Talking streets with New York City transportation legend Sam Schwartz
During his decades in government, “Gridlock Sam” survived the whims of changing administrations by harnessing the power of design and data.
In 1980, during a transit strike that led to cars overloading Manhattan’s street grid, Sam Schwartz — then an assistant commissioner at the Department of Transportation — devised something he called a “grid lock” prevention plan.
“I released it to the lexicon, and gridlock has been associated with me ever since,” says Schwartz, a local legend now popularly known as Gridlock Sam. “After I coined gridlock, I tried pedlock. Never caught on.”
Schwartz rose to become Traffic Commissioner from 1982–1986, then Chief Engineer until 1990. In 1995, he started his own consulting company, working with cities to create urban mobility plans that balance the needs of drivers with those of pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, and everyone else just trying to get around quickly and safely.
Sidewalk Talk editors Eric Jaffe and Vanessa Quirk spent a masked, social-distanced afternoon with Schwartz last summer, while taping the Flexible Streets episode for City of the Future. The chat was so expansive that we couldn’t possibly fit it all into the episode, and so we wanted to share as much as possible with readers. Here’s Part 1 of 2 of an edited transcript of our conversation.
So we’re in Central Park at the moment. My understanding is that you were instrumental in figuring out how cars were going to weave in and out of Central Park.
Central Park’s a great example of road-building. It was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the 1850s. There weren’t cars, then, it was carriages and people and people on horses. And what they did is they created grade separation, meaning one level goes over the other. And as far as I can tell, that’s the first time that that was done deliberately.
So their design was brilliant. New Yorkers will tell you Central Park is a continuous park from 59th through 110th. In fact, it’s five separate pods connected by bridges that look like parks. So you never think you leave the park. And the cars, on the other hand, there are 16 lanes for cars. Yet amazingly, no one would call this a highway.
It’s an amazing example of designing a city in a way that cars and people can coexist, without taking away from the experience of people.
I was challenged with that about 15 years ago by the city of Windsor, Ontario, right opposite Detroit. The city was confused about where to put a new bridge to connect Detroit and Windsor. It’s the biggest commercial international crossing that the U.S. has. So I helped them select a location for the new bridge, but also I said, “How do we design a highway in a city that’s already built up?”
Well, I went back to Frederick Law Olmsted and used his principles that the highway should not split the city apart, that the highway should be an addition. You should still have the ability to have car-free environments. And ultimately that was adopted. So the lessons from Frederick Law Olmsted were then used to design a highway in Canada. And I’m really pleased to say, it’s now completed. I would’ve made it narrower. I would have done two lanes in each direction, but it’s hard convincing highway authorities on either side of the border that you can get by with fewer lanes.
It’s hard convincing authorities in general to design for people, not just cars.
I started in 1971 as a junior engineer in the traffic department. There wasn’t a Department of Transportation yet. And the traffic department’s function was to move as many cars as fast as possible. Except that we had this mayor, John Lindsay, who said, “Wait a second. Maybe we should be doing things differently.”
So under John Lindsey, I started working on a number of proposals to tame the car. We worked on congestion pricing. We called it tolls on the East and Holland River bridges. And under John Lindsay, Central Park and Prospect Park were closed for the first time to cars on weekends in the summer. And gradually it expanded to daylight savings hours on weekends. I was a big advocate for all of that.
Unfortunately, John Lindsay did not get reelected. A new mayor came in, Abe Beame, and we took a turn in the opposite direction.
So I got called into the traffic commissioner’s office one day. And he said, Mary Beame, the mayor’s wife, got caught in a traffic jam on 5th Avenue. You have to come up with a report that says the park should be reopened to cars.
So I actually wrote a report that did not support Mary Beame, but I knew I had to give up something. So I had the 6th Avenue entrance opened to 72nd Street and the hours cut back.
But at the same time, I was working with NRDC, which was suing the city on behalf of Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, and a dozen other environmental groups to implement tolls on the bridges. So I fed them a lot of information. I was kind of like “Deep Throat” in the 1970s, getting them the documents to sue the city.
NRDC won the lawsuit, but, unfortunately, it was stopped by an act of Congress. But that earned me a lot of visibility with environmentalists.
So back to your Central Park study. How did that come about?
In 1978, Ed Koch got elected mayor, and he hired a fellow named David Gurin to be deputy commissioner in charge of transportation planning. So David Gurin, who was one of the founders of Transportation Alternatives, came from a kind of radical transportation, environmental movement. And Ed Koch said to David, this is what David relayed to me, “I want you to do some radical things in New York City.”
So the Department of Transportation had just been formed. He knew that he had to get the guys in the traffic department on his side. So he asked around through his environmental buddies, whether there was anybody in the traffic department that he could trust. And I was relatively low level. I was director of research and I did some design work.
And David said, “Let’s take a bike ride.” We went into Prospect Park and we rode around. And David said to me, “Can we take a lane away from traffic?” I said, “Yeah, we could.” So he then appointed me his deputy as an assistant commissioner in the Department of Transportation. And we began working on Prospect Park and Central Park.
So we did traffic counts at entrances and exits. And when the design of the park came to me in 1971 or ’72, I actually X’ed out an exit ramp that then turned into grass. So I made grass grow from asphalt.
How were traffic counts done in the 1970s? And how much confidence did you have in the data?
So traffic counts in the 1970s were largely done by pneumatic tubes. Every two impacts would be one car. How accurate was it? Within 10 to 20 percent. It wasn’t particularly accurate. And then sometimes, people in communities who wanted traffic signals, they would jump on it to make the counts show up. We would find like these spikes of kids bouncing on it, or maybe somebody driving back and forth a lot.
