Today the 5-day week has become almost universal. Work days are shorter. Vacations are longer. The beneficiaries of this vast increase in free time orient their use of it to the automobile.

TURNS AWAY FROM CORE

The suburbanite or exurbanite will, as likely as not, turn his car away from the metropolitan core. Even within the city itself the link of the automobile to leisure time has become firmer and firmer. The result has been described by Lyle Fitch, first deputy city administrator in New York:

"Every summer weekend a vast horde of pleasure-seeking passenger automobiles pour out of the city like bats leaving Carlsbad Cavern at sunset. Not being able to operate in three dimensions, they put up with conditions which no bat has to tolerate. There is no principle of selection save the willingness to wait in line. Nor do they find relief in flight; as Lewis Mumford has remarked, they only exchange urban jam for suburban jelly and the jelly nowadays continues for 100 miles on Long Island east of New York City proper."

Nor is there a sign of any end to this ever-increasing motorization. Population specialists estimate that population in the United States will expand by about 56 million in the next 20 years-some 35 percent. The number of automobiles is increasing more than twice as fast. It will rise by about 50 million in the same period or about 90 percent; 84 percent of suburbanites own cars and a 57 percent gain in auto ownership is predicted in the next 8 years.

In New York City itself, motor-vehicle registration has risen 500,000 in the last 10 years. About 900,000 persons now drive to work in New York City. The fantastic motorization of the metropolitan area is highlighted by the multiplication of passenger car registrations in the last 30 years:

Nowhere in the world does so great a car pool exist. But great as are these totals they pale-on a per capita basis-with those for the Pacific coast1,300,000 passenger cars for the San Francisco Bay area, and 3,100,000 for Metropolitan Los Angeles.

Against this surge toward the automobile, what has happened to the movement of people in and out of New York by commuting train? Is the rail commuter actually vanishing?

By no means.

The figures on rail commuting offer the following picture:

Excluding the precipitous Jersey decline, the movement of rail commuters into New York City has remained relatively stable. However, except for the increase on Long Island, it has by no means matched the area's general growth in population.

PURPOSELESS IN CHARACTER

The proliferation of population in the New York metropolitan areas-as in other large American cities does not tend to generate a more economically purposeful movement to and from the urban core. The larger a metropolis

grows, under automotive conditions, the more purposeless the character of movements within its sprawling shadows.

The reason for this, the survey has made clear, is not only the transformation in the habit patterns of many who live in the city's outer regions. At the same time, significant changes have been proceeding in the core.

The facade of New York is so familiar that few residents even notice the changes-unless they are monumental-the rebuilding of Park Avenue, the construction of Rockefeller Center, the construction of the great bridges, the eradication of East Side slums.

Few realize that crammed into the area below 60th Street is the most concen

And

trated working area in the world-2,200,000 persons. About 600,000 persons live there. Nearly 2 million persons pour in each day to do their daily work. 1,300,000 to 1,500,000 more come to shop, to see the sights, or just pass through. This core has been characterized by great, if less perceptible, changes in recent years. The residential population is dropping quite rapidly. Movement into the core is falling slightly-mostly because of the 5-day week. Employment remains stable but is changing in character. Retail trade-particularly the business of the Fifth Avenue merchants and the mass salesmen of Herald Squareshows a decline that is made up by the proliferating suburban shopping centers. A measure of the retail-trade decline is afforded by figures of the Metropolitan Regional Study. These disclose that in 1929 a shade less than 80 percent of the area's retail employment was in the central cities of New York, Newark, and Jersey City. By 1954 the total had dropped to 67.8 percent. Another and more significant change is now in progress. tioned: "The Rise of Park Avenue and the Decline of the Lofts."

This might be cap

In other words, while employment in Manhattan remains constant, its character is changing. More workers are being added to the glass-and-aluminum palaces on Park Avenue and Wall Street. The light manufacturing of Manhattan has ceased to grow. Growth has shifted to Long Island City, farther out on Long Island, or to Jersey and Connecticut points.

