However, th force of organized community suspicion, once unleashed, does not easil accede to fact. Whitaker recalls presenting to an Upper West Side com munity group the sketches showing how Westway would liberal Riverside Park of the present highway, and "dump it in the drink" along side. At the meeting's end, an elderly woman approached him and sait "You seem like such a nice young man. Why would you want to destrc Riverside Park?" Years later, Whitaker, grayhaired, was still shaking h head at the memory. One of the objections raised against Westway was that it would indue more traffic into the city. Roberta Brandes Gratz stated that position i her book The Living City: "[EJvery new road in recent years has, by its vei creation, stimulated new traffic. The reality of highway building is th; highways encourage further automobile traffic." This notion, whic started as a valuable corrective insight, has hardened into a mantr Certainly, building new highways may generate more traffic, by enticir Pe°ple to avail themselves of the new roads; but whether it actually will с S° ePends on duplication of routes and many other factors. As it turne out, Westway was not built, and traffic volume still increased in the 1990s along the old, patchedtogether West Side Highway. In the same years, subway ridership also increased, suggesting that the overall economic prosperity of the region during the 1990s led to more vehicles and more mass transit usage. In any case, the Westway plan called for the same number of lanes as the old West Side Highway, with no added capacity. Again and again, it seems to me, the Westway team would answer some objection to the plan, only to discover their listeners had already made up their minds that these facts could not be trusted because they came from Satan. The irony of the Westway battle was that it pitted two groups of idealists against each other; but only one-the antiWestway forces-was able to commandeer the rhetoric of virtue, perhaps because it was located outside the power structure. Ratensky's Raiders had started out with a pro environmentalist perspective. Their willingness to compromise with opponents' objections stemmed partly from the fact that they were already sympathetic to the opposing point of view. "Everybody on that team hated highways," recalled Richard Kahan, Westway's counsel at the time, adding that these were not your typical gungho Department of Highways stalwarts, intent on moving traffic faster at all costs. If they had gotten involved with building a highway, it was because it seemed the only way to accomplish other purposes, such as waterfront access. But precisely because the Westway team thought of themselves as idealists and people of goodwill, they were never able to grasp the seriousness of the animus directed at them. Community activists who had defeated the Lower Manhattan Expressway proposal rallied once more against this new highway proposal.