New York Stops

Do cities ever  get so cluttered they just stop ?  A friend in New York foretold  that  would happen  – “One fine day”, he said, New York will just stop. Dead” . He imagined  a  policeman standing  lonely at a corner in  Fifth Avenue  patiently disentangling car after car in a city which had at last given in,    getting fatter and slower and finally giving up.

Could  cities really stop ? Get so big  they become unmanageable?  A “garbage” strike or even a garbage glitch in New York  now can  be not only inconvenient but disastrous. Or   a  power failure, freezing elevators, machines, traffic lights, when   for a few frightening hours citizens  realise how much they depend on electric current  and  make frantic resolutions never to let it happen again, wondering  what kind of shop  sells generators cheap, then remembering  that unless you keep a tankful of gas ready for action, which most people don’t,  dead pumps will not help much.

A city grows  , so it needs more money to look after more people, so more people are encouraged to come in and pay more rates and taxes . People need shops and cinemas and theatres and  sports arenas and then they need  more people to fill them  because of rising costs and profits and they all need trams and roads,underpasses and overpasses, roundabouts and swings .  That means frayed nerves and irritable complaints that you can’t even get a road mended without a traffic pile-up  half a mile long, appointments are missed and road rage is no longer an affection of speeders but one afflicting those who can only move slow metre by agonising metre. Cities  get  over-crowded,some  thrive on it for a while ,  thrive in spite of it  – and some seize up from it. That has always been the way ,we human beings just must have cities, crowded cities, and yet  no people on earth have found the secret of managing the growth of cities so that they don’t seize up on them.

The Roman emperor Nero, nearly 2000 years ago,  was blamed for solving the problem of over-crowding, pollution, traffic congestion , bad housing , refuse pile-up and much else in Rome in his time – by sending out his slaves one day to burn down about half the city. Guilty of arson or not,  he blamed the Christians for the fire  , played a tune on his lyre, recited a poem or two  and rebuilt the city to a fine plan which would have done credit to a sane man but  was miraculous for an irrational  one like him. 

So when crawling along in slow moving tailback queue  on a city approach road , let’s be glad and rejoice – if we lived in ancient times, things could be a lot worse.