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I’d sure love to ride through the Holland Tunnel on a bicycle. Phew. The days of relatively-open-air trans-Hudson commuting on the ferries are kaput for vehicular traffic.

NYC hated vehicular commuting even at the height of the dominance of railroads, and always actively worked against it even to the city’s detriment. They even went so far as to ban steam locomotives south of 42^nd Street—which dictated where Grand Central Terminal ended up, and prevented the steam railroads on the New Jersey and Long Island sides from building bridges into Manhattan. When the government started spending on roads, Manhattan’s NIMBYs jumped out of their skins over the prospects of projects such as the Mid-Manhattan Expressway and Lower Manhattan Expressway—which ended up not being built. (Even the West Side Highway, built by the New York Central Railroad, ended up being torn down and not rebuilt as planned.)

I would say that the nature of jobs rather than proximity might be a factor. The area in question used to have a lot of manufacturing—that is, until mayors like Robert F. Wagner Jr. showed up and started upping the taxes so that he and others could spend on social programs, which scared the manufacturing jobs away. People that commuted to these jobs did not have the same kind of health or sleeplessness problems that today’s commuters seem to suffer . . . then again, they also did not have access to the same kind of drugs . . .