On Friday, Columbia University history professor Kenneth T. Jackson recalled the time he was in a delicatessen when a customer asked the person behind the counter if he should take psychology, economics, English, or something like that. Wanting to speed up the line, Mr. Jackson interjected, “‘Why don’t you just take some history?’ The person looked at me offhand and said, ‘Oh, I don’t care about that – that’s already happened.'”

The relevance of history was just one of the subjects Mr. Jackson discussed at Friday’s conference at New York Institute of Technology called “New York in Motion.”

Mr. Jackson first cited “central place theory,” which attempts to explain why communities grow where people are not living directly off the land. Over time, this theory posits, a place of meeting will develop where people can exchange goods. A second theory of why cities are where they are, he said, was based on locations offering a natural transportation break. According to this theory, cities arise at or near the place where goods must change conveyance. New York, which is located at a point where a river meets an ocean, “is as classic a transportation break as anywhere on this planet,” Mr. Jackson said. Its waters are largely ice-free, unlike a city such as Quebec, and protected from the ocean by sandbars.

He gave the example of the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825 and dropped the cost of moving things 95%, he said. Mr. Jackson said he always wanted to have an exhibition in which any number of visitors would struggle to pull 3,000 pounds of goods stacked in a wagon on an irregular surface. But if it were sitting on a boat on water, even a young girl could pull it: “Water is the easy way to move things.”

Mr. Jackson gave an example of how changing the mode of conveyance affected New York growth: “You’re not going across the ocean on canal boats, so what do you see on the Brooklyn docks? Huge grain elevators and big sailing ships.” Around these things circulate wholesalers, bankers, stevedores, and others who create jobs.

He continued by explaining how motion has changed in New York. Before the steam ferry, there were sailboats or rowboats for about two centuries. Once larger ferries and regular ferry service came into being, one could go back and forth by steam ferry. Even in Walt Whitman’s day, Mr. Jackson said, passengers would “run for the ferry like they were running for their lives.” Mr. Jackson said you can see the same thing today with the shuttle at Times Square. He said to audience laughter, “I always feel like a fool every time I do it: I know there’s another train.”

Moving on to other forms of transportation, he said railroads were an English invention, but “by the end of the 19th century more than half of all the railroad knowledge in the world was in America.” One reason was that the Duke of Wellington was against building railroads because it “would only encourage the common folk to move about needlessly.”

By the 1850s, Mr. Jackson said, there were more commuters coming in and out of New York City than any city in the world, even though London, Tokyo, and Paris at that time were bigger.

Mr. Jackson said that in a way, the ferry created the first suburb in the world: Brooklyn Heights. He then spoke of the difference between New York and many other large cities: Traveling 15 minutes outside many cities, one sees cows. “What are you looking at 15 minutes out of Grand Central? The Bronx,” he said, to audience laughter. “It’s another hour before you’ve cleared the suburbs.”

He then turned to suburbs and mentioned Alfred Ely Beach, who built a section of pneumatic subway in 1870. The audience laughed when he mentioned that whenever he asks students in a classroom test to identify Beach, some invariably respond, “It’s a beach somewhere.”

He said in Moscow and London, subways have grandeur and sometimes elaborate long escalators. In New York “all they did was dig a ditch and cover it.” London’s subway system is almost as large as New York’s system, Mr. Jackson said, but with only half as many stops.

He also discussed other changes such as the rise of containerization. “Think of it as the back end of a big truck.” Instead of 100 people working on the waterfront, he said, now there’s one person with a big crane, another who puts the hook onto the container, and a third who directs where the container is going to be stacked. The “space-time balance” shifted, and now many containers are loaded in Newark rather than on the waterfront.

He then spoke of why New York has a lower auto death accident rate than elsewhere in the country. Is it because its drivers are “careful and courteous?” The audience laughed. He said one reason for the lower rate was that – because of the density of pedestrians – drivers often cannot drive fast enough to kill people.

gshapiro@nysun.com