An excerpt from the new book “Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car”
Mayor John Lindsay took office on Jan. 1, 1966, full of ideas about how to fix New York’s crime, poverty and transportation problems. But before the young, blond Republican could tackle policies, he faced indignity: he had to cancel all but one of his inaugural parties because of traffic. Subway and bus workers had called a strike — the first citywide walkout — and New York was choked with cars. “With thousands expected at each reception, it was thought the travel to these events would aggravate what would become serious traffic snarls.”
Instead of galas, Lindsay got an introduction to one brutal fact of New York life: if the trains don’t move, nobody moves. New York’s subways and buses don’t just move transit riders; they move everyone else by keeping millions of people out of cars. On an average day, 752,000 people took a car from elsewhere in the city or region to work, play, or run an errand in Manhattan’s dense business districts (an additional 94,000 people arrived in trucks). Despite two decades of declining ridership, however, nearly 2.3 million people took the train or bus. City officials’ great fear was that, during the strike, people who normally took the trains would attempt to drive into Manhattan; the streets could not absorb this traffic. The immediate shock of the transit strike was devastating. Without transit, the city’s economy largely shut down for nearly two weeks, costing New York $800 million in business (about $6.5 billion today).
The longer-lasting consequence was salutary. Just as New York was canceling the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the strike demonstrated that New York, with its concentration of people in tall buildings, could never depend on roads to move most people around. After decades of neglecting subways and buses, the strike’s legacy was to make New York understand that unless its future was transit, that future would be bleak.
Political theater
As fall turned to winter in 1965, nobody believed there would be a strike. For a decade, the city-run transit authority’s labor contract with the Transport Workers Union (TWU) expired every other year on Dec. 31. Just as regularly, Mike Quill, TWU Local 100 leader, would threaten to take 33,000 men off the job. Each time, “New York City residents were treated to...nerve-tingling news reports of a threatened transit strike at dawn on New Year’s Day....The TWU postured, threatened to strike, and made outrageous-sounding public demands.” Then, somehow, sequestered in a Midtown hotel, both sides would come to an agreement just as time ran out. One newspaper dismissed this ceremony as a boondoggle via which management and labor got fancy meals and hotel rooms for a “New Year’s Eve transit gala” on the farepayer’s dime. “All that is needed is paper hats.”
For each previous deal, Robert Wagner Jr. had been the city’s mayor. Wagner had favored organized labor since he took office in 1954. During his first mayoral campaign, he had pledged to recognize city employees’ right to join unions and bargain for wages and benefits: “I and the cause I represent are right if organized labor stands behind us.” The TWU’s bargaining rights dated back to the early 1930s, when New York’s subway and bus systems were largely privately owned and operated, and the union began organizing workers before the city took over the distressed firms.
Wagner’s pro-union bent was astute politics. The city’s voter base was growing disillusioned with depending on favoritism from Tammany Hall for job placement and advancement, and sought to bargain for consistent standards for job titles and pay as well as for pensions and other benefits. From a politician’s perspective, unions created a power base to rival Tammany.
Despite Wagner’s pro-union stance, negotiations with the TWU were fraught. The union was the creation of Mike Quill. The seventh child (of eight) of an Irish potato farmer, Quill hadn’t made it to the top of the nation’s labor union movement by respecting authority. At 21, he had emigrated to New York, where he found work building the city’s third subway and, later, making change for passengers in a Queens subway station. During the Depression, one of the companies that then ran the subways, the Interborough Rapid Transit company, was struggling with deficits and wanted workers to take a pay cut. Quill began organizing fellow workers in a fiercely anti-union national environment; in 1937, on the day he won recognition for New York members, Ford Motor Company guards were beating union leaders in Detroit. In the late 1930s, Quill won a 48-hour work week plus vacation, a precedent-setting victory; transit workers had worked seven 12-hour days. Quill prevailed not only against the government but against factions of his own union, ranging from Communist hardliners to conservatives.
Quill prevailed because of his personality. New York has always been an attention economy, and florid language held attention. “He began using his acid Irish tongue as a weapon in the 1930s, when his infant…union had nothing else.” His method was to make outrageous demands and settle for a fraction at the last minute. Whenever he threatened to strike, “the men who faced him in negotiating sessions…never knew when he meant it,” so the city transit authority erred on the side of a raise. In the three decades since TWU’s first Depression-era contract, he had won a 40-hour work week and benefits.
