Jun 22, 2026 · 24 min · 10 segments
What if building more highways made your commute *slower*? That's the paradox at the heart of AI agent economics: even as per-token inference costs have plummeted dramatically over the past two years…
Actually, I don't do this very often.
And he's responsible for actually a huge amount of the infrastructure in not just New York City, but sort of New York, Long Island, Brooklyn, all of these areas in the greater New York City area.
He was really into highways and bridges and tunnels.
He really liked building ways for cars to get around.
A lot of people blame him for the fact that these days New York City has kind of terrible public transportation.
Anyway, it's an incredible book.
You should read it.
It's about 10,000 pages long.
Every one of them is a goldmine.
But one of the things about New York City traffic and what Robert Moses did, the guy built so much highway.
He built highways.
He built bridges.
He built double-decker bridges where there were like roads stacked on top of each other so that you could get like 50 lanes of traffic going each direction.
And there's a pretty devastating chapter where it goes through some of these projects that he did, and it compares the before and after picture about how long it would take you if you were driving in a car to get from one part of New York to another.
And so the intuition that you should have is building all of this extra highway, all of these extra bridges, all these extra tunnels, we should be able to get around faster, right? No.
In many cases, it actually became slower to get around as that construction increased the amount of capacity on the highways.
The amount of highway that we've built or the cost per mile has gone down, but it still takes just as long to get from one side of New York to the other.
In fact, they're probably bigger.
You're listening to Linear Digressions.
Read the full transcript.
Create an account to read the whole episode, search across every transcript, and follow the shows you care about.
Actually, I don't do this very often.
And he's responsible for actually a huge amount of the infrastructure in not just New York City, but sort of New York, Long Island, Brooklyn, all of these areas in the greater New York City area.
He was really into highways and bridges and tunnels.
He really liked building ways for cars to get around.
A lot of people blame him for the fact that these days New York City has kind of terrible public transportation.
Anyway, it's an incredible book.
You should read it.
It's about 10,000 pages long.
Every one of them is a goldmine.
But one of the things about New York City traffic and what Robert Moses did, the guy built so much highway.
He built highways.
He built bridges.
He built double-decker bridges where there were like roads stacked on top of each other so that you could get like 50 lanes of traffic going each direction.
And there's a pretty devastating chapter where it goes through some of these projects that he did, and it compares the before and after picture about how long it would take you if you were driving in a car to get from one part of New York to another.
And so the intuition that you should have is building all of this extra highway, all of these extra bridges, all these extra tunnels, we should be able to get around faster, right? No.
In many cases, it actually became slower to get around as that construction increased the amount of capacity on the highways.
The amount of highway that we've built or the cost per mile has gone down, but it still takes just as long to get from one side of New York to the other.
In fact, they're probably bigger.
You're listening to Linear Digressions.
