I grew up for half my childhood in a 19th century farmhouse in Queens and did a lot of research about the area. As early as 1900 the pattern of development that you see in Queens was well underway. The farms around my childhood home were mostly sliced up before the formation of greater NYC. Queens Blvd was a big driver of traffic and medium density development.

Brooklyn was even more different -- the Moses parkways were specifically built there to feed the Bridges and tunnels -- the road and transit network had mostly built out Brooklyn already.

Moses's early works, especially the Long Island Parkways and the Triboro Bridge were seen as solutions to traffic problems initially -- people didn't understand that more roads generates more traffic.

Moses was a flawed man ultimately corrupted by he power he accumulated. He became inflexible with time and many of his ideas were stuck in a 1920s perspective. But he wasn't pure evil, and excoriating his ideas in hindsight doesn't really tell the story. More than most other metropolitan areas in the US, NYC has a really balanced transit infrastructure -- it's a positive thing too. He also built out the pretty amazing NYC and NYS park system, all things that left a positive, multi-generational legacy.

New York City and State had the first real regional highway network because of Moses ability to innovate. The country learned a big lesson from that. If you want to critique highway planners, point the flames at the anonymous architects behind shitshow regions like Boston, Los Angeles and Atlanta, which are hopelessly and permanently car-dependent regions.