Two years before the 1965 contract talks, this method had worked. In 1963, Quill had demanded a 32-hour, four-day week, better benefits, and a 15% pay hike over two years. A judge, following state law that prohibited strikes by government workers, issued a prohibition against a walkout. Quill called him a “lunatic” and a “senile old fuddy‐duddy.” He warned New Yorkers to find another way to get around. But behind the rhetoric, he extended a nonnegotiable 5 a.m. deadline New Year’s Day to 7 a.m. By mid-day on the first day of 1964, Quill had agreed to an 11-cent raise for that year, or 4%, and a 24-cent raise and better benefits for 1965. According to The New York Times, “Quill’s usual bad behavior was, as usual, handsomely rewarded.”
In 1965, this pas de deux needed a new partner. Wagner was leaving office, to be succeeded by Lindsay as the clock chimed 1966. As the 44-year-old mayor-elect prepared to take over, he had no intention of repeating Wagner’s grubby dance. A Manhattan Republican, Lindsay had won on a mandate for change. One of his advertisements summed it up: “He is fresh and everyone else is tired.”
The city wanted a fresh approach to managing wrenching adjustments. New York was on its way to a then-record population (7.9 million in 1969) and a then-record number of jobs (at nearly 3.8 million). Yet growth masked troubles. The city was shedding manufacturing jobs, which peaked in 1947. In lieu of jobs for people with little education, it was gaining financial jobs as well as other jobs requiring a college education; such jobs wouldn’t crest until 1969, when white-collar jobs, too, began to decline.
Replacing blue-collar jobs with jobs requiring a college degree didn’t help most of the black and Hispanic migrants who were coming to New York. In 1950, fewer than 10% of city residents were non-white; by 1970, this percentage would more than double. In response to a growing population as well as concern about slum conditions, New York — after World War II and under Robert Moses’s direction — had destroyed apartment buildings and brownstone blocks in favor of high rises, both middle-class resident-owned complexes and low-income public-housing developments. One result was dislocation and crowding of poor newcomers into remaining tenements, as middle-class residents left for the new suburbs. The cumulative effect was trauma. Alienation on the part of young male newcomers pushed up crime; the murder rate had risen by 16% in the four years before Lindsay’s election, topping 600 annually. Spending on social services left the city with budget deficits, which Wagner had papered over with borrowing.
Voters were looking for an enlightened approach, one that would move New York away from the Democratic backroom, as exemplified by the city’s kowtowing to the TWU. In the cycle of machine politicians succeeding reform politicians, Lindsay was a reformer. As such, even though Wagner hadn’t been on the ballot, Lindsay had run against the incumbent, promising to stop the “decline and fall of New York” by sweeping out “tired management.” Lindsay would govern idealistically and openly, not by bowing down to shadowy forces he castigated as “power brokers.” New York would once again be “the Empire City,” he pledged.
Ironically, Lindsay would be the first leader to embrace transit in more than half a century, since the car had gradually captured elected officials’ attention as the engine of growth. He proposed to solve New York’s transportation crisis by reinvesting in subways and buses. The “survival of this City,” as he put it in one of nine policy “white papers” published by his campaign, would depend on addressing the subway system’s “sorry plight” of “ill-equipped and ill-maintained” and “sardine-packed” trains. He promised an “attractive, comfortable, convenient and speedy mass transit system,” with the goal to “attract persons who presently use private automobiles.”
None of his lofty planning considered labor, though. Quill’s threats were but a distraction to Lindsay. Days after winning the election, Mayor-elect Lindsay “ruled out” a strike, saying he would not “permit” one. In remarks before a good-government group, he called the collective-bargaining process an “archaic machine.” Instead of the mayor and the union sparring, Lindsay suggested that “professors with tenure and no ax to grind would be a better form.” History backed the mayor’s complacency: “In his 30 years as head of the Transport Workers Union, Mr. Quill has never called a subway strike,” the Times reminded readers. As usual, “the TWU boss will settle.” Only the Journal-American was skeptical: “Lindsay cannot be serious in declining to participate in negotiations....What he doesn’t do now may well compound what he’ll have to do later,” editorialists warned.
Lindsay, advocating bloodless labor relations, forgot feelings. Wagner, attacked for months as a corrupt dinosaur during the campaign, had no incentive to assure a smooth transition and ink one final deal with Quill. More importantly, Lindsay had misread Quill. For his bluster, Quill was a serious man who ran a serious union that had improved hundreds of thousands of families’ lives. He wanted to be taken seriously. Moreover, at 60, he was suffering heart problems and wanted to ensure that his union survived the modernization of New York’s government.
