Premier Doug Ford is even talking about digging a giant traffic tunnel under the city’s biggest and busiest highway, the 401, an idea that most experts consider pure lunacy.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
It’s a golden season for devotees of the brilliant journalist and biographer Robert Caro. It has been 50 years since the publication of his masterwork The Power Broker and the anniversary is being marked with all due ceremony.
Newspaper and magazine writers are revisiting and re-evaluating the book. (Was the author too hard on his protagonist Robert Moses, the pharaonic builder of the monumental parks, bridges, housing projects and expressways that shaped modern New York?)
An exhibition at the New-York Historical Society is showing a collection of notebooks, manuscripts and other Caro-bilia, including his Smith Corona Electra 210 typewriters. Podcasters on the 99% Invisible show are combing obsessively and enthusiastically through the famous door stopper (1,126 pages in my well-thumbed paperback edition) chapter by chapter.
They even had a fanboy chat with the author himself, now 88 years old and still labouring on the final volume of his sweeping biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
But what does this have to do with the here and now? Quite a bit, it turns out. At least if you live in my city.
Toronto is in a position much like that of Moses’s New York in the 1920s, when he first came to power. Booming growth and mass immigration have transformed it into a teeming world city. Its streets are choked with traffic. Getting around has become a nightmare. Even visiting celebrities like Tom Cruise complain about its time-sucking congestion.
The obvious solution is to build more roads. Isn’t it? Doug Ford certainly thinks so. The Progressive Conservative Premier of Ontario vows to create a big new one. Highway 413 will connect the expanding Greater Toronto regions of Halton, Peel and York. His government is bringing in new legislation, the creatively named Building Highways Faster Act, to make sure pesky hurdles such as environmental assessments don’t get in the way of paving paradise – or Southern Ontario farm fields, anyway.
Mr. Ford is even talking about digging a giant traffic tunnel under the city’s biggest and busiest highway, the 401, an idea that most experts consider pure lunacy.
A quick – okay, a long – read through The Power Broker might give him second thoughts. Like Mr. Ford, Robert Moses was hell-bent on building more, better, wider roads. In the four decades he spent as New York’s master builder, he succeeded in constructing a sprawling network of multilane highways, carving yawning gashes through the physical and human landscape of the metropolis.
To save time, Mr. Ford might skip to the chapter called One Mile. Mr. Caro describes how Moses rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through the heavily populated borough, gutting the stable low-income neighbourhood of East Tremont and forcing thousands of people from their homes.
The cost of progress, the power broker would say. Worth it to get traffic moving again. Except it didn’t. New Yorkers soon learned the lesson that would become familiar to cities around the world in the era of the automobile: Build bigger roads and motorists will flock to them, dreaming of a direct, unimpeded ride to their destination.
It is, of course, a fantasy. Moses’s beautiful new roads filled up almost as soon as they opened. “Four lanes of Belt Parkway had been jammed before the war,” Mr. Caro writes, referring to the Second World War. “Now six lanes of Belt Parkway were jammed. Prewar construction on old Atlantic Avenue had been intolerable. Postwar congestion on a new – widened, modernized – Atlantic Avenue was more intolerable.”
Will the smooth toll-free Ontario highways that Mr. Ford is planning be any different?
The Premier is not quite the monomaniac that Mr. Caro describes in his scathing portrait of Moses. For one thing, he doesn’t suffer from the deep prejudice against mass transit that Moses harboured (bike lanes are another matter). In fact, he is spending many billions on a new subway that will traverse the city: The Ontario Line. That is to his credit.
But Mr. Ford does have a similar passion for building big and building fast. Get it Done is his party’s slogan. He has no time for pettifogging objections from lily-livered critics. It’s all: Bring in the bulldozers and damn the torpedoes.
What is most compelling about Mr. Caro’s book is his description of how Moses amassed, then ruthlessly employed, power, and did it without holding an elected position of any kind. There is something mesmerizing about the way he rolled over his opponents. However we might view the results today, he got it done.
Come to think of it, maybe Mr. Ford shouldn’t read The Power Broker. It might give him ideas.