A story-filled street stroll with the one, the only “Gridlock Sam”
In Part 2 of our Q&A, New York City transportation legend Sam Schwartz discusses technology’s role in the future of streets.
You can read Part 1 of our conversation with Sam Schwartz here. And you can hear us discuss Flexible Streets with Sam on City of the Future.
How do we build on some of the street design improvements we’ve seen during the pandemic?
So in cities, we have to begin to balance things. So right now, with the pandemic, we’re seeing city street space, which was totally for cars — either the storage or movement of cars, trucks, motor vehicles — can be used for sitting areas, for dining areas, for bikeways, for all sorts of other uses. Play streets! So this ought to be a moment that we rethink and we figure out this conundrum of more people wanting to use the streets and bike or walk or dine. And yet more people are afraid to use transit, and want to use cars during this time.
So how can you solve that? Well, again, I’m a believer in history. We’ve encountered emergencies in the past, whether it was transit strikes when too many people came in by car. Or after 9/11, there was fear of riding transit. A number of lines were out of commission. Or Superstorm Sandy, a number of tunnels were flooded.
What did we do then? We created occupancy restrictions to come into Manhattan. So in our densest areas, that’s something we should be looking at right now. That can happen almost overnight. And we could reduce the number of cars coming into the Central Business District. We should move congestion pricing forward. Form the traffic mobility panel. Put in the hardware that we know eventually will get approved and tell the Feds that if they threaten us with withholding federal funds or something like that, we’ll pay them back. Just one year of congestion pricing will pay for all the money that they’ve spent on those roads.
So we need to just have a more balanced approach.
And what would that look like for you?
So what should the streets of the future look like? Probably wider sidewalks. Probably more restaurants outdoors with some capacity to do it almost 12 months a year through some heating, through some design solutions. Trucks should be allowed to come in in the early morning and make all of those deliveries. We should use our streets in a smart way temporally. And we could have a city that we really enjoy. When you travel to places that have wide expanses of pedestrian oases, you get an immediate, wonderful feeling about that place.
Years ago I was walking up 6th Avenue and there was a decal stenciled on a light pole. It said, “The streets are saying something.” And New York streets should say: number one, we walk. Number two, we take transit, and we bike, and we eat, and we enjoy, and we like music and all the other things. We dance in the streets! We should be holding dances out in the street now.
You said, “We should use our streets in a smart way temporally.” A lot of people think of streets in a rigid way. How do we change that mindset to accept more flexibility in our street space?
You know, our technology is so good today. First of all, every driver in a car could be warned that they can’t go on a particular street. And they could know that in advance, whether it’s Waze or Google Maps or anything else, it could reroute them away from streets that are closed.
We can also use technology so signs change. There’s no reason for a sign to be static. Look at what the advertising community does. They figured a billboard was worth $50,000 a month and they made it now worth $300,000 a month because instead of one static message, they may have 10 messages on it.
Traffic control devices could come down. An arm could come down automatically during certain times.
These are the 2020s. We can do almost anything, technologically. Let’s do it! And in some cases, you may need some personnel to help out with the situation. And emergency vehicles should have what are called preemption devices. Some firehouses have devices to change the traffic signals so that they can get out of the firehouses in a number of cities. You have devices, including New York on buses, that can change the traffic signal pattern.
So we should think of the street of the future as being one that does change during the day, during the week, during the season, and we should use some technology and human power combined to make it happen.
Where are you taking us now?
You know, let’s go down 94th. Back 50 years ago, under John Lindsay, a little bit of street space there was taken away from cars and given to pedestrians. It’s the first instance that I know of where asphalt began to be used for other purposes.
Commissioners come in, and mayors, and they think everything is brand new and nobody thought about it before — and I was probably as guilty as anyone else. But now with 50 years of doing this, I could point to a lot of things when people say, “This is the first time we closed off cars.”
One of my most memorable possessions is a letter that I have signed, sent to me personally when I was a commissioner, of Katharine Hepburn complaining about making 49th and 50th streets bus-only streets in the 1980s. I love having that letter.
