Story of One Mile:  Traffic Planners Helped Destroy The South Bronx.
Why Do It To 34th Street?

In the 1950s, when transportation planners preferred highways, Robert Moses slashed a series of vital neighborhoods with the Cross Bronx Expressway, helping to destroy them. Victims of top-down planning, these neighborhoods were seen by "experts" as a set of dots and lines on a traffic map rather than as complex social and economic organisms that would suffer irreparable harm.

Moses also tried to build highways across Manhattan's Broome Street and 33rd Street, only to be stopped by neighborhood opposition. If he had built them, there would be no SoHo, Murray Hill or Kips Bay as we know them today.

Now DOT wants to slash an Above Ground Subway across 34th Street. From the East Side's Murray Hill and Kips Bay to the West Side's Clinton area, the city's neighborhoods are once again perceived as dots and lines on a traffic map. Yet they are anything but. They are places where thousands of people live; young people go to school, entrepreneurs run small businesses, and residents invest time and money in their housing and neighborhoods – all jeopardized by the Transitway, a modern-day version of top-down traffic planning.