So what we did in those days is somebody stood out with a clipboard and we would have these counters with five or six buttons. And it’ll say left turn, right turn, straight through.
So what you do is you calculate the amount of time that cars may have to stop, meaning the amount of red time, and the amount of green time. So if 40 percent of the time the signal is green, you throw that 40 percent into your formula and you come up with lane capacity.
And what we found is, very easily, we could take the three lanes and make them two lanes. And it’s really the first time lanes were taken away from cars since the Nineteen-teens and -twenties. A wonderful picture people should look up is what Park Avenue looked like in the 1920s. You could see why it was called Park Avenue. It was a beautiful park in the center.
But the 1920s was the beginning of the modernist movement. And modernists said, “A successful city is a city for speed.” And it’s a city for the car. And after that, we took sidewalk space and narrowed it. We took park land and narrowed it. We widened roadways.
So this is the first time, 1978, ’79, that we started to take away lanes from cars. Broadway Plaza, the closing of Times Square was planned during the Lindsay administration. And that continued through the Koch administration. We did a number of things then, and a lot of it got forgotten afterwards until Janette Sadik-Khan came around and began continuing many of the things.
Can you talk about Times Square? Was that process similar?
Yeah. So I worked on it two different times, once in the Lindsay administration. So we counted the traffic. We counted the cross-traffic pedestrians, but pedestrians weren’t given the weight of today. So pedestrians weren’t a big part of the calculation.
We did the calculations, we wrote a report, but it was at the end of the Lindsay administration. And he had gotten burned on one of my first projects, the red zone to ban cars from Midtown Manhattan. We couldn’t follow through.
And so that sat until 2007, 2008, sometime like that, and Janette Sadik-Khan called me in as an advisor. I was not a consultant, I was a free advisor to the traffic guys.
If you’ve got pedestrians — and, boy, do you have pedestrians at Times Square — you have some serious traffic problems as well as safety problems. So I explained that their model just didn’t know New York and couldn’t figure it out. It was like the old traffic models. And I explained how actually traffic would get better on 6th Avenue. Eventually they fine-tuned it to reflect reality, and nobody would take it away today.
Can you speak about the importance of gathering data in doing what you do?
It reminds me of a meeting I had about five years ago in Brussels, with transportation officials from throughout Europe. I attended two or three days of sessions, and then I was the keynote talking about my book Street Smarts: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars. And after I did my presentation, somebody from the audience asked me a question I hadn’t encountered before.
And it was: “What do you see as the difference between European planning and the U.S.?”
I thought for a moment and I said, “You believe in science.” Every one of the presentations that they gave opened with the environmental benefits, the health benefits, the energy consumption, carbon footprint. When I do presentations in the U.S., I have to answer two things: what is it doing to the economy and what’s in it for me, meaning the person that I’m talking to.
If we open on, “Well, this’ll be good for the environment, lower the carbon footprint, and others,” we’ll be driven out of most community boards.
So the importance of data is, first of all, in a place like New York, you get sued all the time. If God came down and said, “I want to build the Garden of Eden in New York city and I won’t displace a single person,” he’d be sued by the serpent advocates that he had been improper and impolite to the serpents.
So the importance of data is (a) get to the right answer, but (b) also to build a case that is bulletproof in a lawsuit.
Throughout your career, you’ve seen the zig and zag of politics and how that influences how the city gives space to or away from cars. Now we’re in a moment when street space is more critical than ever. How do you think the pandemic is going to change New York? Are we going to think about sharing space differently now?
I think this is a terrible tragedy, but also a great opportunity to rethink our street space. And I think it’s important for us to look back in history and ask: how did we get here?
I’ve traveled around the world and I’ve studied cities and I’ve written a couple of books on traffic. And it seems to me that the share of automobile traffic in the low twenties, 20 percent, is about right. You will always have people that need cars for whatever particular reason. It could be people with disabilities, people that can’t take transit, or for whatever reason they need it.
So I’m not anti-car. I want to see balanced transportation. I also want to see cars in urban areas go very slowly. And how do cars go slower? Not by just putting up speed limit signs — that doesn’t do it. You need to do it through design.
I met with the equivalent of the commissioner in Barcelona. They have a million-and-a-half to 2 million people, and you can count on your fingers the number of pedestrian casualties that they have. And when I asked, “What is your secret?” He said, “I make the lanes very, very narrow.” When you have the narrowest lanes, you don’t feel comfortable going fast as a driver.
I learned that on the Williamsburg Bridge. In the 1980s, the feds wanted me to knock down the Williamsburg Bridge, build a brand new bridge, because it was corroding. It was also what they called substandard, meaning the lanes were too narrow, they weren’t 12-foot lanes with shoulders, which is what the feds love. They were under 9 feet wide at the towers. And they said, “We’ll give you the money for a new bridge. We’ll build these beautiful highway ramps through this desolate area called Williamsburg and the Lower East Side.”
It didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t about to destroy Williamsburg or the Lower East Side. My roots are there. My mother, after fleeing from Poland, lived in the Lower East Side and Williamsburg. I have family there.
So what I did is I studied the bridge. So if it’s substandard, why is that bad? “Well, if it’s substandard,” they said, “it affects the capacity. You can’t move as many vehicles.” I said, “You know, I’m the traffic commissioner. I don’t want to move any more vehicles into Manhattan. So forget about that.” They said, “Well, it’s not safe.” So I did a safety study on the bridge and I found that the points at which the roadways were narrowest, under nine foot lanes, had the fewest crashes. They were the safest parts of the bridge.
So design has a huge impact. If you drive over the Williamsburg Bridge, when you’re coming to those towers, boy, you’re more alert than any other part of that bridge.
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.”
