Detroit's measuring stick.

[Detroitnerd]

Detroitnerd, I am puzzled by your slightly hostile response. If you reread my previous message, I clarified what I had initially said - that by the 1970s and 1980s, New York had a "well-developed" transit system, which is true. Even in the worst of times, millions of people used the subway every year. I completely agree with you that the subway system itself operated poorly until the 1990s, so I am not sure why you are getting so exercised about this issue and claiming that I know nothing about New York.

Why are you puzzled? You said New York had a great subway system in the 1980s. You believe that New York City's transportation system was built in response to its density. Those two things are kinda ... ludicrous? And then chiding me on my criticism because you vaguely remember, from when you were a little kid, that the system was great then. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining, pal.

I will defend my point, however, that the city's subway system was initially developed in response to the fact that the city needed a means to move around millions of people. Was the city as big as it would become? No, but the city still had 4.5 million + people before the subway lines were really developed. Did the subway system allow for and promote greater growth? Of course it did. The point is that urban growth is caused by a multitude of factors. Pointing solely to one or two factors does not explain New York's vitality.

Dear, cman: Manhattan was populated a long time ago. Gradually, it grew up from around lower Manhattan [[the joke goes that they never decorated the north wall of City Hall because they never saw the city expanding very far north) then grew up all the way until Manhattan was developed top to bottom.

Now, look at a map of Manhattan. Manhattan is a strip of barely concealed bedrock about 13 and a half miles long, seldom wider than two miles. How do you get people around Manhattan? The streetcars were slow. Since Manhattan's street grid had been designed to bring goods in from the ships along the many streets to avenue markets, the island never had a good north-south system of roads, and traffic was horrible. How do you get a person 13-1/2 miles in all this?

Bear in mind that when construction started on the subway, there were some dense pockets in Manhattan. You do know what those were, right? They weren't glittering skyscrapers: They were the worst, most densely packed slums in the world. Normally, in this day and age, density is a function of a carefully designed built environment that will accommodate people by stacking them one on top of another. This was a den of filth and disease, with firetrap buildings and whole families sleeping in one room. There's your "density."

Only when you have the subway built, especially with its tubes crossing under the rivers and reaching Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey and the Bronx, do you start to have subway stations in the city where more than 100,000 people can pour off at one stop in an hour. That's why they built Rockefeller Center there, or the Empire State Building, or the World Trade Center. You didn't have this kind of planned density until you had a subway to serve it. And that's why I have to say point of view isn't in line with history.

So why all the passion, cman? It's because this is a Detroit forum, and people in Detroit don't have much experience with mass transit. So when people start bandying about "their" ideas of how transit works, some of us on this forum can get pretty passionate about it. The idea that you need density before you implement transit is totally backwards, yes. But what makes it especially dangerous is that it just plays into people's lazy thinking here: "We don't have density; why bother building transit?" When actually, the thinking should go: "We need more density; let's build transit."

Anyway, sounds like we're both stepping on each other's toes. The above is as clear a way to spell out the history of how the subways and development grew hand-in-hand in New York. Cheers.