52 MARCH | APRIL 2016 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Street Fighter

“Gridlock Sam” Schwartz is an icon in New York’s century-long war with traffi c. Can his fi nal campaign reshape the city’s transportation future? BY TREY POPP

53 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 2016 PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HAMERMAN THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 201653 half past nine on a Friday high up on poles to discourage theft, but ernment agency—at any level of govern- morning and the Henry nonetheless became coveted collector’s ment—has long puzzled many New Yorkers. It’s Hudson Parkway is wide items virtually from their debut.) And for good reason: Schwartz made them open when Sam Schwartz GCE’70 receives Indeed, a cheeky obituarist might be up. (The proximity of many of these signs his first GPS instruction. We’re speeding tempted to tell Schwartz’s life story entire- to FBI, DEA, and Secret Service offices north out of . Upper West Side ly through signs. One of his per- provides a clue about whose identities he brickwork flickers through the bare- sonal favorites adorns the Carroll Street was helping to conceal.) branched plane trees lining Riverside Park. Bridge, one of four remaining retractable Which is not to say that he reigned by In two miles, intones the halting yet serene- bridges in the United States, whose sliding catering to the mighty. The finest mo- ly unflappable voice of Default Female, wooden deck spans the Gowanus Canal in ment of his scrappy civil-service career bear right … onto I … Ninety-Five … North. Brooklyn. After orchestrating its restora- came when a hundred-odd countries de- Schwartz pauses mid-sentence and cocks tion in the late 1980s—against the will of clared war against his towing fleet, which his head slightly. “I don’t like the way she’s city budget honchos who wanted to tear it Schwartz had sicced on diplomats who’d going,” he says, in a mild Brooklyn accent. down and build a modern replacement collectively dodged tens of millions of “I’m going to go a different way.” with federal money—Schwartz hung a plac- dollars of illegal-parking fines under the New York may be bumper-to-bumper ard reading: “ORDINANCE of the City | Any shield of diplomatic immunity. Like a with drivers who know better than their Person Driving over this Bridge Faster grade-school miscreant sent to the prin- GPS Sherpas, but Schwartz has a special than a Walk will be Subject to a Penalty of cipal’s office, he was summoned to the claim to mastery, so we shoot past the Five Dollars For Each Offense.” United Nations. George Washington Bridge. And glide In 1984, as traffic commissioner, Schwartz “I’m told it was the best session of the along. Fort Lee slips by on the opposite had lines painted and signs posted around General Assembly countries—not an bank—you can still buy “I Survived Brooklyn’s Park Circle rotary—one of the empty seat in the place,” he reminisced Bridgegate” T-shirts commemorating the borough’s busiest intersections—desig- as we drove. “The Israelis and Arabs were traffic scandal that kneecapped Governor nating a horse crossing, to help the ani- pouring coffee for each another. Iran and Chris Christie—replaced by swiftly scroll- mals access Prospect Park trails from a Iraq were unified against me. I felt I had ing views of the Hudson River Palisades. nearby stable. “It’s about time,” he told brought peace to the world.” The State Everything’s moving smoothly when we The New York Times. ‘‘After all, horses Department felt otherwise—especially hit toll-plaza signs flashing warnings of