TWO CONCENTRATIONS ARISING

What this means to the Manhattan profile is that two huge population concentrations are building up the big corporate centers of Wall Street and midManhattan.

Between the two centers of greater concentration gradually spreads a gray area. Here there is dropping density-antiquated loft areas, obsolescent residential regions, and declining business centers. This pattern, still hardly visible in the New York ebb and flow, is a familiar one in every other American metropolitan center.

Just ahead-in the opinion of such careful analysts of the urban milieu as Ray Vernon, director of the Metropolitan Region Study-lies another sharp jag in population tendencies.

Large offices and corporate bureaucracies, employing hundreds and thousands of modestly skilled workers, soon may find it easier to obtain the pool of skills that they require mostly female-in suburban and exurban areas rather than in the central business district.

As more female workers become available outside the core, it is suspected, a tendency to remove low-level repetitive office functions to more remote areas probably will revive.

TRANSFORMATION NEEDED

It is obvious that population change, cultural adaptation, technological revolution, shift in social patterns and economic displacement on the scale that this survey suggests dictate an equivalent transformation of the transportation circulatory system. Otherwise, parts of the metropolis will suffocate; other functions will desiccate. The healthy growing whole may turn into a tumorous mass. What agencies does our society possess with which to meet the challenge? The answer as given by Dr. Luther Gulick, president of the Institute of Public Administration, is that "we have bits and pieces; we have promising voluntary cooperative arrangements; we have State and Federal interests in various elements which are involved, but nothing that can really tackle the jobs."

Nor is it merely that the body of our community has outgrown the structure of its government. A look at suburbia and exurbia, where half the population is

already concentrated, shows that this area is characterized by intensely cellular government.

Instead of pooling resources in order to meet the titanic problems of big cities in the 20th century, each suburban fragment fights desperately to reincarnate the Jeffersonian "little town." The New England town meeting, antique form, smallness, narrow horizons, diversity rather than communality-these, as Robert C. Wood of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has observed, have become the shibboleths of the land beyond the city limits.

But the population shift has abrasively eroded the resources of big city government. The New York City government, like all metropolitan authorities, now masters a comparatively smaller part of the available economic and human assets than it did a generation ago.

Everywhere there are battlelines and divisions-small towns against village, county against State, city against county, city against authority, authority against State, State against State and States against Washington. The New York metropolitan area possessed 1,079 separate government subdivisions in 1954.

Only last month an unusual effort to mobilize the political leadership of three States-New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York-in a rational attack on the transportation problem failed.

Problems so vast clearly lie belond the capability of even the most vigorous and visionary leaders of private industry.

In the case of railroads serving New York the crisis is sharpened by the fact that each road is deeply engaged in a general struggle for survival against the technology of the motor era. Embroiled in this fight for life even the ablest executive envisages the commuter crisis only against a sea of deficit, which slowly rises closer and closer to the level of the corporate neck.

The cry for help from a drowning man seldom furnishes a rational basis on which to construct a more efficient system for the management of bathing beaches.

A REVOLUTIONARY CRISIS

This is not, of course, the first great social, economic, and political crisis in the history of New York. However, the overall revolution in a way of life is greater than any crises of the past.

Any past crisis inevitably produced the leadership and creative forces needed for solution. There is no reason to doubt that the present situation will prove an exception. In other American cities new thinking to meet the challenge is arising.

New York possesses a concentration of skills, energies, finance and even instruments of government that give the region unusual advantages in coping with revolutionary change.

Not the least valuable of these assets are the great public authorities that the complex social engineering problems of the past have called into being. Thus far, the leadership and resources of these agencies have been only peripherally engaged.

