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New York's number one traffic expert on the future of the city.
By Rosten Woo
The Metropolis Observed
June 2002
Sam Schwartz--the New York traffic commissioner who coined the term
gridlock in the 1980s, author of the daily "Gridlock Sam" column
in the Daily News, and former cab driver--is undeniably the city's
foremost traffic authority. Since 1995 he's run the Sam Schwartz Company,
a traffic consulting and urban-design firm that has been involved
in many of New York's largest traffic and planning issues--from the
fabled Second Avenue subway line to the construction of a new Mets stadium
and the redevelopment of Battery Park. With Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposing
tolls on the East River bridges and the constant talk of Lower Manhattan's
redevelopment, New York's traffic clearly is heading in new directions.
Rosten Woo sat down with Schwartz to talk about gridlock, bridge tolls,
Frederick Law Olmsted, and the future of Lower Manhattan.
Rosten Woo: You coined the term gridlock during the NYC transit strike in
1980, right?
Sam Schwartz: Well, I coined the term with another traffic engineer, Roy
Cottam. William Safire called me within nine days of the strike, and because
Roy didn't want to be blamed for it I ended up with all the credit. Now
any kind of stalemate is called a gridlock: "political gridlock,"
"educational gridlock," "the health system is gridlocked."
In the beginning I kept a file tracing its movement across the country and
then across the world?and that was an amazing experience. I've tried to
create other words but failed.
RW: What are some of the tools of a traffic engineer?
SS: There are a lot: you have one-way streets, yield signs, stop signs,
and traffic signals. Of course, the ultimate solution to an intersection
is grade separation, which as far as I can tell was first used by Frederick
Law Olmsted in the design of Central Park.
You had a park that went from 59th to 110th Street, which is two-and-a-half
miles long. How do you make that experience continuous for pedestrians if
traffic still has to get from the west to the east side? Rather than making
intersections, he created the park at one level and a half-dozen transverse
roads at another.
The brilliance of Olmsted's design is that when you're driving on the transverse
roads across Central Park, you'll say you're at grade, and when you're riding
your bicycle up 20 to 30 feet you'll say you're at grade. Mixing up the
concept of grade and doing the right kind of design, in which nobody feels
put out, is brilliant. The WTC area gives us incredible opportunities; you
could have undulating parks so that you don't even notice that you're rising
and the roadway is dipping a little.
RW: Now the philosophy of grade separation has gone through a lot of changes,
right? Is grade separation really the ultimate solution? Have intersections
been solved?
SS: Well, it's a rollercoaster is what it is. Here in New York City we built
one of the earliest elevated highways. People thought elevated highways
were good because they allowed cars to get where they had to go and people
could still get to the other side.
But then we had the Miller Highway, also known as the Westside Highway,
collapse due to lack of maintenance in 1973. Then the Embarcadero [in San
Francisco] collapsed in an earthquake and people began to question whether
it was appropriate to have elevated highways along waterfront property.
So Toronto is now knocking down the Goggner Expressway.
In the beginning everybody went elevated to achieve the grade separation
and then they said, "Maybe a boulevard, a nice grassy boulevard."
That's an older idea, but they went back to it. So the Embarcadero is now
a boulevard, the Westside Highway is now a boulevard. The Goggner Expressway,
they're looking at a boulevard.
Now a lot of people are watching what's going on at the big dig in Boston
and saying even having these at the surface--it's still not very good. You
have to cross a lot of lanes, people don't always make it across, you have
the left turn accidents--a lot of the things we tried to solve.
The worst thing we ever did is pedestrian bridges: we'll put the highway
at grade and pedestrians will just walk over the highways. Well pedestrians
hated that and too many people took the risk of just running across highways.
That was a big failure. The waterfront along the FDR drive is just not accessible.
People don't like going up scissor-staircases or ramps.