were here way before cars.’’ once other countries retaliated in an impending gridlock. That rhetoric matched his record—and it outbreak of parking-privilege brinkman- Yet it doesn’t materialize—at least suffuses Street Smart, which begins with ship. It quashed Schwartz’s hometown nowhere in our path—and for a minute I an impassioned ode to the history of public crusade in favor of global détente. curse my luck. Traffic jams are not my that laments their 20th-century Even after David Dinkins’ rise to the idea of fun, but how many times do you domination by private automobiles. Four mayoralty ended Schwartz’s government get to battle gridlock alongside the man years before the horsewalk, Schwartz had career in 1990, he continued to fight traf- who coined the term? built curb-protected bicycle lanes on the fic. Through his consultancy, he advises Schwartz, a fleet-minded Brooklyn native avenues linking Central Park to Washington cities all over the world on transportation creeping up on 70 years of almost unrea- Square. Today, urban planners have a catch- strategy. He started a traffic column for sonable devotion to New York, is better phrase for this ethos: “Complete Streets”— the New York Daily News, which he still known as Gridlock Sam. The word first and Avenue has become an exem- writes. “William Safire, Thomas Friedman, appeared in print in a 1980 memo he plar. When Schwartz tried it, it was too far and E.R. Shipp are all fine as they go, but authored as the city’s chief traffic engineer, ahead of its time to last. for my money, the best newspaper col- and though he has tried to share credit Yet he could be equally creative in his umnist in New York is Gridlock Sam,” with a reluctant colleague, the coinage has efforts to improve life for drivers. (Which, asserted New York magazine’s Richard clung stubbornly to him ever since. of course, was the point of cracking down Turner in the mid-1990s. “I read it every “I’m pretty sure that the first line in on parking scofflaws, whose lane-blocking day, and I don’t even drive.” my obituary is going to mention it,” he ways exasperated hundreds of people “Perusing his column is a way to structure writes in his new book, Street Smart: The behind them.) Befitting a bureaucrat who your life, to achieve dominance over the Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars, which boasts of committing “low-level sabotage” city,” Turner mused. “With the counsel of splits the difference between memoir during his peonage in the Traffic Depart- Gridlock Sam, one can map out the day like and urban-transportation manifesto. ment—“I would widen a sidewalk to a Napoleon planning the Russian campaign.” That’s a fair bet. But it will leave plen- decent size here. Eliminate a parking lane It’s a telling comparison—as though a ty of nuggets jostling for the second line. there”—Schwartz’s street-sign oeuvre occa- driver’s best hope when battling New York Ever wonder about those Manhattan sionally had a cloak-and-dagger side. To traffic was momentary triumph on the street signs warning DON’T EVEN THINK this day, some Manhattan curbs are post- way to a catastrophe of empire-crippling OF PARKING HERE? Schwartz’s idea. ed with No Standing signs whose exemp- proportions. The irony of Schwartz’s nick- Same goes for their Koch-era cousins: NO tion for “authorized vehicles” is governed name, of course, is that gridlock is pre- PARKING, NO STANDING, NO STOPPING, by the cryptic initials AWM. The fact that cisely what he has spent his entire profes- NO KIDDING. (Both were deployed extra those letters fail to correspond to any gov- sional life trying to eliminate.