As Mr. Wood describes the situation:

"Metropolitan authorities play their part in whatever solutions have been forthcoming in the transportation field as well, but here the pattern of challenge and response is more complex. In New York the port authority and the transit authority vie, sometimes spectacularly, with Robert Moses (in his several institutional capacities) to provide for the fast circulation of goods and people throughout the region."

Mr. Wood points out, however, that the “ad hoc and haphazard employment of authorities, State highway departments and assistance programs" insures that most solutions will be engineering rather than social.

The conclusion seems obvious. Our problems have outrun our efforts to cope with them. Not because we lack the means, but because in social organization the metropolitan area is not a whole. Instead it constitutes a more and more amorphous body. Its structure, both political and economic, is fragmented. Public and private interests are in conflict. Geographic lines are placed ahead of the public welfare. The parts are more important than the whole.

In this welter of parochialism, confusion of the public mind and conflict of vigorous interests, the vehicular revolution rolls impressively forward with a swish of rubber tires and a nauseating smell of volatile hydrocarbons. When and how will it end?

[From the New York Times, Mar. 3, 1959]

STUDY FINDS CARS CHOKING CITIES AS "URBAN SPRAWL" TAKES OVER-Los ANGELES FINDS FREEWAYS NO HELP EXPERTS SAY MOBILITY FOR CARS IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR FAST PUBLIC TRANSIT SYSTEM

This is the second of three articles on the growing commuter problem in the New York area and other major cities

(By Harrison E. Salisbury)

Many New Yorkers have long cherished a secret dream. noon all traffic in the city will halt, choked in its own excess. be filled to the brim. Not a vehicle will be able to move.

Some day at high
Every street will

The realization of this dream-or nightmare is still at least a few years distant in the case of New York. But it could happen tomorrow in Los Angeles. Los Angeles now has such a number of motor vehicles that if all were brought onto the street at the same moment they would take over every roadway in the whole sprawling area. The city has 12,500 lane-miles of streets. This includes 60 miles of freeway-the largest total of any metropolis in the world.

But it also possesses more than 1,500,000 passenger cars. Traffic engineers calculate that, allowing 20 feet for each car, appropriate footage for 36,000 intersections and a reasonable interval between cars, every street in town would be jammed.

Sometimes, as the engineers struggle with the 5 p.m. automobile jam, they wonder if it has already happened.

New York's problem of moving people and vehicles in, out, and through the metropolitan area differs from the problems of Los Angeles, San Francsico, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston, or any other American metropolis. But in each case there are more similarities than differences. By surveying conditions in other metropolitan cities light can be cast on New York's problems, clues can be gathered to future trends and ideas of what to do and what not to do can be assembled.

No city in America possesses richer, more varied, more exotic experiences in moving people and vehicles than Los Angeles.

Here, nestled under its blanket of smog, girdled by bands of freeways, its core eviscerated by concrete strips and asphalt fields, its circulatory arteries pumping away without focus, lies the prototype of "Gasopolis," the rubberwheeled living region of the future.

Los Angeles is no longer a city as the term has been conventionally defined. Sam S. Taylor, general manager of Los Angeles traffic, calls Los Angeles "a mobile region."

For anyone looking toward the future, toward the end results of full autofication of the American metropolis, Los Angeles is the phenomenon to analyze most carefully.

When Lincoln Steffens went to the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik revolution he proclaimed, "I have seen the future-and it works."

Today's visitor to Los Angeles might paraphrase Steffens and say: "I have seen the future-and it doesn't work."

Los Angeles today is confronted with the radical consequences of total reliance upon the gasoline combustion engine. What 40 years ago was the world's best interurban transit system-the big red cars of Henry Huntington's lines— long since has been consigned to the scrap heap. The cult of the automobile has saturated a vast metropolitan area. Expert after expert has examined the Los Angeles picture and backed away shuddering.

Every transport problem that New York and other big American cities cope with today exists in Los Angeles in nearly insoluble form.

