the city into giving him an extra term. I didn't think much of him. This book has given me a much clearer sense of his positive impact. He certainly built on the anti-crime legacy of mayors like Dinkins before him, but it seems like his time in power was a one of great flourishing for New York City. On multiple different transit fronts, his mayoralty saw logjams driven through and great progress. My life as a cyclist in the city would be vastly different, and worse, if Bloomberg hadn't been Mayor, been willing to take risks, and entrust and protect bold subordinates. It's an interesting historic lesson, how that which seems insufferable in the living, can seem like a golden age in restrospect.
I appreciated how present Covid was in this narrative. Much of it appears to have been written in quarantine. Gelinas lays out the ways that the city has yet to fully recover from the pandemic. In a political and intellectual world that seems to be running as fast as it can from acknowledging that that whole 2019-2022 period ever occurred, it's refreshing to encounter a narrative that deals so frankly with Covid's effects. This is not a pessimistic book, however. It's suffused with a sense of the possible. It's honest about the challenges facing New York City, but it makes clear how much we've already done to improve our streets, and provides a framework that people can use to continue that process. Highly recommended.
The book is mostly chronological, moving us from the city's "original sin" of pro-car policy making in the early decades of this century down to our current era of Uber and bike lanes. But the focus is on the fights. Each chapter focuses on a single issue, or related set of issues, and how they were raised, agitated around, and resolved, or at least settled for now. Some chapters focus on a Mayoral administration or two, but others can span across as many as 8 decades.
Gelinas is a spirited editor and columnist for the New York Post, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Recent politics might lead you to believe that a conservative political profile like that would make her pro-car, but she seems to be a New Yorker first. And she builds a compelling case, anecdote by anecdote, and fatality statistic by fatality statistic, that cars are a menace to our city.
One of the most illuminating aspects of this book is the way that it lifts the hood on the basics of the city's functioning. By looking at transit and all (or just most) of its components in detail, Gelinas provides a greater sense of the possible. Things can be changed in serious ways, and they have been. It's easy to take things like Citibikes, or pedestrian areas around Times Square for granted. Gelinas lays out how it took decades, and a lot of hard work and careful planning to make those things happen.
When I moved back to New York City in 2018, I quickly became enamored of a bicycle loop in the city's iconic central park. It had clearly once been a road for cars, with street lights that still functioned in a vestigial way. Guests often asked me how long it had been since the bikes had taken over. The volume of bicyclists using it, and the sheer normalcy of it all led me to believe that it must have been established as a bike lane for at least a decade. This book let me know that it was established in 2018. My first months on that bike lane were its first months as a car-free road.
This is a theme throughout the book. Political change is very, very difficult. But once a change is achieved, it can quickly become part of the furniture. Decades of opposition to bike lanes made them seem impossible, but the commitment of the Bloomberg administration made widespread implementation possible, and the growing presence of bicycling in the city now seems irreversible. The shift from impossible to inevitable seems clear in retrospect, but not at the time. Not at all.
Gelinas's account of the birth of car-centric New York is an illustration of this process. It shouldn't be a revelation, but it was surprising to me to think about the way that street lights post-dated the invention of the automobile. Prior to the car, New York traffic largely managed itself. Nothing was moving quickly enough, or in a form that was heavily-armored enough, to necessitate further regimentation.
It was clear from the start that motorists were a privileged minority. When cars started taking over, only the very wealthy could afford them. In the rest of the United States, this changed, but New York's density, the cost of parking, and the sheer day-to-day frustration of car ownership meant that it has remained primarily an upper-middle-class affectation. We certainly hear a lot about the tradesmen who need their cars to go build things during political fights, but fundamentally, drivers are people who are too snobby for, and can afford to stay away from public transit.
Rich people will tend to get what they want, though, so in the space of a few decades at the beginning of the 20th century, they were able to completely warp the character of the city and its streets. The most frustrating thing about this, which Gelinas emphasizes over and over, is that the city can't function based on cars. Even at it's lowest points, the subway and bus systems moved vastly more people. All of the road infrastructure we have built has a pretty hard limit of under a million vehicles. In the one-driver car culture that suffuses most of these trips, there is no way to support the city's 3-4 million jobs with cars alone. Two transit strikes, in the late 1960s and early 1980s underlined this for all, and helped vault appropriately anti-car attitudes into the halls of power.
Gelinas's work is laser-focused on policy changes, but it's about personalities too. She helped to revise my estimation of two massive figures in New York history, one in a minor way, and another quite significantly. The author, and the trade dress of the book, emphasize that they are offering a sweeping re-estimation of Robert Moses. Moses, immortalized in Robert Caro's monumental book "The Power Broker" is blamed by many for New York City's car culture. He used his unelected position to guide NYC planning, and build infrastructure for decades. Gelinas confidently explodes the idea that Moses was personally responsible for these changes. The highway-ification of NYC was the plan long before Moses was calling the shots.
I'm not that convinced by this argument. Yes, the straw-man picture of Moses as a Colossus bending the city to his car-mad will is ridiculous. It was not surprising to me to find that Moses was a tool of powerful interests as well as being one himself, though it was nice to have this argument laid out so succinctly. Moses remains one of the most powerful and interesting figures in New York history. No, he didn't formulate the plans, but he is the guy who figured out how to carry them out, and he exercised abnormal levels of power to do so.
The depiction of Mayor Michael Bloomberg was most surprising to me. I did not live in New York during his tenure from 2002-2013, though I did visit a lot. As a politically-aware adult, I certainly knew that he was a publicity-hungry mayor at the time, and my impressions were mostly negative. He was the nanny-Mayor, who wanted to tell people how to live, and used his wealth to pressure the city into giving him an extra term. I didn't think much of him. This book has given me a much clearer sense of his positive impact. He certainly built on the anti-crime legacy of mayors like Dinkins before him, but it seems like his time in power was a one of great flourishing for New York City. On multiple different transit fronts, his mayoralty saw logjams driven through and great progress. My life as a cyclist in the city would be vastly different, and worse, if Bloomberg hadn't been Mayor, been willing to take risks, and entrust and protect bold subordinates. It's an interesting historic lesson, how that which seems insufferable in the living, can seem like a golden age in restrospect.
I appreciated how present Covid was in this narrative. Much of it appears to have been written in quarantine. Gelinas lays out the ways that the city has yet to fully recover from the pandemic. In a political and intellectual world that seems to be running as fast as it can from acknowledging that that whole 2019-2022 period ever occurred, it's refreshing to encounter a narrative that deals so frankly with Covid's effects. This is not a pessimistic book, however. It's suffused with a sense of the possible. It's honest about the challenges facing New York City, but it makes clear how much we've already done to improve our streets, and provides a framework that people can use to continue that process. Highly recommended.
July 17, 2025
A good book which tackles topics of walkability and mass transit in New York City over the decades. Chapters mainly focus on a given topic and give its particular history, good and bad. It gives you a lot of context on modern-day urbanism policy proposals and what has worked/failed in the past.
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