8 COMMISSION ON BUILDING DISTRICTS 



will reconstruct its sewers on the separate system. The other boroughs, 

 for the same reason, will probably adopt in large measure the separate 

 system. Amos L. Schaeffer, Consulting Engineer, Borough of Manhattan, 

 an expert on sewers, testified that the adoption of the Commission's plan 

 of building control will be of great assistance in planning the future sewer- 

 age system of the city. 



The city is spending an enormous amount of money to extend and 

 improve its rapid transit facilities. This expense was undertaken largely 

 for the purpose of preventing the present indecent, unsafe and unsanitary 

 congestion on the transit lines and for preventing the further congestion 

 of population. New lines were needed, but they alone will be wholly in- 

 effective in preventing the continuance and increase of intolerable conges- 

 tion during the rush hours on all the rapid transit lines — the new as well 

 as the old. This rush hour congestion problem is the inevitable result of 

 centering all business and industry between the Battery and 59th Street. 

 If everyone must come to Manhattan to work it will be quite impossible 

 to provide adequate transit facilities during the rush hours. The remedy 

 lies in creating numerous other business and industrial centers and checking 

 the extension of the Manhattan areas devoted to business and industry, 

 especially the latter, combined also with a limitation on the intensity of build- 

 ing development in such areas. This corrective the districting plan is 

 designed to furnish. Daniel L. Turner, Deputy Engineer of Subway Con- 

 struction of the Public Service Commission, a leading expert on city pas- 

 senger transportation, has testified to the absolute necessity of adopting such 

 a plan for the purposes above mentioned. Mr. Turner said : " Unless a very 

 careful housing and districting regulation, such as you are trying to carry out 

 here is adopted, it will be absolutely impossible for the city to cope with its 

 municipal transportation problem. These two problems have got to be taken 

 together. They are absolutely related to each other. We can provide 

 facilities up to a maximum of the street capacity, but we are rapidly 

 coming to the actual capacity of the streets, so that the housing ought to be 

 so controlled and the manufacturing sites and the working sites, with a view 

 to having the population distributed over the whole area and in that way 

 develop a two-way business on all lines to the very utmost." 



With increasing population and attendant congestion it becomes more 

 and more important and difficult to guard the public health. A districting 

 plan to the extent that it reduces congestion and attendant close personal 

 contact on the transit lines and on stairs and elevators, will prevent the 

 transmission of communicable disease. Dr. Haven Emerson, Commissioner 

 of Health, testified to the menace of the rush-hour congestion and the 

 importance to public health of the proposed districting plan, as follows: 

 " Another point in which health authorities foresee benefit to public health 

 by a consistent plan for the control of the future growth of the city is 

 in the improved conditions of occupancy of traffic conveyances. It is appre- 

 ciated and acknowledged that the more congested is a traffic conveyance the 