On election night, Quill had telegrammed Lindsay with congratulations. He further noted that “our Union has a longstanding commitment with the membership of ‘no contract, no work’...with no extensions whatsoever.” In other words, Quill was warning Lindsay that the union would strike immediately when the contract expired come New Year’s, unless a new contract were in place. Nearly a month later, the union head, still ignored, asked the mayor-elect to meet “at whatever time and place you designate.” Quill outlined 67 demands, again including a 32-hour work week, a 30% wage hike, and an extra week’s vacation, for a total of six weeks. The package would cost $680 million over two years, doubling the transit authority’s budget.
Lindsay refused to play his part in this performance: “I’m not mayor until Jan. 1,” he said. Later, he added that he wasn’t sure both sides were negotiating in “good faith,” even as Quill’s language grew more incendiary and as Quill had taken to mispronouncing “Lindsay” as “Lindsley,” his way of returning the disrespect that Lindsay was showing. By December, Quill had changed his tone, calling Lindsay a “coward” and an “ungracious sourpuss.” He warned, “Let him run the trains and buses.” Lindsay waited until after Christmas, days before his inauguration, to meet Quill.
The mayor-elect remained aloof. “I am not an expert on labor matters,” he said. “There are involved human problems.” On New Year’s Eve, the day the contract expired, Quill, flouting another court injunction, issued his ultimatum, directed to the man who “sits and stares and looks over my head.” If Lindsay didn’t negotiate personally, “the whole thing would be decided on the streets.” As the sun rose on New Year’s Day 1966, Quill directed members to walk off, refusing to relent under the threat of incarceration for breaking the anti-strike law. “The judge can drop dead in his black robes,” he intoned. Trains and buses stopped, and Quill went to jail.
Stay home — and prove yourself irrelevant
The mayor who had tried not to sully his reputation with labor relations had to devote his inaugural speech not to hopes and aspirations for New York, but to condemning an “unlawful strike against the public interests.” Lindsay spent his first night as mayor awake at City Hall. Looking “haggard and shaken” the next morning, he gamely cracked a joke — “the hours are a little long,” he said of his new job — as he called New York a “struck city.” The only consolation: Jan. 1 was a holiday and a Saturday, meaning not many people would be getting around town.
The administration had two days before the work week to devise a plan for the biggest crisis since World War II. Though subway and bus usage had peaked just after the war, in 1948, nearly three-quarters of Manhattan’s 3.3 million daily visitors — people coming to work, to shop, or to visit doctors or friends — still arrived via public transportation. The centerpiece of the plan, then, would be to convince people to sit tight. “Only 25% of those who normally come to Manhattan will be able to do so,” the mayor warned, telling “not really essential” workers to stay home. “It is vital that the flow of people...be reduced to a minimum,” he said. “If you’re on your way to Manhattan by car, turn around and go home.” He exhorted drivers who wouldn’t stay home to “fill up the cars” with passengers.
On Monday, it appeared the plan would work. People listened to the instruction to stay home, with Manhattan receiving half of a normal day’s cars. With the mayor having ordered schools closed, and with Christmas just passed, people were in a “holiday mood,” with white-collar workers not minding an extra day off. The New Yorkers who didn’t stay home were creative in demonstrating to their employers—or to themselves—that they were essential workers, people who couldn’t miss even one day at the office, the store, or the factory. The mayor demonstrated grit, walking 70 blocks for the cameras before switching to his limo and picking up commuters along the way to set an example for carpooling. A “partly blind news dealer trudged about four miles” to the Brooklyn Bridge, where he hitched a ride to Manhattan. A maintenance man from Astoria roller-skated across the Queensboro Bridge, “wheezing,” but saying he “wanted to see if I could do it.” One executive took his 11-year-old daughter’s bike to Wall Street.
Yet by mid-week, the good mood had worn off. Despite Lindsay’s entreaties to employers to pay absent employees, workers could not be productive at home. One executive said paying people to stay home would “subsidize the strike.” Lindsay’s separation of workers between “essential” and “nonessential” failed. In a competitive city, lost time at work, even if one weren’t paid by the hour, meant lost prestige. To stay home was to declare oneself unnecessary.