54 MARCH | APRIL 2016 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE amuel I. Schwartz was born in 1947, the youngest of four children sar- Sdined into a kitchen-and-two-bed- room apartment in Brooklyn’s rough-and- tumble Brownsville section. His parents were Polish immigrants. When Sam was four years old, they moved across the bor- ough to Bensonhurst, where his father ran a small grocery. Insofar as they were trading up, it was for the “orderly vio- lence” of a mob-controlled neighborhood. “People did not mug old women in Bensonhurst,” as Schwartz puts it. But gangs of kids clashed with chains and zip guns until some of them graduated to the ranks of organized-crime groups that oth- erwise enforced a fearful peace. It was the sort of neighborhood whose grittiness, to a kid who mastered it, instilled enduring devo- tion. Sam worked at his father’s store, played stickball on 83rd Street, and worshipped the Brooklyn Dodgers. His oldest brother, Brian, tells a story about the time he and

Times Square traffic, then and now.

Which brings us to what may be the most prized traffic sign in his personal collection. At a glance, it doesn’t seem that re- markable: RED ZONE | NO CARS 11AM-4PM MON THRU FRI. But the zone in question, which he helped to outline in the early 1970s under Mayor John Lindsay, was to have covered some 120 blocks in Midtown Manhattan. The project got far enough along that signs were manufactured, but “just weeks away” from planting them, as Schwartz tells it, “the mayor got cold feet.” (Later, Schwartz worked on an- other plan Lindsay championed: convert- ing into a pedestrian plaza. It failed to gain traction amid public opinion typified by a 1977 New York Times editorial that deemed the creation feurs expected to benefit, and plow a his two younger brothers went to Ebbets of “a nice pimp and prostitute prome- projected $1.5 billion in annual revenues Field on “Meet the Dodgers” day in 1956. nade” a poor trade for subjecting auto- into boosting mass transit services and “We were able to buy box seats on the mobiles to “certain chaos.”) improving roads and bridges. railing, right on the field—I think we prob- Forty years later, Times Square is per- It’s called Move NY. To critics, it’s a ably paid $4 a ticket,” he recalls. “And haps the liveliest and most commercial- last-ditch attempt to revive former whenever the Dodgers came around, we ly lucrative pedestrian mall in America. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s failed con- threw my younger brother over the fence. And Sam Schwartz is in the middle of gestion-pricing scheme. To proponents, And the Dodgers would pick him up and one last bid to reset the way New York it’s the first such plan that genuinely put him on their shoulders. So we have moves. It would charge every driver en- has the potential to benefit everyone— these pictures of Sam on Carl Furillo’s tering Manhattan south of 60th Street, and the political sophistication to actu- shoulders, Roy Campanella’s shoulders, cut tolls on outlying bridges where resi- ally pass. It may be the last best chance all the famous Dodgers.” dents lack strong public-transit options, for Gridlock Sam to modify the first line For eight-year-old Sam, it was just in the