Here in New York people are looking at the World Trade Center site and saying
let's take advantage now and try to link Battery Park City and the World
Financial Center with the mainland of Manhattan. It's been separated by
this wall of the Westside highway, or West Street, which is 8- to 12-lanes
across when you include all the turning lanes.
So we went from elevating a lot of highways to putting them at grade, which
was the solution in the late 20th century. Now it looks like we're thinking
about tunneling a lot of these roads and making the at-grade crossing simple,
more fun, and greener.
RW: What's the relationship between urban design and traffic engineering?
SS: The problem is that transportation and traffic engineers have sat in
a box for so many years and architects and urban designers sat in another
box and they would fling messages across to each other. They were never
integrated. When they came up with one percent for art I thought, "What
a mistake!" What that said was this: "Design something functional,
a roadway, and afterwards stick on some art, you know, 1 percent, rather
than integrating art, architecture, engineering and design all in one."
In Battery Park, we're adding more than an acre to the park in the process
of improving the roadway. We did the same thing at Greenwich Plaza. A 70-foot-wide
street was going nowhere, so I reduced the size from 70 to 40 feet and now
there's an oasis along a side of it.
In a lot of cases we improve traffic while converting asphalt to green.
David Gern, who was one of my mentors, would always say that it was written
in the Talmud: "He who can make a blade of grass grow from asphalt
shall be blessed forever." I'm still looking for the citation but I
haven't found it.
RW: What about superblocks and at-grade crossings?
SS: In looking at the World Trade Center site, they're saying maybe we should
return the grid pattern. You get view corridors, orientation, it's simpler
to get around, there's more curb space, and better access. The tradeoff
is it means less pedestrian area.
A lot of Main streets are now reversing themselves. So many Main streets
in the 1970s and 1980s made themselves entirely car-free. Now Poughkeepsie
is reversing it, Buffalo is reversing it. They're saying "we kind of
like the congestion and the traffic." It gave a life and vibrancy to
Main Street, which is odd because if you were a planner back in 1960s and
1970s, you were looking at just the opposite. "Let's pedestrian-ize
and make the center of the street lively."
You need to strike a balance. There are places in Manhattan like Times Square
where you really could pedestrian-ize and sustain the vibrancy. But you
have to evaluate each location. There is a good chance that Lower Manhattan
could use the vibrancy that cars bring.
RW: Where do you fit on the political spectrum of transportation?
SS: There is a very well-defined political spectrum when it comes to transportation,
and the car is the center around which it revolves. The very pro-car is
conservative and the anti-car is the most liberal. You may be surprised
to find that some political conservatives are thinking very much the same
way as the very liberal transportation people.
Now, the people on the far left have been saying that the car should pay
for itself, that it takes up space and therefore we should use congestion
pricing. In a conference we ran about value pricing with the Manhattan Institute,
we found that the politically conservative position is that, "All the
left is saying is that we should have a market-based approach to solving
transportation. We like it!"
RW: Recently you've been advocating for tolls on the East River bridges.
SS: What we have now on the East River is an awful system because you have
people shopping for the cheaper bridges, cheaper trips. You can either pay
a lot of money to go through the Battery or Midtown tunnels, or you can
go through city streets and connect to the free bridges.
The Midtown and Battery tunnels and the Triborough Bridge all have nice
limited-access highways connecting them to the boroughs, but the free bridges
really don't. Those are city streets connecting them.
It is a really bad planning policy to have people travelling through city
streets when you could be keeping people on limited access highways. And
then we have the most bizarre thing on Staten Island, where tolls only go
one-way, going into Staten Island, and they're doubled on the way out. So
for a trucker from Brooklyn who wants to go to New Jersey, the direct route
might be over the Verrazano Bridge to the Staten Island Expressway and then
over to the New Jersey Turnpike, but to do that it may cost more than $40.
