Today the urban transport of goods creates a variety of challenges for city planners, freight engineers and local businesses and residents. The trucks that cart our packages can clog streets, cause excessive noise and produce noxious emissions. And as RPA’s new study, ​“Why Goods Movement Matters”, highlights, these consequences of freight are most felt in dense urban areas.

Challenges in delivering goods in and around cities like New York are not new.

In the early 1900s, Manhattan’s West Street, pictured above in a photo from RPA’s First Regional Plan, was a place where all factors of freight collided with everyday life. The West Side Line, a street-level freight rail line, operated on Manhattan’s far west side alongside horse-drawn carriages and early automobiles in an attempt to facilitate the urban movement of goods.

Beyond the congestion caused by theses trains (some of which spanned city blocks in length), ​“the line killed and mutilated hundreds of people, and its path well earned the name Death Avenue,” according to the New York Times. Men riding horseback, later dubbed the West Side Cowboys, were required to ride ahead of the grade-level trains, warning pedestrians and drivers.

Video by Annik La Farge, author of On the High Line and write at livingthehighline.com

New York Central Railroad and the city eventually brokered a deal in 1929 to elevate the West Side Line, whose elevated tracks would later become the High Line. West Street and 11th Avenue also became the location of the new Miller Highway, thought to be a potential solution for overcrowding and street congestion.