HULTON ARCHIVE GETTY ARCHIVE CHENSIYUAN IMAGES; HULTON surcharge the taxis and app-based chauf- of his obituary. knick of time. The Dodgers abandoned

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 2016 55 Brooklyn for Los Angeles the next year, a in 1969 the self-described “long-haired streets, and traffic engineers have designed heartbreak followed by a steady trickle of hippie” enrolled in Penn’s civil engineering and managed that space for one purpose, friends to the suburbs—and then his older department, where he landed at the feet for decades. And that purpose of course siblings. They all moved for the same rea- of a Serbian émigré named Vukan Vuchic. has been to move cars, as quickly as pos- son, Schwartz says now: the lure of the Vuchic, who retired in 2010 as the UPS sible. And if there’s congestion, we build automobile, which was simultaneously Foundation Professor of Transportation our way out. That approach has really had overwhelming “the streets on which we Engineering, casts a long shadow over severe negative impacts—including even lived, played, and worked” in “nearly every the realm of urban transit. “He’s kind of the obesity epidemic. And Sam, being hon- city that had been built before the advent like the Yoda of the field,” says Paul est about that, and not denying it, and of the internal combustion engine.” Steely White, executive director of Trans- instead trying to reform it—he’s recogniz- Sixty years later, Schwartz has the look portation Alternatives, a New York advo- ing the impact that traffic engineers have, of a professor who’s happiest during an cacy organization. Vuchic still keeps an and their responsibility.” oversubscribed office hour. There’s more office in the Towne Building, where he Fresh out of Penn, Schwartz wanted to salt than pepper in his gently wavy hair, recently reflected on teaching “for 30 or work for the Transit Authority. and a close-cropped beard frames a wide, 40 years against the wind” in a discipline That hope crashed against a tough job mar- toothy grin. In conversation he has a way that valued the free flow of automobiles ket ruled by rank-and-file employees moving of canting his head and arching one eye, above everything else, including the liv- up the ladder. So, master’s degree in hand, a gesture that suggests bemusement or ability of the cities they plied. he took what he could get: shifts driving a shrewdness, but derives most closely from “When I was a student in Berkeley, in taxi cab. When he eventually accepted a job simple attentiveness. His oldest brother 1963 or 1964, the annual report of the as a junior engineer in the city’s traffic attributes that trait to the hours Sam Traffic Engineering department of Los department, he felt “a little bit like I sold spent working for their father, who was Angeles came out,” Vuchic recalled. “And out,” as he put it years later in a letter to particularly sensitive to the needs of his it began: ‘Pedestrian remains the main Vuchic. “I was in ‘car-land.’” poorest customers. “In that store, not an obstacle to the free flow of automobiles He didn’t have to wait long to get a pow- item had a price,” Brian told me. “And we in the Los Angeles area.’ That was the erful lesson in “the practical consequenc- had to, as kids, look at a customer, look attitude. Let’s remove those people!” es of overdependence on cars.” On at the item, and then decide upon a price. Vuchic, who treasures memories of criss- December 15, 1973, a dump truck carrying And you had to begin knowing people very crossing Belgrade in streetcars as a boy, 30 tons of asphalt for repairs well—like if they were poor, or if they were spent his career trying to shift the empha- dropped through the West Side Elevated charlatans. So you really got a very good sis to urban quality of life—staking out what Highway onto the street below. A sedan training in understanding people. And I you might call the approach to tumbled down after it—though miracu- think Sam really got that in the grocery transportation engineering. Schwartz lously no one was seriously injured. store. Because you had to really meet with proved to be a kindred spirit. “He was enjoy- The elevated highway’s subsequent clo- people of different types, of different ages, ing that life,” Vuchic told me, “but not under- sure south of 18th Street gave Schwartz of different needs.” standing how it can be made. So I think my a tall task: figuring out what to do with That democratic ethos has stuck to teaching gave him the basis.” the 80,000 cars a day that would need an Schwartz throughout his adulthood—as Vuchic also infected Schwartz with a alternate route. It was a formative experi- has an abiding bitterness over the certain radicalism about the field. ence, because something strange hap- Dodgers’ abandonment of Ebbets Field. “Traffic engineers have failed,” Schwartz pened: the traffic simply seemed to van- “It was almost like a death knell for once told Aaron Naparstek, the founding ish. “Somehow, those eighty thousand Brooklyn, and for New York City,” he said editor of Streetsblog, a transportation- cars went somewhere, but to this day we as we drove. “The Giants moved at the focused website in New York. “If you com- have no idea where,” Schwartz writes. “Or same time. And it began a cascade, post- pare the accomplishments of our profes- how, two years later, twenty-five thousand World War II, in which we saw New York sion [in this country] over the last 50 years more people were getting into Manhattan’s City get worse and worse and worse … to the medical profession, our performance Central Business District.” And it seemed like that was the pattern, is equivalent to millions of people still It was a demonstration of what econo- and that would always be the pattern, dying of polio, influenza, and other minor mists call induced demand—that an increase until someday New York would become bacterial diseases that have been cured.” in the supply of a good, in this case a , uninhabitable by many people.” “It’s totally Sam that he can be so irrever- stokes higher consumption of it. Shrink the But a stubborn hometown loyalty was ent and honest about his own profession— supply, and to some degree traffic would already baked into him by the time he was and really challenge himself and the profes- disappear with it. The effect was compelling a teenager. And Brian, who had become a sion to do better,” White says, offering a enough that the West Side Elevated Highway physicist, pointed him toward what proved full-throated defense of what struck me as was ultimately taken down rather than to be the ideal target for a city lover with a a questionable comparison between traffic rebuilt, saving the city a considerable bill mathematical bent of mind. “Traffic,” he planning and the biomedical revolution. for construction and maintenance at appar- told Sam during his senior year of college— “More than 40,000 people are killed on ently negligible costs to drivers. in a scene both men liken to the iconic our roadways every year,” White says. “You For the next few years, Schwartz toiled “plastics” exchange in The Graduate. So know, 80 percent of our public space are in the middle ranks to advance an urban-