Any other famous letters?
Let me think. Well, some famous tows. We towed Henry Kissinger’s car. This one will be denied: we towed Donald Trump’s driver’s car in the 1980s.
Approaching 94th Street and Central Park West
Take a look over here. Do you see?
Yeah, what is this brick?
This is called a neckdown, and this was done circa 1971 when I started with the traffic department. It’s the first attempt at trying to tame a street through design. The traffic has to go more slowly. The pedestrian has only about 15 feet to cross as opposed to 30 feet to cross, so the pedestrian’s exposure it’s a lot less over here.
Here we see a father with a child in the stroller and within four seconds, he’d cross the street as opposed to — it would have been eight seconds. Four extra seconds — multiply it by 8 million people crossing and you increase the probability of crashes.
And watch how the vehicle has to turn slowly, and turning vehicles are a serious problem with pedestrians. When you make the neck narrow, they have to slow down. Slowing down saves lives, but speed limit alone is not enough.
And the brick is just a visual cue to slow down?
Yeah. It’s for the pedestrian crosswalk. Back in those days, this was used as a crosswalk.
This expanded, curved sidewalk is what makes it the neckdown, though, right?
Right. The pedestrian now is not coming out from behind a parked car. I am perfectly visible right at the edge of the curve, but if I was back here, where the curve used to be, I am not visible to that car. So my exposure time is reduced, my visibility goes up. It’s just a wonderful feature.
Pointing to a traditional division of road/sidewalk
See the difference, this part of 94th didn’t get treated. So you have no visibility because you have SUVs parked on both sides. Now maybe they’ll see the top of my head, for someone a little over six feet tall. They wouldn’t be able to see you.
I looked at crashes on Canal Street and I often found the same MO. There were pedestrians that were killed crossing in front of trucks, and it was often shorter people, because the truck driver could not see the person. For 25 years, I fought to get mirrors on the front of trucks to look down and it’s finally a law in New York State.
Walking west on 94th, pointing to a No Parking/Street Cleaning Sign
I could even tell you when the broom first went through the P sign. That means it’s a sanitation regulation. It was David Gurin who came up with that idea, and then I had one of my guys draw it up. That was probably around 1979.
The sign that I’m most famous for is, “Don’t even think of parking here.” First time I showed that to Ed Koch, he loved it.
Is this typical when you walk around town, Sam? You’re just telling people about the hidden histories?
Yeah, my kids groan when I do it. Although I have a grandson who’s really interested in bridges. So he likes walking around with me and hearing about all these things. But it’s also terrible to go to a movie with me if it’s about New York because I will say if the sign is wrong or they got the time period wrong.
Pointing to an expanded sidewalk.
So take a look at this first attempt at pedestrianization. Some trees in a barrel. You can see there’s no change to the curve over here but a reclamation of pedestrian space with these ugly barrels.
A designer had something much more interesting in mind. This is the city’s execution of it, but the city’s execution today would be stupendous. But this is the beginning, and it started 50 years ago.
Sam, when you’re thinking about balance, how much street space right now is devoted to parking that you think could be shifted to another use?
It’s a good question. About 35 percent of our land or so is devoted to the automobile, which includes parking. So 10 percent or so is parking and we could reduce the parking in commercial districts dramatically. There’s this misbelief that people are driving into most commercial districts in large numbers when in fact, it’s the people who are walking.
We tried to close a couple of streets in Chinatown, Pell and Doyer, in the late 1970s or ’80s. We had all the data that 98 percent of the people walked, didn’t drive, didn’t need any parking.
We did South Street Seaport. We closed that. We also did Fulton Street, Brooklyn. So people think the first busway was 14th Street. But Fulton Street, Brooklyn was done 1970, ‘71.
There was a movement in the ’60s that was very much like what you are seeing today. If you look back at the period, you’ll see many of the great ideas of today had their basis from there — and some of that was from people in the ’30s. The ’30s, ’60s, and the ’20s now are pretty exciting periods.
