Essay On City Transportation

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The same advancement that set the city growing upwards also helped to propel it to new speeds. The impact of public transportation on the growth of the city, particularly the subway, has been tremendous. The best known of which and was known as the “life-line of New York City” was the West Side Line which carried no passengers and yet sustained the city through the goods it carried. Completed in 1849 stretched as far as Peekskill New York spanning a distance of 40 miles (64km) and was extended as far as Albany 1851, it was the only all-goods line in Manhattan. The development and importance of steel would not be the only change that would propel the city forward; transportation relied on one more breakthrough before it would change the layout of cities completely. The advancement would be electricity. Early modes of transportation such as elevated railways originally produced and operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (ITC), who would also go on to become the original operator of the subway, were cable powered systems. The first line called the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway was operated along the 9th street line which travelled from Battery Place, at the south end of Manhattan Island, northward up Greenwich Street to 30th Street and opened…show more content…
The development of low fare rapid transport and in particular the subway, as well as the expansion of the metropolitan area to include Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx in 1898 created drastic changes in the flows and movements of the population. These 2 changes changed Manhattan. The once congested tenements of Harlem, Fort George and the Lower East Side were torn down and urban sprawl began as workers with lower incomes moved further away from the city center and chose to commute in for

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