As the week wore on, roads into Manhattan were jammed with traffic, with 30% more cars and trucks “squeezed into Manhattan and then squeezed out again” on the second workday. “Bumper-to-bumper traffic twice as heavy as yesterday choked every major artery,” with roads clogged by 4:45 a.m. More than 60,000 vehicles crossed the city’s East River and Harlem River bridges from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx into Manhattan, compared to a normal 49,000, between 6 and 10 a.m. Cars carried an average of two and a half passengers each, compared to the normal one and a half, but it wasn’t enough. Lindsay, in a helicopter to survey traffic, warned, “There’re too many cars...with just a driver.” He implored people to pick up passengers, but resisted mandatory restrictions in favor of “voluntary” cooperation. His traffic commissioner, Henry Barnes, said, “Things will get better [as] people will learn of the trouble spots.” They didn’t; 64-year-old Sylvester Dalton of Brooklyn died of a heart attack in the clogged Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.
New Yorkers who heeded the mayor’s call to leave the car at home — or who didn’t have a car, which was most of the city — became “tired, sore-footed, and ill-tempered.” One cyclist complained that there were so many walkers on the Brooklyn Bridge that he had to walk his bike. Commuter rail lines from the suburbs were running, but lines to enter Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central Terminal were hours long. Patience waned: “I’m not really charmed by the fact that Lindsay walks downtown every day,” said a commuter having an after-work drink in a Madison Avenue bar.
Business grew fed up. Lindsay and Barnes devised a complicated system for “staggered” hours. They split Manhattan into four sectors, whose respective workers were supposed to commute at different times. White-collar firms such as Chase Bank, with 18,000 employees, Standard Oil, with 3,000 employees, and Seagram, with 800 workers, said they would comply. But most employers showed a “staggering indifference” to the staggering plan. Dolores Opiolo, in charge of eight hundred employees at Cosmopolitan Mutual Insurance Co. at Columbus Circle at the northwestern tip of Midtown Manhattan, showed contempt. “Are you kidding?” she asked a reporter. “When they get here, they get here.” An Equitable insurance spokesman said, “We are not complying with this pattern.” A New York Stock Exchange official professed not to know his quadrant. The mayor had lost control before he had gained it — and New York experienced the longest rush hour in its history, six and a half hours.
Frayed industries and businesses
The nearly two-week-long strike demonstrated that to shut down New York’s transit system was to shut down its economy. Business groups told Gov. Nelson Rockefeller that the strike was “the most seriously damaging blow” since the Depression. With half of Manhattan workers out, 50 million hours of labor, or $125 million in wages, were lost the first week. Businesses were losing as much as $100 million per day in productivity. Rockefeller requested federal aid, telling President Lyndon Johnson that the strike was “calamitous.” Johnson responded with small-business loans — the first time the White House had approved such aid outside of a natural disaster.
No industry escaped. Department stores were nearly empty, with Macy’s seeing one-third of its average 150,000 daily shoppers. The Metropolitan Museum saw only 1,250 daily visitors, compared to the normal 6,000 to 7,000. Though the arts industry had supported Lindsay’s election, the cultural world’s patience frayed. Theater producer David Merrick said the mayor had gone from “fatuity to banality” and added that his exhorting New Yorkers to stay home was harming theaters. Two Broadway shows closed. Newspapers suffered a slump, with revenue down by half, as retailers, theaters and other buyers saw no reason to advertise if customers couldn’t travel.
The economic impact was uneven — and hurt blue-collar industries that were already struggling. White-collar employers such as financial and law firms, with higher profit margins and better-paid employees, could withstand duress. They blocked off hotel rooms for top-paid workers, ensuring continuity. But retailers and manufacturers could not afford to pay absent workers.
The garment industry was the worst hit. “How can you pay a piece worker who’s not here?” asked one clothing maker. Only 35% of apparel workers showed up, compared with 70% of bankers. Apparel makers — concentrated in factories, warehouses, and showrooms west of Midtown — were critical to New York’s economy. At the industry’s peak employment, in 1948, the rag trade had employed 354,000 New Yorkers, or nearly 10% of the labor force, and one-third of the manufacturing base. But clothes makers already faced competition from lower-cost regions of the country; the local industry had shed tens of thousands of jobs over nearly two decades and had fallen to 175,000 workers, 100,000 of them in Manhattan.
Now they faced deadlines to fulfill spring orders. The mayor appeared oblivious. The first Sunday of the strike, touring the city’s call-in center, Lindsay had advised a telephoning garment worker, buyer’s assistant Jack Friedman, to stay home. “If the strike goes another week, we would be severely injured,” said the chief executive of the Arkin Organization, a dress company, at the end of the first week.
