Los Angeles Daily Journal
Jan. 3, 2018
THE LITTLE FISH THAT’S KILLING MANHATTAN
Gideon Kanner
Professor of Law Emeritus, Loyola Law School
Being old isn’t all bad. If you’re lucky, you remember things and you gain perspective. Case in point, the abysmal traffic conditions in Manhattan recently reported by the New York Times which reports that Midtown Manhattan traffic has reached a near-gridlock condition. Winnie Hu, “App-Hailed Cars Clog Streets. Should Riders Pay for the Jam?” Dec. 27, 2017 (front page, no less).
Current average car speed in midtown Manhattan is 4.6 mph, down from 6.5 mph only five years ago. (Walking speed is 3 mph — which means that a jogger can beat Midtown traffic.) The Times attributes these conditions to the presence of Lyft, Uber and Juno ride-hailing app vehicles looking for fares. Adding insult to injury, “more than a third of ride-sharing cars and yellow taxis that clog the streets are empty at any given time during weekdays in Manhattan’s main business district.”
Today, there are 103,000 for-hire vehicles plying New York streets, as opposed to only 47,000 as recently as 2013. Uber alone puts 65,000 cars on Manhattan streets. The upshot is that you can easily get a ride when you want one, says the Times, but once you get in the car, you’re stuck.
But another way of looking at this problem is that Manhattan streets are unequal to the task of accommodating modern traffic. So the question virtually asks itself: Weren’t New York traffic engineers smart enough to see what was coming and what to do about it? Yes, they were, but these days, planning and building are two different things once environmental concerns are brought to bear on the problem at hand.
The story of the old decrepit Manhattan West Side highway that was torn down back in the 1970s, but never replaced is instructive. Why? Oh, they tried, and therein lies a tale. What stopped the would-be highway rebuilders was a lawsuit brought by environmentalists who persuaded a local federal judge, Thomas F. Griesa, to bar the construction of a new replacement West Side Highway on environmental grounds.
By an odd coincidence, the same issue of the Times that tells us about the impending Manhattan gridlock also carries an obituary of Judge Griesa, and brings it all back to mind. Griesa found that the plans for the proposed replacement highway violated environmental laws, and barred its construction. The plan was that the new West Side Highway would permit much of the local traffic to bypass the congested mid-Manhattan streets, and keep it moving. It would run from the southern tip of Manhattan to 42nd Street, using a tunnel for a part of its route. It was projected to cost some $2 billion (in 1970s dollars, or $5.7 billion adjusted for inflation).
So was the proposed new highway environmentally bad by increasing air pollution, as claimed by the environmentalists? No. Judge Griesa, according to the Times, rejected that argument, and based his highway-killing judgment on the proposed highway’s adverse impact on fish. Fish? In Manhattan? Yes, fish. Specifically, the Hudson Striped Bass which was not even endangered. It was, according to the judge, “one of the nation’s most popular and commercially lucrative fish,” and it still is. So the new highway was not built, even as Manhattan traffic grew worse and is now approaching gridlock conditions.
As far as I know, the Hudson River has been cleaned up to some extent, but that was largely due to removing industrial waste accumulated on the river bottom in the industrial area way upstream, near Poughkeepsie. It had nothing to do with automobile traffic in Manhattan. Swimming in the Hudson remains hazardous in places. And so I fail to see how improving the river water quality for fish does much of anything for embattled New Yorkers stuck in traffic, waiting for the red light to change so they can move forward another few feet. To say nothing of wasted energy and air pollution caused by all those idling cars (recall that, ironically, air pollution was what the environmentalists claimed to be defending New Yorkers from).
Which brings us to the moral of this story — actually two morals. First, judicial rulings have consequences, even when there is a time lag between their promulgation, and a visible manifestation of their effects. Some judicial rulings can be terrific, but others are unsound, or even disastrous, like the misbegotten judicial notion of bussing kids from good schools to decrepit, dangerous inner city ones, a feat that helped empty the cities of their middle class populations and in some cases transformed them into urban wastelands, as middle-class families fled to the suburbs.
Second, a legal question: How come, in eminent domain cases, the same judges who wield a heavy hand in environmental review litigation — such as killing entire public projects on environmental grounds — hold that condemnors’ findings of public use are “well-nigh conclusive” and disclaim any power to deal on the merits with land owners’ defenses alleging that condemnors’ findings of necessity for the proposed public works, their efficacy, safety, location, layout, etc. are defective?
In the notorious Chevalier case, the California Supreme Court went so far as to hold that in eminent domain cases, state compliance vel non with statutory criteria of public necessity was altogether nonjusticiable, not even where the condemnors’ determination was obtained by fraud, bad faith and abuse of discretion. The California Legislature repealed that rule in 1976 but the court never retreated from it, and even now review of these matters is available only in cases of a condemnors’ “gross abuse of discretion” or bribery. New York federal courts did the same over there, when in the Rosenthal & Rosenthal case they upheld a condemnation, refusing to inquire into allegations that a redevelopment project’s boundaries were corruptly drawn to benefit the mayor’s friends.
Conclusion: Ideas do have consequences, and as this saga illustrates, in time seemingly unconnected court rulings can have a profound impact on people’s lives. The parties who fought it out before Judge Griesa almost a half-century ago could have no idea that their wrangling over the comfort levels of an abundant fish would come at the expense of people’s life quality affecting their daily lives.