Robert Moses, American urban planner, designed the Northern State Parkway and Southern State Parkway (b. 1888)

Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was an American public official who worked mainly in the New York metropolitan area. His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island. Although he was not a trained civil engineer, Moses's programs and designs influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners nationwide.Moses held up to 12 official titles simultaneously, including New York City Parks Commissioner and Chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission, but was never elected to any public office. He ran only once, as the Republican nominee for Governor of New York in 1934, and lost in a landslide. Nevertheless, he created and led numerous semi-autonomous public authorities, through which he controlled millions of dollars in revenue and directly issued bonds to fund new ventures with little or no input or oversight from outside sources. As a result of Moses's work, New York has the United States' greatest proportion of public benefit corporations, which remain the primary driver of infrastructure building and maintenance and account for much of the state's debt vehicles that maintain its sustainability.

Moses's projects were considered economically necessary by many contemporaries after the Great Depression. Moses led the construction of New York campuses for the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs and helped persuade the United Nations to locate its headquarters in Manhattan instead of Philadelphia. Moses's reputation for efficiency and nonpartisan leadership was damaged by Robert Caro's Pulitzer-winning biography The Power Broker (1974), which accused Moses of a lust for power, questionable ethics, vindictiveness, and racism. In Moses's urban planning of New York, he primarily bulldozed homes with Black and Latino residents to make way for parks, chose the middle of minority neighborhoods as the location for highways, and deliberately designed bridges on the parkways connecting New York City to beaches on Long Island to be too low for buses from the inner city to access the beaches. Some reviews of Moses's career are critical of characterizing Moses as a racist and opponent of mass transportation, noting a more complex situation with respect to bridge height and positive contributions Moses made to minority communities.