Even in the garment industry, workers didn’t share the burden equally. Some 75-80% of “elite” cutters and designers made it to work, with haute-couture houses hiring cars to transport employees. But lower-paid machine workers, black and Puerto Rican, were not. These workers, disproportionately women, lived in what the Times called the “distant slums” of Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan. Without cars and living too far to walk or cycle, they could no longer commute. As week two of the strike began, Lindsay made what the Times termed a “hurried tour,” led by a “red fire chief’s car,” of three neighborhoods: Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, the South Bronx and Harlem. “I haven’t been able to work,” one woman told him.
Direct impacts cascaded into indirect ones. Without wages, “slum” dwellers couldn’t spend money in local shops. Patrons cut back on purchasing goods in Puerto Rican-owned bodegas, with supermarket sales off by half or more. A linen store owner on Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn told the mayor that business was “very bad.” Likewise, in Harlem, shoe store owner Oscar Hauben told the mayor, “I can’t stand it.” The mayor’s response was, “I’m sorry.” On his visit — faced with hecklers who told him, “you have the power” — “the mayor got into a car and drove off.”
By the 12th day, the mayor had had enough. The strike could not persist a third week. Lindsay did what he had vowed not to do: get involved. “The mayor...took a more active part in negotiations,” working with TWU officials in an “all-night round.” The City and the union settled a deal that included two annual 4% raises and a final 7% raise as well as a $500 pension bonus. The deal would grant workers $60 million in new pay and benefits over two years, falling short of what Quill had asked for but in line with previous agreements. The settlement was not different from what a more astute mayor could have achieved on New Year’s Eve. On Jan. 13, “New York began to pull itself back to normalcy.” A “handful of men,” Lindsay said, had “consigned a city of eight million people to paralysis.”
A glimpse of 1970s decay…
One party emerged victorious from the strike: the Transport Workers Union. The union victory, in turn, strengthened public-sector labor unionism in general.
“Messages of solidarity” came to Quill via telegram from rail unions as far away as Milan, Paris and London. (The mail wasn’t unanimous: “Gentlemen, please, my feet hurt,” one commuter beseeched him.) The outcome was not just a wage and benefit gain — the “highest pay increase in [the] U.S.,” it told its members — but a broader economic, cultural and social triumph. “Your greatest victory,” the union termed it. The TWU had demonstrated that unionized government laborers would not surrender to bloodless economic and political technocrats. For the nearly six decades that have followed, organized public-sector labor, and not elected officials counseled by management and productivity consultants, has controlled how, and at what fiscal cost, New York City’s government agencies deliver public services, a dynamic only briefly suspended during the 1970s fiscal crisis. Quill had won Lindsay’s attention the hard way — and his words resonated across the generations. As John Samuelsen, president of the TWU Local 100 from 2009 to 2017, notes, Quill’s rejoinder to the judge to drop dead in his robes “has been a driving force for waves of TWU leaders” and “still unites us all,” setting the transit union “apart as fighters rather than cookie-cutter cooperators.”
Nobody else won, but Quill had suffered most. Quill “was on the verge of collapse” when he uttered his famous “drop dead” words; the phrase became his “final act of defiance,” says Samuelsen. Hours after the judge jailed him, he suffered a heart attack and would spend most of his ten days in custody inside Bellevue Hospital. By the end of January, he was dead. Four years later, a judge ruled that his widow was eligible for workman’s compensation, as the strain of the strike had made his heart disease fatal.
The strike harmed public and political support for unions. Just a decade before President Jimmy Carter deregulated the airlines, the trucking industry, and the federal railroads against well-founded objections by labor unions that unfettered competition would lower wages, and a decade and a half before President Ronald Reagan broke the national air traffic controllers’ strike, the walkout hardened liberal sentiment against working-class assertion. Castigating “silent men” of other unions whose leaders failed to criticize the TWU during the walkout, the then-liberal New York Post editorialized, “If there are labor leaders who fought vainly against Lindsay’s election now seeking to exert a measure of revenge...let them recognize that their own members are the daily victims of this unnecessary, unwarranted strike.” New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy said the strike had been “very, very harmful to...organized labor.” Public-sector labor would largely retain its power, as government service jobs were less vulnerable to automation and offshoring than were manufacturing jobs, but private-sector union power steadily eroded.
