The Power Broker: 10 Takeaways from an Aspiring City-Builder

After a year-and-a-half of reading, I have finally finished perhaps the most fascinating and involving book I have ever read, one that won the Pulitzer Prize 49 years ago and continues to be read and cherished by many influential people today. Robert Caro’s The Power Broker tells the life of Robert Moses in a depth and understanding that is rare in books. It pulls the curtain back on a man who spent so much of his life in the public eye, celebrated for his accomplishments, while keeping so much of his real means and methods deeply private. It’s a brilliant story on how power is amassed, used, abused, and ultimately lost.

Robert Moses held positions of public service for over four decades and yet, as Caro describes, for most of that career he had little accountability to the public at all. For while politicians are elected and thus come and go, Robert Moses built around him an empire of bills and laws and power that ensured that no elected official, no matter the level of public protest, would ever be able to remove him from office.

The book presents the dichotomy of Getting Things Done: Moses’ accomplishments are exceptional, and yet so was his ability and willingness to bulldoze neighbourhoods to achieve those accomplishments. He built beautiful parks and parkways for the middle and upper classes while simultaneously building bridges low enough that public transit buses could not go under them, and leaving poor, racialized neighbourhoods without parks at all. The value of the infrastructure he built is measured in the billions (possibly trillions in today’s dollars), while the number of the persons displaced for his projects is measured in the millions.

As an aspiring and city planner and engineer with my own big ideas and a desire to implement them, the book felt less like a biography and more about a self-help book full of valuable lessons and cautions. I could closely relate to Moses’ visionary side, particularly in his younger years where he would walk all over the city and imagine incredible improvements, vigorously taking notes and sketching up plans. And yet, Caro describes that Moses’ character flaws were arrogance and a thirst for power, which ultimately led to the abandonment of his ideals and caused many flaws in his works. As I continue to process this book and figure out what to do next with it, I’ve summarized 10 key themes from the book relevant to myself but also anyone else working in the field of urban planning and mobility.