ANGUISHED CRIES HEARD

It is from Los Angeles that the most anguished cries are heard for rescue from the rubber-tired incubi. It is Los Angeles that threatens to prohibit new cars unless they are fitted with devices to prevent the discharge of smogcreating hydrocarbon fractions.

It is Los Angeles that sends its officials to plead with the grand viziers of Detroit not to put longer fins on the cars, not to widen the machines because there just is not room on the streets or in the parking spaces.

It is in Los Angeles that serious officials say that the system is exhausting the elements necessary for human life-land, air, and water.

And it is in Los Angeles and other motor-oriented west coast cities that the cry rises clearly that no solution will be found solely in freeways, gradeseparated facilities, and other devices for multiplying the mobility of private

cars.

No matter what the cost, public transit facilities must be provided. Otherwise chaos lies just ahead. That is what the west coast Cassandras-often yesterday's prophets in the freeway temples-are saying today.

THE END OF ROOM

Los Angeles provides a classic example of the Malthusian principle applied to the automobile. As cited by Dr. Lyle C. Fitch, first deputy administrator, of New York City, this is the law:

"Today's automobile population continually outruns its lebensraum.” Metropolitan Los Angeles expects to have 900 miles of freeway and 300 miles of expressway by 1980. A freeway is a grade-separated roadway. An expressway is a limited-access street-level roadway. Even with this program, Mr. Taylor says that Los Angeles in 1980 "may well have worse traffic conditions than exist today"-unless public transit is provided.

The building of motor facilities on the scale already carried out by Los Angeles has given the community an anthill aspect.

So much land thas been allotted for automotive use that the center of Los Angeles-despite recent public and private building projects-more and more resembles a Swiss cheese, tunneled at the core and gnawed at the edges. About 28 percent of the 3,300 acres of downtown Los Angeles is occupied by streets, freeways and service ways. About 38 percent more is occupied by offstreet parking garages, loading facilities and other institutions dedicated to rubber-clad wheels. Thus, about two-thirds of downtown Los Angeles is already in thrall to the gods of gasoline.

GOODBY, WALKERS

The pedestrain is regarded as an anachronism.

Found on the streets at night

in a residential area he is liable to arrest as a suspicious character.

In fact, the next step calls for elimination of the pedestrian completely in downtown Los Angeles.

Special free-walks, overcrossings, second-story-level sidewalks, and moving platforms are to be provided so that the streets can be turned over exclusively to motor use. Helicopters and convertiplanes may ultimately be provided to transfer the obsolete foot traveler to areas where he can be appropriately installed in a four-wheeled vehicle.

The drawback to this, as Mr. Taylor notes, is that as more and more space is allotted to the automobile, the goose that lays the golden eggs is strangled. Enormous areas go from the taxrolls and are rendered unsuitable for productive economic purposes. The community's ability to foot the ever-multiplying costs of freeways dwindles— $10 million a mile in some Los Angeles areas; as high as $50 million a mile in heavily builtup eastern cities.

At the same time traffic movement becomes more and more random as concentrated business and special-purpose areas disappear.

FREEWAYS DUBIOUS VIRTUE

But what of the clover-leafs and double-eights of the freeways do they at least move traffic more rapidly in and out of the city?

The answer is surprising. At peak traffic hours it makes virtually no difference where you drive in Los Angeles-freeway, expressway or ordinary street. Your maximum speed will still be in the range of 25 to 30 miles an hour. Time and again freeway movement is impeded by accidents. So chronic is the problem that the engineers propose to remove stalled cars from the highways by helicopter.

The truth is that a horse and buggy could cross Los Angeles almost as fast in 1900 as an automobile can make the trip at 5 p.m. today.

Nowhere are the problems that arise from spongy half urban half rural settlement-the kind so rapidly expanding around New York-better studied than in the Los Angeles area. Here what sociologists call urban sprawl has been carried to extremes that bring infinite complication to every rational plan to transport people.