If the Trains Don’t Move, Nobody Moves: The Legacy of the NYC Transit Strike of 1966

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).

Continue reading the entire piece here at Vital City

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here. Nicole is the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car, available now.

Photo by Frederic Lewis/Hulton Archive/Getty Images