RECORD OF TESTIMONY AND STATEMENTS IN RELATION TO 193 



NECESSITY FOR DISTRICTING PLAN 



After the congestion became intense the condition was improved by 

 installing the speed control signal which permits a train to come right up, 

 behind the other train, to the station, so that when it does get a clear signal 

 to go ahead it has only a short distance to run into the station. With the 

 signal development of the present time it may be practicable to maintain such 

 operation and thereby decrease the interval between trains. 



Districting as a remedy for subway congestion 



You not only have to distribute the workers but you have to distribute 

 the places of abode and also distribute the places where they work. This 

 is the prime essential. The difficulty to-day is that one part of New York 

 City is the objective point of so many people. As it stands now, practically 

 everybody wants to go somewhere between 42d Street and the Battery 

 during the peak of the rush. Practically all the lines are built in order to 

 carry people to that one location. I do not think there is any necessity for 

 such a condition. 



There ought to be localized business centers surrounded by residential 

 areas, away from the one general center, which would be traversed by those 

 transit lines which connect the outer sections with the general center. There 

 would then be created a two-way traffic movement to such localized centers 

 from the contiguous residential areas. 



Unless a very careful housing and districting regulation, such as you 

 are trying to carry out, 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 ca- 

 pacity, but we are rapidly coming to the actual capacity of the streets so 

 that housing and manufacturing sites and working sites ought to be con- 

 trolled 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. 



I think districting is absolutely essential to the transportation problem 

 of this city. That is the only way in which the excessive rush hour conges- 

 tion can be eliminated. 



To illustrate what I have just been saying, the transit plan, as it has 

 been laid down, is to distribute the population throughout the whole city. 



It is essential, however, in order that the plan may be effective that 

 there may be some control over housing regulation near the business center, 

 for the reason that if you permit tenements to be piled up near a business 

 center, thereby reducing the ride to twenty minutes or half an hour, people 

 are going to insist in living in these areas rather than going out into the 

 undeveloped and new areas which the rapid transit system has made ac- 

 cessible. 



If there were cross-connections between Long Island City and the resi- 

 dence portions of Brooklyn, it would tend to draw factory workers out of 

 Manhattan into the outlying boroughs and make it easy for them to get 

 back and forth to places of work which would not have to be in Manhattan. 



I think that the traffic conditions I have pointed out will undoubtedly 

 continue even after the new subways are completed, unless a districting 

 plan is adopted. Unless you have your districting plan or something similar 

 to it carried out, the transit problem of the city will come to such a point 

 that it will be impossible for the city to cope with it. 