The strike also damaged Lindsay. “[It] confirmed Lindsay’s belief that there was a group of people who controlled the city, in the case of the subway workers, the leadership of the union,” said Jay Kriegel, at the time Lindsay’s 25-year-old chief of staff. Just before the settlement, Lindsay lashed out against unnamed “power brokers,” who, he said, had attempted to “intimidate” New York. (Kriegel claimed that Lindsay, a Protestant, included the Catholic Church, whom many Irish American subway workers looked to for guidance, in this “power broker” category.) “This city will not capitulate before the lawless demands of a single power group,” Lindsay had vowed. Yet the strike had made it obvious that New York depended on public sector workers — making this faction of power brokers more powerful. For the rest of his eight years in office, Lindsay would be plagued by labor unrest. The strike presaged “a whole series of labor disruptions,” including the 1968 teachers’ strike and the 1969 sanitation strike, said Kriegel.
The biggest damage was to the city’s psyche. Lindsay argued that the strike had showcased New York’s strengths, praising “good humor and toughness,” and saying that by overcoming the emergency, “we shall have gained some future hope...[during this] test of a proud city.” Yet the city wasn’t proud; it was depressed. The Fifth Avenue Association business group declared that they would “never recover.” Board of Trade chief Neil Anderson concluded that much business was “gone for good.” The New York World-Telegram asked, “How many New York City businessmen are thinking of moving out so that what happened Jan. 1-13 can never happen again?”
Indeed, the strike was “the beginning of the decay of the city,” said Kriegel. Job losses accelerated through the 1970s; the city eventually lost more than half of its nearly 1.1 manufacturing jobs, including most apparel jobs. The number of white-collar jobs, too, stopped growing and contracted during the 1970s as corporations left the chaotic city. Crime accelerated: the murder rate doubled, from 654 in 1966 to 1,466 by 1971.
The city seemed ungovernable, and Lindsay’s transformation from photogenic tonic into haggard man over two weeks did not change this perception. On the strike’s final day, the Times’s A.M. Rosenthal encapsulated the mood. “If they were angry, New Yorkers are too tired to show it,” he wrote. “All the taxes and all the city aggravations turned out to be just not enough to guarantee the woman from Harlem her right [to get to work.]...The fatigue in the city has been cumulative....It was too much of a struggle....New York had been stripped of its ‘worthwhile things.’ ” The city was “just plain tired,” he concluded — two months after Lindsay had won office on the slogan, “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired.”
. . . and a glimpse of recovery
During the strike, the New York State legislature held a prescheduled transportation hearing. Lindsay was to have been the first witness. Owing to the emergency, the mayor was absent. Robert Moses went first. State Sen. Paul Bookson, who represented Lower Manhattan, observed, “We have a transit strike...this week. Obviously, if this kept going, it would reach a point where your [bridge and tunnel authority], the facility to move these automobiles, would break down. Without mass transit, these other authorities are not of real value....Unless we have an effective transit system, your bridges, your highways, don’t function properly.” “I don’t agree,” Moses responded. “I don’t follow your line of reasoning.” Bookson persisted: “Supposing there were no mass transit system...how well would your highways, bridges or tunnels function?” Moses’s reply: “I can’t answer that.”
The rest of New York, though, had discovered that without mass transit, there was no effective urban transportation. Even though the strike had weakened Lindsay, it demonstrated that on transportation theory, if not execution, the mayor, in campaigning favoring transit over roads, was right. Lindsay had understood what most people needed the subway strike to grasp: without transit, the city didn’t work.
Officials who preferred highway building argued the opposite. Lindsay’s traffic commissioner, Barnes, a Wagner holdover, said the strike was “poetic justice” and had proven wrong “ivory-tower planners who believe the way to solve New York’s traffic problem is to make it so difficult that no one will want to drive into the city...you have got to have autos as an alternate means.” Moses, too, insisted that his Triborough authority’s motor vehicle crossings had “functioned smoothly throughout the subway strike.”
Yet everyone else could see: the lesson of the “ordeal” was that “the subways must continue to carry at least two-thirds of the 3 million daily travelers into and out of the central business district,” The Times noted. In February, Lindsay told the press that “the transportation problems of the city...are of the utmost immediate concern....This fact was dramatically demonstrated when our city was crippled.” From bank CEOs to garment workers, the mayor to the governor, New Yorkers now understood, in a way they hadn’t for more than half a century, that the car could never replace the subway as the city’s dominant form of transportation. The question now became: how to rebuild the subways after decades of neglecting them in favor of the car?