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Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

robertcaro.com

21–30 of 48 posts

Re: Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

#21
post #17

I just posted about The Power Broker and Silicon Valley to my blog: Elon Musk and the Environment https://joshuaspodek.com/elon-musk-and-the-environment . I'll repost it here in case people find it meaningful or relevant. Many New Yorkers know Robert Moses from Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York , which won every award it could. At over 1,000 oversized pages, I thought I’d brow…

However, any path towards a cleaner, more environmentally sound future requires the mass adoption of electric. Fossil Fuels are named as such for a reason. Getting caught up on growth is an inappropriate lens in this context.

Re: Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

#22

I'm a little less than halfway through The Power Broker. It's a riveting read, especially as a New Yorker (quite possibly living in housing built by him!). I suppose I haven't quite gotten to the part where Moses goes full corrupt. From what I've read so far, he seemed utterly vicious, sneaky and deceptive, but also ridiculously competent. Anybody who's had to sit in committees and meetings spinning their wheels, hea…

The article you quote mostly concludes that it was probably a correct assertion. While the Moses parkways were certainly based on older ones they were found to also have substantially lower bridge clearances than the ones they imitated.

To be honest, what I find more confusing is that nearly a century later we still cling to the parkways being for no commercial traffic. It wouldn’t be all that radical to, whenever a bridge is up for replacement, replace it with a bridge that does meet Interstate clearance standards, and it would provide a less chokepointy system for trucks and take them off local roads, where they have a worse impact. The days of the bucolic parkway have long passed and they are all heavy commuter routes now.

Re: Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

#23
post #17

I just posted about The Power Broker and Silicon Valley to my blog: Elon Musk and the Environment https://joshuaspodek.com/elon-musk-and-the-environment . I'll repost it here in case people find it meaningful or relevant. Many New Yorkers know Robert Moses from Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York , which won every award it could. At over 1,000 oversized pages, I thought I’d brow…

I've never found the narrative that more roads were supposed to cause more congestion particularly convincing. If you fulfill demand, and then more demand springs up, then you fulfill that demand too. It's like with housing: the solution is to build more, not less.

Only in infrastructure construction do you see complaints that people take advantage of the provided service. In any other business where creating more product prompted superlinear demand, this would be seen as a marvelous opportunity.

Re: Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

#24
post #17

I just posted about The Power Broker and Silicon Valley to my blog: Elon Musk and the Environment https://joshuaspodek.com/elon-musk-and-the-environment . I'll repost it here in case people find it meaningful or relevant. Many New Yorkers know Robert Moses from Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York , which won every award it could. At over 1,000 oversized pages, I thought I’d brow…

I've never found the narrative that more roads were supposed to cause more congestion particularly convincing. If you fulfill demand, and then more demand springs up, then you fulfill that demand too. It's like with housing: the solution is to build more, not less. Only in infrastructure construction do you see complaints that people take advantage of the provided service. In any other business where creating more pr…

There can exist a situation where the parameters limit possibilities.

For example, you can’t fit the world’s population in California and still have the same quality of life, even if you build 3 billion houses.

Same thing with roads, especially with regards to pedestrians and bicyclists. You simply can’t have big roads and big vehicles traveling at high speed in the same space as walking and bicycling people. Not to mention the exponential effects of spreading things out makes everything too far away, compounding the number of vehicles and need for lanes and so on and so forth.

Any elderly (or small child) person can’t cross a typical suburban 6 to 8 lane intersection. It takes a healthy adult 20+ seconds to cross some of these intersections.

The real solution is to create more desirable cities, walkable cities, and more economically productive cities so that all the demand isn’t in a few select locations. However, modern zoning and regulations don’t allow for the type of tight construction that allowed dense urban areas to come into existence in the first place.

Not to mention the politics of dealing with people who simultaneously want a single family house with a detached garage and front and back yard, but also want a walkable neighborhood where the kids can roam around outside with little risk of being hit by a pickup truck. These are conflicting demands and will never be satisfied.

Re: Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

#25
post #17

I just posted about The Power Broker and Silicon Valley to my blog: Elon Musk and the Environment https://joshuaspodek.com/elon-musk-and-the-environment . I'll repost it here in case people find it meaningful or relevant. Many New Yorkers know Robert Moses from Robert Caro’s book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York , which won every award it could. At over 1,000 oversized pages, I thought I’d brow…

I've never found the narrative that more roads were supposed to cause more congestion particularly convincing. If you fulfill demand, and then more demand springs up, then you fulfill that demand too. It's like with housing: the solution is to build more, not less. Only in infrastructure construction do you see complaints that people take advantage of the provided service. In any other business where creating more pr…

The fewer people that drive, the less you have to expend on massive road projects and the better the experience for anyone who actually needs to drive. The whole bicycle infrastructure of a city like Amsterdam probably costs less than any single major highway, and the number of cars it eliminates from the road is massive. In my experience though, once a place has become car dependent, the attitude changes into one where alternative city design is almost impossible to contemplate. The assumption just becomes that adding a lane to a highway is the best course of action even though it doesn't really increase the flow that much at all.

Re: Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

#26

For those who have read The Power Broker... how do you stand to hold it? I bought the paper book after reading another one of these threads on HN, but it's so large that it makes my hands sore to hold it (or my neck if I lay it on my lap to read). Since there's no ebook version, I wonder how you all manage to get through a tome like this.

I used an X-Acto knife to slice it into 3 volumes and rebound them.

Re: Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

#28

For those who have read The Power Broker... how do you stand to hold it? I bought the paper book after reading another one of these threads on HN, but it's so large that it makes my hands sore to hold it (or my neck if I lay it on my lap to read). Since there's no ebook version, I wonder how you all manage to get through a tome like this.

I didn't and went with the audiobook version.

Re: Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

#29

Reading Robert Caro was one of the great pleasures of my life, I can't recommend him highly enough. The only probem is that once you read him, you're spoiled. Nobody else really compares to his force of writing and depth of research.

A question I have is do you suggest his books to a non US audience ?

Re: Robert Caro and Kurt Vonnegut interview each other (1999)

#30
post #29

Reading Robert Caro was one of the great pleasures of my life, I can't recommend him highly enough. The only probem is that once you read him, you're spoiled. Nobody else really compares to his force of writing and depth of research.

A question I have is do you suggest his books to a non US audience ?

...if so, which one would you start with?
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