The 1950 census rated New York, with a regional population of 13 million, the nation’s densest city, averaging 25,000 people per square mile. With the city’s streets more clogged than ever, it may be useful to look back on that survey and see what’s changed, and what hasn’t, over the 63 years. The report was written by Bruce Smith, the Institute of Public Administration’s criminal justice authority and the nation’s foremost police expert. He blistered the would be-reformers like Gulick as “white-collar sleuths armed with shiny badges, junior bloodhounds with big bowwow collars, petty expense-account auditors and meter readers…”īut the reorganization effort prevailed, thanks in part to exhaustive scholarship like the Traffic study. A fellow student of Gulick’s in the Training School for Public Service in the nineteen-teens, the irascible Moses had gone on to a legendary career as bridge and highway mastermind and Parks Commissioner, while also serving on the board of the MCOMS - but that didn’t keep him from publicly excoriating the reorganization effort in 1952. The records of the MCOMS fill 23 boxes in the Luther Gulick Papers of the Baruch Archives’s IPA Collection, and a treasure trove they are. We know all this from a highly informative 1952 Traffic study issued by the Mayor’s Committee on Management Survey, the colossal municipal makeover that dragged the metropolis into the modern era. A police traffic school to train specially selected officers came next, and by 1914 the first consolidated accident reports (of which there were many, as we shall see) were being compiled and centrally assembled. By 1908 the police commissioner was empowered to control the flow of traffic throughout the newly amalgamated (1898) city. By 1903, with the advent of the automobile, the city’s Board of Aldermen promulgated the first traffic regulations and mounted officers were assigned to patrol Fifth Avenue.

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