Posted Nov 6, 2014, 5:00 PM
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Read more: http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon1023ng.html
Savior of the Subways
As New York’s first MTA chairman, William Ronan helped start the city on its remarkable turnaround.
23 October 2014
Quote:
William Ronan, the first chief of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, died last week at 101. During his nine-year tenure at the MTA and its predecessor, Ronan presided over a transit system in decline serving a city in decline. Yet he was at the helm when New York finally gave up on the private automobile as the engine of urban growth, a realization that eventually allowed Gotham to resurrect itself.
Robert Moses’s Triborough Bridge opened in 1936, minting huge toll profits that helped him become New York’s “master builder.” New York spent three decades building highways, bridges, and tunnels. Though intended to relieve traffic congestion, the new infrastructure actually encouraged people to drive more. Between 1940 and 1963, car and truck traffic into Manhattan increased by 59 percent. Subway traffic fell 10 percent and commuter-rail traffic dropped 14 percent. By the mid-sixties, after “30 years of do-nothingism in mass transportation,” as Ronan would later put it, it looked like the car had prevailed.
In 1964, Governor Nelson Rockefeller tapped Ronan, an NYU government professor and top administrator for Mayor Robert Wagner, to come up with a plan for the bankrupt private railroad that brought commuters from Long Island into Manhattan. A year later, the state took it over. Without that rescue, Ronan said, the Long Island Rail Road “wouldn’t have survived in any form.” Gotham’s subways, jointly controlled by the state and city, soon needed a bailout, too.
Ronan grasped two things before most people did. First, he understood that transit was the future, not the past. Ronan doggedly released what the New York Times called “a sweeping $2.9 billion blueprint” to build a Second Avenue subway, an LIRR link to the East Side of Manhattan, and a rapid commuter train to Kennedy Airport. Campaigning for a $2.5 billion bond in the summer of 1967, Ronan reminded New Yorkers that the city hadn’t built any subways since the Great Depression and hadn’t “done anything really significant for commuter railroads since 1913.” Voters approved the state bond, and Ronan got to work planning his new tunnels, noting that he was “little interested in stocking libraries with more studies.”
Ronan understood something else: transit was never going to pay for itself, but that didn’t mean it should die, as it had been gradually doing. “It’s time to stop talking about transit deficits,” he said. “We don’t talk about a police department deficit, but we need the subways as much as the police department.”
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Last edited by Perklol; Nov 27, 2014 at 1:53 AM.
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trains on weekdays and 
trains on weekends. The line reached a temporary terminus at the 21 St-Queensbridge station, but the three-station, 3.2 – mile route was extended 1,500 feet and, in 2001, connected to the busy Queens Boulevard corridor just south of the 36 St Station with the rerouting of 
service at all times to 63rd Street.
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