56 MARCH | APRIL 2016 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE ist and environmental agenda that fre- A bureaucrat with his eyes on a bigger into the sunset. It was a great story for quently clashed with departmental and prize might have commanded such a force Milton Lewis, and I made my point.” mayoral priorities. from the remotest corner office he could Illegal parking did indeed plummet In the mid-1970s, the National Resources find. But for Schwartz, the traffic gener- under Schwartz’s iron fist, and traffic Defense Council sued New York for fail- alship was the prize. He relished hitting speeds crept up—from 7.9 to 9.5 miles per ing to implement a transportation plan, the streets with his platoons, prodding hour on the avenues—according to that filed under the Clean Air Act, that man- idling drivers through a megaphone. New York article. His star rose further dated tolls on the Bridges to Stories of his exploits have attained when, in 1986, the Department of Trans- improve air quality. Mayor Abraham almost mythical status, like the time he portation was riven by an extortion and Beame and New York Governor Hugh ticketed Mayor Koch’s car for illegal park- bribery scandal of such dramatic scope Carey fought the NRDC in federal court. ing while the two men were having lunch that it later inspired the pilot episode of Meanwhile Schwartz covertly fed a young together. (Thirty-odd years later, Schwartz Law & Order. As head of the only bureau NRDC lawyer named Steve Jurow infor- mation that undercut the city’s official predictions of traffic Armageddon. (The Stories of Schwartz’s exploits have attained city also argued that the tolls would cause excessive economic harm.) almost mythical status, like the time he It was a monumental battle. As Jurow remembers it, the US district judge who ticketed Mayor Koch’s car for illegal parking presided over much of the case, Kevin while the two men were having lunch together. Duffy, “would hold his head and moan whenever we came in.” It went all the way to the US Supreme Court, where to emerge untarnished, Schwartz was Justice Thurgood Marshall ordered the appointed acting commissioner, then first plan to be implemented. deputy commissioner, of the entire DOT. “Only an act of Congress could stop it,” It’s hard to estimate a single bureaucrat’s as Schwartz wryly puts it, “but, unfortu- impact on a massive department, particu- nately, that’s just what happened.” The larly in a city as big and complex as New city’s Congressional delegation got a law York. Since the era, the city’s passed permitting the city to substitute most consequential DOT commissioner other pollution-reducing strategies for has probably been Janette Sadik-Kahn. the tolls. In the end, Schwartz—still work- During her six-year tenure under Mayor ing hand-in-glove with the NRDC—man- Michael Bloomberg, Sadik-Kahn threaded aged to win parking restrictions as well New York with nearly 400 miles of bike as Manhattan’s first truly exclusive bus lanes and created 60 pedestrian plazas, lane on Madison Avenue. It was small- including the one at Times Square. ball compared to the original vision. But “If Gridlock Sam didn’t exist, it would in Jurow’s estimation, “It ended up pivot- be necessary to invent him,” she told me ing New York City transportation policy maintains that it was a mix-up; his agents in January, calling him a “New York insti- toward transit” in a meaningful way. were just overzealous when he was in the tution” and a mentor. Ed Koch’s election as mayor catapulted vicinity.) But he gleefully claims respon- “I’ve always considered him my broth- Schwartz up the ranks. By 1982 he was the sibility for personally ordering a Channel er in infrastructure. He battled these traffic commissioner—which put him in 7 news truck to be towed—while its report- corrosive forces of decay and, also—and charge of the least-loved army in New York. er was interviewing him. just as importantly—public indifference.” “Brownies are the most abused, assault- “It was Milton Lewis,” Schwartz remi- The bike lanes and plazas that were her ed, kicked, spat upon, cursed, threatened, nisced as we drove, forcing his voice through proudest achievements, she said, stoked and run over of civil servants,” New York his nose in a caricature of the late news- and depended on a “culture shift that magazine asserted about the city’s traffic- caster’s brash questioning. “He said, ‘You really accepts people and bikes as criti- control agents in a 1984 article about the would tow other city cars?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ cal parts of the transportation network. sudden doubling of their ranks. “Yet, last He said, ‘You would tow diplomats?’ And I “But just as vital,” she added, “though month, when a bill was proposed in the said, ‘Yeah!’—I said, ‘I’d even tow the press.’ much less noticed by the media or the City Council that recommended making And he said, “You would tow an Eyewitness public, are the nuts and bolts of managing it a felony to attack a traffic-control agent, News vehicle?!” And I said, ‘You’re in the the 789 bridges in New York, the 6,000 Councilman Rafael Castaneira Colon, a no-standing zone!” Whereupon Schwartz miles of asphalt, the 12,000 signalized Bronx Democrat, opposed the measure. signaled for a tow truck to drop its hook. intersections. And so I’m forever indebt- ‘If they’re getting beaten up out there,’ “And you saw the tow truck pick up the ed to Sam for seeing farther than the city’s Colon reportedly said, ‘it’s because they Eyewitness News vehicle,” he chuckled, next fiscal year. And for his strength to

