Postwar auto traffic and toll income quadrupled within two decades.

Evidence

With the war, and gasoline and tire rationing ended and automobiles pouring off the assembly lines again, the volume of automobile traffic in New York soared. … In 1941, the Triborough Bridge had carried 11,000,000 vehicles. In 1946, it carried 13,000,000; in 1947, 16,000,000; in 1948, 19,000,000; in 1949, 23,000,000; in 1950, 27,000,000; in 1951, 32,000,000-in 1960, fifteen years after the war ended, it was carrying 46,000,000 vehicles per year. And that was just one bridge. Traffic on all Triborough Authority toll facilities had been 43,000,000 in 1941; it was 112,000,000 in 1951 and 154,000,000 in 1960. The Authority’s annual income had been 8,000,000 in 1941; in 1951, with the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel's thirty-five-cent-per-car charge swelling the toll receipts, the Authority's annual income was 26,000,000; in 1960, it was 37,000,000 (in 1962 with the Throgs Neck Bridge open and operating, it would be 43,000,000; in 1967, with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge open and operating at fifty cents per car, it would be $75,000,000, almost ten times higher than it had been before the war). — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 3033

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The postwar boom both enabled displaced integration and was itself fueled by that workforce — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 38