have been extended along the Van Wyck, thus “the opportunity of constructing an open cut subway as a part of this express highway at greatly reduced cost is now apparently lost because the highway project was blueprinted without consideration of the airport’s full requirements.”103
Without a fixed rail connection, every passenger who came to Idlewild would have to ride on rubber wheels or helicopters (see below). And those rubber wheels had to thread a crowded city only partly relieved by the parkways and highways Robert Moses had spread across the city. This was just the beginning of decades of bad connections. Robert Moses bragged in 1935 that “you can ride from 92nd Street and the East River all the way to Kew Gardens and east on a genuine parkway without crossings or lights,” but it was a different challenge entirely to link Kew Gardens in central Queens to Jamaica Bay.104
Moses extended what eventually became the Van Wyck Expressway, paid for by a combination of state and federal funds, from Queens Boulevard-Grand Central Parkway to the airport after the war. The new highway was designed both as a connector to the airport and “to serve Queens as a whole, with traffic separations planned to reduce congestion in the Jamaica area.” In retrospect, this dual use was a major error. In practice, the Van Wyck would never serve as a dependable, fast route to the airport.105 The Van Wyck Expressway when it first opened in 1950 had six lanes and two parallel service roads, which counted as a large highway for its day. Officials predicted a 20 percent reduction in city-to-airport trip time for both cars and buses … on a good day.106 Robert Caro colorfully describes how Moses ignored dire traffic predictions for the Van Wyck and refused to even carve out a future right of way for transit down the Van Wyck, despite the ease and comparative low cost for transit on such a route.107
Access to Idlewild also suffered from a local quirk in the regional road network. On paper, Robert Moses appeared to have created a fairly even distribution of highways linking Nassau County and Queens; Moses had essentially built out much of the system projected in the late 1920s by the Regional Plan Association. Yet Moses refused to abandon the parkway ideal, of leisure drives through green parks, when the parkways had by and large become commuter routes through emerging suburban areas. As a result, Moses made traffic worse on the Van Wyck and limited efficiency in bus and truck service to the airport by banning buses and commercial vehicles from most of his parkways, including the Southern State (which connects both to the Van Wyck and the Belt), Belt Parkway, and the Grand Central. The Van Wyck Expressway, as the only highway to the airport that accommodated trucks and buses, developed a reputation in the 1950s for gridlock. The Belt Parkway also connected to Idlewild, but the Belt was a long, twisting, and dangerous connector to Manhattan that Robert Moses stitched together along the edge of Brooklyn marshes, waterfronts, and neighborhoods; it proved to be poorly designed as a dependable high-speed expressway. Many Nassau County commuters also realized that the shortest way from the South Shore of Long Island to Manhattan and the Bronx was to head north on the Van Wyck to the Grand Central rather than fight their way west on the Belt Parkway. Truckers loading up cargo had to find their way to their destinations either by slow surface roads or, like everyone else, by crowding the Van Wyck Expressway.108
Port Authority leaders were not deaf to the criticism and requested that Moses alter his policies. Port Authority chairman Cullman in 1947 made clear that “an outstanding need of a smooth functioning airport system was permission from the city to operate buses over the Belt Parkway. Robert Moses … has opposed airport traffic over parkways.”109 Moses, however, still viewed his parkways as “ribbon or shoe-string parks” whose aesthetic qualities would be destroyed should buses be allowed on them. He explained his resistance to the privately run Carey bus service to Idlewild by irrationally predicting worse congestion from buses than cars: “You can understand the difficult traffic problems that would arise if regularly scheduled trips at intervals of a few minutes were permitted over the parkway system to Idlewild Airport.”110 Yet tens of thousands of individual cars and taxis nevertheless congested parkways to and from the airport, and their numbers rose in tandem with explosive increases in aviation traffic.111
The airport’s negative reputation for difficult access and egress solidified during the 1950s as more and more travelers found themselves stuck in traffic: “During the past few years many travelers have noticed that at times it has taken longer to drive from New York International Airport, at Idlewild, in Queens, into Manhattan than it has to make the flight from Boston to New York City.” Carey passenger buses remained banned from the Grand Central Parkway, for instance, thus making their journey to the airport painfully slow on regular city streets like Woodhaven Boulevard.112 The Whitestone Expressway, the interstate connection to the Van Wyck that finally allowed trucks and buses direct access from the airport to the regional road system, including the Long Island Expressway and the Whitestone Bridge, was not built until the 1960s as part of preparations for Moses’s 1964–65 World’s Fair.
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