Electrified rail transit was another casualty of the federal government’s (and Robert Moses’) concerted effort to create a white, automobile-based suburbia. Whereas local transit systems had provided mobility within the city, the government had plowed its interstates through downtowns and urban neighborhoods in order to provide mobility OUT of the city—and to the new racially-restricted suburbs. The freeways—for which the federal government at the time provided a whopping 90% federal funding match—were the literal routes of white flight, connecting with new suburbs governed by “racial covenants,” prohibiting “persons of any race other than the Caucasian race” from living there.

The existing transit systems were seen as physical impediments to the government’s heavily-subsidized goal of suburbanization. With the freeways connecting to sprawling new, auto-centric development and pouring cars into downtown, public transit was considered literally in the way (especially electrified transit, with its rails and overhead wires). Moreover, because trams (aka streetcars, trolleys, or light rail) generally served the red-lined areas directly adjacent to downtowns, there was little political will to revitalize systems which were of the most use to those in "blighted" areas (aka people of color and recent immigrants). For Robert Moses, New York’s “Master Builder” and the architect of its freeway network, the rails needed to go.

Robert Caro notes in THE POWER BROKER that, “Moses boasted that he was ‘ripping up trolley tracks all over town’.” In the Bronx, as in the other Boroughs, he completely eliminated the local tram network, forcing residents to rely on the Manhattan-centric subway, or infrequent and overcrowded buses. In addition, he tore down the second and third avenue elevateds (seen in orange on this image), with half-hearted promises to build a subway that never came.

(An aside, unlike in some cities, NYC’s transit system was officially desegregated in 1865 due a lawsuit from Elizabeth Jennings Graham against the Third Avenue Railway System [TARS].).