So instead, the trucker goes down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, over the
creaky, rumbling, Manhattan bridge, inch along Canal Street going through
Chinatown, Tribeca, and Soho, and spend a half-hour spewing diesel fumes
onto people's homes to get to the Holland tunnel without paying a dime on
tolls. Our policy encourages the biggest trucks to go through neighborhoods
rather than highways. That's crazy.
RW: So what is your vision for tolling the bridges?
SS: My vision is that all four East River bridges would be E-Z Passed with
the toll revenue going towards maintaining the bridges. This would relieve
congestion because you wouldn't have so many lanes closed due to construction
and emergencies.
Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, has introduced this in London and
he even goes a step further. We should put an E-Z pass for any car that
enters Manhattan's central business district. If you enter Manhattan below
60th Street, it'll trigger your E-Z Pass, and if you continue to use it
for a number of hours, you would continue to be charged.
It's happening in California on State Route 91, and Minnesota just issued
a request for proposals. You could price people for using the interior avenues
rather than the exterior avenues, for travelling during Christmas time when
we have our worst traffic--charge more during peak hours, less at night.
RW: How do you answer the criticism that putting tolls on the East River
bridges will be unfair to poor people?
SS: Far more poor people are in the subways; very few people can afford
to drive into Manhattan and park during peak hours anyway. We could have
a program where Brooklyn and Queens residents pay less--it's already done
in the Rockaways and in Staten Island.
There could be equity formulas. Excess revenue can be put towards public
transportation. Will there be a couple of hardship stories? Yes, but we
did this to New Jersey. We put a toll across every entry point from Jersey
to NY and that hasn't stopped lower-, middle-, upper-class people from coming
in.
RW: Do you think value pricing will happen in New York?
SS: I think it's an issue for a non-election year. We might have to wait
till after the gubernatorial elections. We're very heartened by Pataki's
transportation policy thus far. He did insert in the budget a line item
for $800 million by 2006 from value pricing. That to me can mean just one
thing: E-Z Passing the East River bridges. We may really see it.
RW: You were a taxi driver, then a traffic commissioner, and now a consultant
to all of these urban design and traffic engineering problems. What do you
think these professions have to learn from one another?
SS: I think you need to be a user--one of the biggest mistakes that we've
made is that so many people doing the planning have suburban mentalities.
When I ask city kids to design a bridge they're busy figuring out where
the pedestrians go, where the bikes will go, where the trains will go.
Here in NYC in the late 1950s we made the Verrazano Narrows--12 lanes with
the most majestic view of the harbor, the bay, and the ocean. And there's
no bikeway, walkway, or trains. It's a suburban mentality. If we'd given
it to a city kid to design it would be the most romantic spot in the city!
In the 1970s, Mayor Lindsey called me into a meeting about closing Central
Park to cars during certain hours and I started talking about the real benefits
of closing the park to cars and the benefits that it brings to bicyclists.
Roy Cottam joked to everyone, "You all have to remember that Sam here
is a subway rider!"
All these planners lived in the suburbs and they made me look like the freak
because I rode the subway! It's a mistake to be a planner and not be a user.
I think it's great that for one month out of each year people who run the
Chicago Transit Authority have to be either a bus driver, or a conductor,
or in some way do it.
RW: Is traffic planned or does it just happen and then people try and manage
it?
SS: Well, there was a conspiracy to destroy the transit systems of city
after city and GM, Phillips Petrol, and Firestone tires were all convicted.
But they destroyed the transit systems and we then tried to build cities
around the car.
European cities ended up mirroring us. Thirty years ago, London hardly had
traffic problems, but now European city after European city, Asian city
after Asian city, they all have traffic problems now because they copied
us. In Sao Paolo, the rich travel by helicopter because the traffic problem
is so bad.
Everybody copied our mistake! They say, "Oh, we want to be like Americans
and drive around in Cadillacs." It's baffling to me because even in
the 1960s, Jane Jacobs and a lot of other planners were already writing
about how the auto was destroying the cities. The Cross Bronx Expressway
battles were in the 1950s!