Pointing to a protected bike lane at West 94th Street and Columbus Avenue.
These are the bike lane designs that were done under the Bloomberg administration and then continued under de Blasio. I did the very first physically separated bike lanes on 6th Avenue, 7th, Broadway, and 5th. Lasted less than two months.
It was right after the 1980 transit strike, and people started to complain about the bikes. There was a racial component to it. Too many community groups saw it as Black teenagers coming into their neighborhoods. They didn’t want bike lanes. But the ones in Midtown, people were complaining about because pedestrians weren’t used to it. There weren’t many bike riders back then that were using it. And so, the mayor one day called me into his office and he told me: “You have to take the bike lanes out.”
I had just put them in! And I said, “Why, Mr. Mayor?” He said, “I can’t go anywhere in the city without somebody complaining to me about the bike lanes.” He said, “Last week, I was with President Carter, in the back of his limousine, with Hugh Carey, the governor, and we’re running up 6th Avenue and Hugh Carey turns to the president and says: ‘Mr. President, look out the window at that bike lane. See how Ed is pissing away your money.’”
So I knew I was dead. I took them out. I shaved my beard. My beard was red in those days. I thought that would help me from the media not spotting me. Well, it didn’t help at all.
I thought Carter was an environmentalist?
Yeah, I mean, he didn’t say anything. It was just the final straw of Ed Koch, and I don’t think Hugh Carey was anti-environment or anything, but this was decades ahead of when enough people would accept bikes.
There was no movement then. It wasn’t as if we had supporters in any great numbers, even from the hardcore bike riders, because they saw the bike lanes as being marginalized and that they should own the road. So I was very surprised at the backlash that we got. In fact, I continue to get backlash. I proposed bicycle bridges to Manhattan, for example.
Is that the proposed project from Queens?
Yes. It makes a lot of sense. We haven’t built a bridge since 1909.
Back in the ’90s or so, we built a road out in the river so no lanes had to be closed on the FDR Drive. I was hoping that the city and the state would keep it as a promenade. They didn’t. But they spent all that money to build a road temporarily for cars to avoid a detour.
So if they could do that, why not build a road for the bikes to touchdown in Manhattan? So they can be part of the continuation of the promenade around Manhattan Island. Twenty-seven miles of continuous path. It would be wonderful.
Arriving at the “open street” at West 94th Street and West End Avenue.
So, here is a street that’s closed with wooden saw horses.
So the sign says, “Share the road. Do not enter except local traffic. Five miles per hour.”
So what they mean by the local traffic is in block. So that car is just continuing, pedestrians be damned, dog walkers be damned.
This car, too.
Yeah, again, barely slowing down, and there could be children playing.
This is early 20th-century technology: a wooden sawhorse. These sawhorses were old when I started 50 years ago.
What I recommend is that we have variable signs. So, a sign where we have the city’s speed limit could right now be saying: “Do not enter!” And someone who enters then gets points on their license if they get stopped. And they get an alert on their phone. So using that kind of technology.
Walking up West End Avenue.
So, West End Avenue over here, if you were here, I’d say five years ago, this was six lanes. Two parked, two travel lanes in each direction. So, you did not have this pedestrian island over there. So, by going from two lanes in each direction to one, it increased the density of the traffic, which slows the traffic down.
Secondly, the crossing distance goes down — you’re only looking at one lane as opposed to trying to figure out two lanes. Sadly, it was, I believe, a 10-year-old boy named Cooper Stock who was killed right at that corner on 97th and West End. The street is named after him. There’s a street sign there that led to the city providing this kind of attention.
And sadly, too often, things would get enforcement when there’s a tragedy, suddenly you’ll see a clampdown. Enforcement tends to be not scientific, not based on data.
This Sidewalk Talk Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Follow Sidewalk Labs with our weekly newsletter or subscribe to our podcast, “City of the Future.”
