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Westway Project

United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Operations. Intergovernmental Relations and Human Resources Subcommittee

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 1578


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This book has its origins in an M.I.T. research project that was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Our immediate objective was to prepare a set of case studies that examined bargaining and negotiation as they occurred between government, environmental advocates, and regulatees throughout the traditional regulatory process. The project was part of a larger effort by the EPA to make environmental regulation more efficient and less litigious. The principal investigator for the research effort was Lawrence Sus skind of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Eight case studies were prepared under the joint supervision of Susskind and the authors of this book. Studying the negotiating behavior of parties as we worked our way through an environmental dispute proved enlightening. We observed missed oppor tunities for settlement, negotiating tactics that backfired, and strategies that ap peared to be grounded more in intuition than in thoughtful analysis. At the same time, however, we were struck by how often the parties ultimately managed to muddle through. People negotiated not out of some idealistic commitment to consensus but because they thought it better served their own interests. When some negotiations reached an impasse, people improvised mediation. These disputants succeeded in spite of legal and institutional barriers, even though few of them had a sophisticated understanding of negotiation.
From 1971 to 1985, battles raged over Westway, a multibillion-dollar highway, development, and park project slated for placement in New York City. It would have projected far into the Hudson River, including massive new landfill extending several miles along Manhattan’s Lower West Side. The most expensive highway project ever proposed, Westway also provoked one of the highest stakes legal battles of its day. In Fighting Westway, William W. Buzbee reveals how environmentalists, citizens, their lawyers, and a growing opposition coalition, despite enormous resource disparities, were able to defeat this project supported by presidents, senators, governors, and mayors, much of the business community, and most unions. Although Westway’s defeat has been derided as lacking justification, Westway’s critics raised substantial and ultimately decisive objections. They questioned claimed project benefits and advocated trading federal Westway dollars for mass transit improvements. They also exposed illegally disregarded environmental risks, especially to increasingly scarce East Coast young striped bass often found in extraordinarily high numbers right where Westway was to be built. Drawing on archival records and interviews, Buzbee goes beyond the veneer of government actions and court rulings to illuminate the stakes, political pressures, and strategic moves and countermoves that shaped the Westway war, a fight involving all levels and branches of government, scientific conflict, strategic citizen action, and hearings, trials, and appeals in federal court. This Westway history illuminates how high-stakes regulatory battles are fought, the strategies and power of America’s environmental laws, ways urban priorities are contested, the clout of savvy citizen activists and effective lawyers, and how separation of powers and federalism frameworks structure legal and political conflict. Whether readers seek an exciting tale of environmental, political, and legal conflict, to learn what really happened during these battles that transformed New York City, or to understand how modern legal frameworks shape high stakes regulatory wars, Fighting Westway will provide a good read.
A gripping account of how the automobile has failed NYC and how mass transit and a revitalized streetscape are vital to its post-pandemic recovery In 1969, as all students of New York City history think they have learned, master builder Robert Moses lost his long battle to urbanist Jane Jacobs over his planned Lower Manhattan Expressway. The ten-lane elevated expressway would have sliced across SoHo and Little Italy, demolishing historic buildings, and displacing thousands of families and businesses. Jacobs and her neighbors defeated Moses, and as a result, New York became the only major American city with no interstate highway running through its core. Like many global cities, though, New York had spent fifty years during the first half of the twentieth century trying and failing to tame its heavily populated landscape to fit the private automobile. New York has now spent more than fifty years trying to undo those mistakes, wresting back city space for people, not cars. Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car chronicles the earlier, less-known battles that preceded the cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway: Jacobs became an example for generations of urban planners, but whose example did Jacobs emulate in an earlier victory that saved Washington Square Park? Moses may serve handily as New York’s uber-villain now, but who, before him, was responsible for destroying a critical part of New York’s transit system? A well respected urban writer who has focused on New York’s transportation system for more than a decade, author Nicole Gelinas resumes the story where Robert Caro’s landmark The Power Broker ended. Movement explores how, in the half-century leading up to the COVID- 19 pandemic, New York’s re-embracement of its mass-transit system and a livable streetscape helped save the city. Gelinas tackles the 1970s environmental movement, the 1980s rebuilding of the subways, and more contemporary battles, from Mayor Bloomberg's push for more pedestrian plazas and bike lanes in the early 2000s, to transportation advocates' protests to prevent traffic deaths in the Mayor de Blasio era of the 2010s, to how New York’s stewardship of its streets and subways have played a critical role during the 2020 pandemic and subsequent recovery. Introducing a cast of transportation heroes to rival Jane Jacobs (Shirley Hayes, Hazel Henderson, Richard Ravitch, Nilka Martell) and puncturing the myth of Moses as New York’s anti-hero, Movement explores how New York City has helped redefine what it means to be a global city: not a place that is easy to drive through, but a place where people can take transit, walk, and bike to work, to school, or just for fun.