So, before a lot of these cities had even been developed, they already knew
it was a mistake to build a city around the car. Please: if you haven't
already built your city to be adapted to the car, don't! It's a mistake.
RW: Why do you think people want cars so much?
SS: First of all there was the conspiracy that destroyed public transportation,
so it's not accidental that people want cars. I have no doubt that that
kind of conspiracy goes on in other countries, though we may not hear about
it.
Car people have been brilliant at marketing cars. If you take public transportation
you're not cool. The people who design cars are so confident that we traffic
engineers and planners aren't going to solve the congestion problem that
they've made the interiors of cars so comfortable that people won't mind
spending extra time inside them. The chairs are ergonomically designed,
you can save the settings have 15 different settings for each car user,
it's got places for your cups attachments for your phone, fax machines,
home offices, televisions, superior sound systems, navigation devices. I
understand that they've started having certain odors in cars that they've
tested that will say to an 18-year-old boy that "you'll get a lot of
girls if you get this car" or a girl vice-versa!
This is huge business. You see people convinced that they should sit in
enormous machines with tremendous power to travel 100 miles an hour as they
inch along at one mile an hour. In some cases what they're really doing
is providing more seating in midtown Manhattan and making it really comfortable.
RW: So, does public transit need a PR campaign?
SS: I have a magazine which I'll show you. I took Playboy and Playgirl and
put the logo of Infrastructure Finance magazine on top of them and ran it
at a conference saying, "Infrastructure must become sexy." The
civil rights movement became sexy. That made it attractive to people. Martin
Luther King, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy--they were real leaders, incredibly
attractive individuals. The men and women singing folk songs made the Civil
Rights movement sexy and it widened that whole arena. The thousands became
millions. Maybe we should use Hollywood. I always thought that it would
be great, instead of LA Law to have NY Engineer.
RW: Do you foresee this kind of mass movement about infrastructure? Do you
think this is something we can expect?
SS: I'm beginning to see it, I'll tell you. The engineer of 100 years ago
was considered a heroic, romantic figure. Willa Cather's first novel, "Alexander's
Bridge" talks about Bartley Alexander, a heroic bridge builder with
flowing hair and everything. He was thought about in worldly terms; his
opinion was important in politics.
The engineers of the 1970s and 1980s were thought of as nerd-like, you know,
"Revenge of the Nerds." That was the view, and it wasn't so far
off. Now, I'm seeing a change again. I'm very impressed with my staff and
the students that I now have as freshman at Cooper Union. They're far more
articulate, less shy than they used to be. Who's to say that the hero of
2005 won't be a female engineer, vaulting a huge chasm somewhere?
RW: You were responsible for a lot of those sassy parking signs under Koch,
right?
SS: I did "Don't even think of parking here," "No standing,
No stopping, No parking, No kidding." And I had "Gridlock busters,
don't block the box." I gave out positive tickets when I was traffic
commissioner. I went out with the Rockettes around Christmas time and we
gave positive tickets to people who stopped at a green light when they couldn't
go ahead with a free parking token inside and tickets to Radio City Music
Hall. Ed Koch loved it. He was a fun-loving mayor.
RW: Do you think these aggressive traffic-education campaigns were effective?
SS: Absolutely. Everybody knew about blocking the box. It caught on instantly.
"Don't even think of parking here"--they looked up at that sign
and they stopped thinking about parking there. I think some humor in this
is fine. I once read an article by an Israeli psychologist who used "Don't
even think of parking here" as evidence of the authoritarian nature
of Americans.
RW: What's the worst street in Manhattan?
SS: 47th between 5th and 6th avenues, that's because it's the Diamond District
and everybody wants to be very near to their merchandise. I tried very hard
to clean up that block but people didn't mind the tickets. It's still like
that: I was driving up there the other day and I was passed by two guys
pushing a hot dog cart. I never caught up to them!
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