1. Mass transit has always been the key to urban mobility. During Moses’ reign,theNew York metropolitan area suburbanized and grew much in the same way as other cities did and continue to do so today – through car-oriented suburban sprawl. While today we take this type of growth for granted, in Moses’ time it was being invented, as a direct result of his transportation policies. His policies did not just favour the automobile but actively served to harm any attempt at mass transit, by robbing it of land (by refusing to reserve right-of-way for transit in highway projects), funds (by using his power to exclusively fund highways), and access (by building parkway bridges so low that buses would never be able to travel under them). And yet, during this era of building for the car at the cost of transit, New Yorkers’ commutes became worse and worse. My takeaway: we’ve had more than enough time to learn that car-dependent urban sprawl is not a sustainable way to grow our cities. Building new transit-oriented communities is essential and this needs to be the standard growth model, not the exception.
2. Sprawl locks in sprawl. Caro uses the development of Long Island as a case study to prove this point. At the peak of population growth on the island, when its population was growing by the millions, Robert Moses’ transportation policy was to build more expressways, and he refused to even consider mass transit even though many proposals were put forward. The highways incentivized low-density suburban development and invited very little employment and industry, locking in these new developments as “bedroom communities” where most people were bound to long car commutes into the city. Years later, this development pattern persists and later studies found that even with billions of dollars in transit investments, the potential to change peoples’ commute mode to transit was very low. My takeaway: once a car-oriented built form is established (highways and low-density sprawl), the cost to change it to a more walkable one is incredibly high and the marginal gains of doing so are very small. Built form takes a very long time to change, making it even more important that we develop walkable communities from the beginning, not with some rough plans for transit in the future but with transit from day one.
3. Beware the “Highwaymen”: Caro uses the term “Highwaymen” to describe the people and organizations who stand to profit from the industry of building cars and highways. Moses united these groups behind his banner to Get Things Done, including construction unions, banks, automakers, and developers, providing massive construction contracts that kept unions thriving and made many individuals wealthy. As the Highwaymen were getting rich in New York, the urban masses were buying cars to use the new highways, but traffic was getting worse and worse with every new highway built. My takeaway: just like 70 years ago, the modern “Highwaymen” don’t care about how long it takes the public to get to work or how it affects their health, they care about selling cars and gas and tires and insurance, getting “shovels in the ground” and financing big construction projects. I see much of the same power present today; for example, automakers continue to sell bigger and more expensive cars despite mounting evidence that they are more harmful and despite a massive affordability crisis. On the infrastructure side, we’ve seen the rise of “Public-Private-Partnership” models for large construction projects, where ownership of transit projects, rather than being managed exclusively by government, is shared with the private sector, whose interest of course is making money rather than delivering quality. Some of these projects have had serious troubles with quality.
4. “Commuter Syndrome” was introduced in the book as a term to describe the real human toll that results from days, weeks, months, and years of using an inefficient and congestion-ridden transportation system. After being a part of this long enough people become complacent and lose sight of the fact that it could be better. My takeaway: today, commuters in our metropolitan regions continue to suffer from this. We’ve somehow normalized 2+ hour daily car commutes and baked this into planning decisions. Meanwhile, the pandemic demonstrated for many just how freeing it can be to regain those daily hours and I hope we can build off this going forward.
5. The underprivileged are always vulnerable. Robert Moses, being a broker of power, was careful to avoid major threats to other powerful people, and instead directed his efforts towards those who had the least ability to resist him. His highways and housing projects razed and displaced lower-income communities and his investments in roads disproportionately benefited people who could afford cars while simultaneously siphoning funds from City budgets that could have been used for transit. Moses was able to do this for years without backlash, because he was able to concentrate the worst impacts on the people valued least by society; as Caro notes in the book, “the fate of poor people had never been news in New York City; it still was not news”. My takeaway: equity-deserving individuals and communities have less resources, less time to advocate for themselves, and those who stand to gain from them will always seek to unless our government truly cares to protect them.
6. Keep a healthy skepticism of the media. Moses used his power and empire to swoon journalists from New York’s top media organizations and in turn enjoyed incredibly positive media play on all his works, with scant criticism for decades. Journalists looking for evidence of Moses’ corruption were often able to find it but would find their bosses had no interest in publishing it, lest they provoke Moses’ rage. My takeaway: at the end of the day, media companies are private and run by individuals with private interests. Power will often protect power, and the media can insulate certain individuals from criticism.
7. Hit the street to learn the real truth. In writing the book, Caro became one of many characters (which notably included Jane Jacobs) interested in speaking with real people and capturing their experiences. It was a striking contrast to the Moses-driven master planning approach and yet Caro was able to capture so much of the human experience and tragedies behind Moses’ projects; for example, describing in vivid detail the filth that people awaiting displacement from his slum-clearing projects were left to endure. My takeaway: planners and engineers don’t regularly interact with and talk to “members of the public” and I feel this is a major hindrance to our abilities. There’s so much we can learn by getting out of our comfort zones and walking around an equity-deserving neighbourhood, or along a suburban road.
8. Master planning has never been concerned about individual people. Robert Moses often used the phrase “you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette” and he meant it. Caro provides many examples of where Moses had drawn up plans for a project, and upon receiving push-back from residents, simply refused to engage with them or hear them at all. Sometimes the pushback was as simple as asking that the highway divert a block north or south to avoid destroying a community; still, Moses had zero interest in engaging. My takeaway: the goal of master planning is to see cities as overarching problems to be solved and while this is essential for regional planning we cannot count on master planning to understand or care about individuals and their communities. We must structure engagement processes that listen and respond to those needs on an individual project basis and be willing to adjust our master plan policies to deliver justice and minimize harm at the local level.
9. The cost of Getting Things Done. Caro frequently refers to Moses’ incredible focus on “Getting Things Done”, using the capitals to emphasize how central this dogma was to his existence. Moses was able to accomplish huge public works but had to sacrifice many of his ideals and values in the process, instead becoming someone willing to trade all ethics to make whatever deal necessary to get political support for his projects, becoming just as corrupt as the corrupt elected officials he was dealing with. My takeaway: The more power you give an individual, the more ability they have to get things done without interference, but also the less sway that anyone else has over those decisions. You trade democracy for efficiency. You trade public participation for the values and opinions and biases of one person. Things might get done faster but at what cost?
10. The “ingratitude of the public”. For years, Moses was recipient of almost universal praise from the public and the media, but Caro reveals that this was due to a carefully crafted image and a lot of flexing his power with members of the media in private. As his power deteriorated at the end of his career, he began to bemoan how the public and media didn’t appreciate great public servants or public works and he became enraged seeing or hearing any hint of criticism of his policies. My takeaway: working in public service requires not just thick skin but also intrinsic motivation. Public criticism of public officials is a part of democracy, and no one should be surprised when they enter one of these roles and receive it (abuse and harassment of public officials is, however, a growing problem and is completely unacceptable).

There you have it. It’s challenging to condense any further my reflections on a 1200-page, 18-month read. I feel that the book has given me a new lens to see the world through and will help guide me through my own career as I push to improve our transportation systems so make them more sustainable and workable for everyone.