FLORENT DARRAULT FLORENT deserve it.’” “with the crew filming it kind of going off stand firm against political winds.”

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 2016 57 One measure of Schwartz’s legacy is behave more cautiously, “grossly substan- cloth-covered wire, to hand-operated inter- the subtle but significant change in how dard lanes seemed to be the safest of all.” locking machines, to electromechanical the department, under his leadership, That argument carried the day. The relays so old that rail manufacturers have conceived of its responsibilities. Traffic bridge underwent a 15-year rehabilitation. long stopped making replacement parts— engineering had been (and to a consider- But for Schwartz, the victory’s significance greatly restricts the number of trains it can able extent still is) fixated on two con- lay partly in its impact (or, rather, lack operate, and probably inflates the cost of siderations: speed and safety. Schwartz thereof) on the neighborhoods on either operating them.) Significantly, those num- worked to expand that focus to encom- side of the span. The long approach ramps bers happen to be just enough to plug a pass a wider set of considerations. required for a modern bridge would have Statue-of-Liberty-sized funding gap in the Sadik-Kahn pointed to the case of the come at the expense of significant acreage MTA’s current five-year capital plan, which Williamsburg Bridge as an emblematic in Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. still remains unsettled in its second year. example. The 1988 discovery of ruptured To some proponents, that was a plus: a Move NY is by no means the first or only structural steel in the 84-year-old span— chance to condemn blighted property. Yet plan of its kind. But it has attracted an the same problem that caused the West today, Williamsburg is one of the most uncommonly wide range of supporters. Side Highway collapse—forced Schwartz vibrant (and expensive) neighborhoods in That they include Charles Komanoff tes- to completely close it to all traffic (a first Brooklyn. And the gentrifying Lower East tifies to its technical merits. Komanoff, a for a major city bridge). The damage was Side is one of the most ethnically and socio- transportation economist and environ- widespread, and New York would need economically diverse areas in Manhattan. mental activist, was profiled by Wired federal money to address it. Only the feds “He pushed back against this accepted magazine in 2010 as “The Man Who Could wouldn’t pay to repair what they deemed wisdom that the city should just tear the Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic.” He has devel- a “substandard” bridge. Which biased whole thing down and start again,” Sadik- oped a monumental, 67-page Excel spread- the process toward demolishing and Kahn told me, “which would have leveled sheet, called the Balanced Transportation replacing it with a modern span: wider much of Williamsburg and the Lower East Analyzer, that breaks down “every aspect lanes, ample shoulders, and lengthier Side in the process—and would have prob- of New York City transportation—subway approach ramps to expand the capacity ably stopped the revival of those neighbor- revenues, traffic jams, noise pollution—in beyond the quarter-million daily cross- hoods before it even started.” an attempt to discover which mix of tolls ings it was already hosting. Traffic engineering during America’s and surcharges would create the greatest “The Williamsburg Bridge debate re- highway-building heyday may have benefit for the largest number of people.” vealed a fundamental truth about transpor- sapped vitality from our cities. But done “Sam and I were working on parallel tation,” Schwartz writes in Street Smart. right, Schwartz suggests, it can be a tool tracks,” he told me in January. “And “[T]he cost-benefit equations of traffic en- for urban preservation. around 2011 or 2012, I had to admit—and gineering, in which benefit number one was I’m choosing my words deliberately, getting more drivers to their destinations Williamsburg Bridge now car- because I kind of didn’t want to—but I had more quickly, weren’t based on impartial The ries about 115,000 vehicles to admit that key elements in Sam’s vision and unbiased math. They were a set of blind- every day. Schwartz wants to charge all were politically superior, and also supe- ers that left only a very narrow set of options of them $5.54 each way. The same would rior from a traffic-management stand- visible at all. go for the other East River bridges, which point, to what I had been proposing.” “We could rebuild a bridge for $700 have heretofore been free to motorists Schwartz’s plan was “pure genius,” million, and leave the city with an ongoing (though not to subway passengers). That Komanoff then gushed, letting his traf- maintenance bill of at least $20 million charge would equalize the cost of crossing fic-geek flag fly—“a thing of Platonic annually for the next 30 years in order to those bridges with the current tolls for beauty as well as political and logistical put more cars on the streets of the coun- the Metro Transit Authority tunnels into appropriateness.” Now Komanoff is a try’s most crowded city … This was anoth- southern Manhattan. vocal leader in the Move NY coaliton. er sensible infrastructure investment that In contrast to the Bloomberg adminis- Tom Wright is president of the Regional wasn’t sensible at all.” tration’s failed congestion-pricing plan, Plan Association, an urban transporta- A second factor pushed the calculus even tolls on the MTA’s major outlying bridg- tion and economic-development advo- further toward building a high-capacity es (like the Throgs Neck, which links cacy organization that focuses on the modern bridge: standard 12-foot-wide lanes Queens to the Bronx, for example) would greater New York metropolitan area. He would be safer than the Williamsburg be decreased by $2.50, or 45 percent. stresses that the idea of tolling the East Bridge’s 9-foot-wide ones. That was an all Schwartz’s Move NY plan also calls for River bridges wasn’t new even when RPA but universally accepted truth among traf- using some of the projected $1.5 billion pushed for it as far back as 1996. fic engineers. Except, when Schwartz in new revenue to subsidize fares in “What Sam did with Move NY was change mapped three years’ worth of accidents on “transit deserts”—discounting the cost the entire political dialogue,” he told me, the bridge, the data showed something of commuter rail and express buses. “by saying that the crazy thing is that we’re counterintuitive: the bridge’s safest sec- Overall, it projects investing $375 million charging motorists who don’t have transit tions were where the lanes shrank to their a year in road improvements, and $1.15 bil- options a fortune, and we’re not charging narrowest points, near the support towers. lion a year in mass transit. (The subway motorists who do have transit options. So, Perhaps because they caused drivers to system’s antiquation—which runs from by widening the scope—and making it not

58 MARCH | APRIL 2016 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE just about the East River, or just the Harlem to stop it. It also opposed Bloomberg’s River, or Manhattan to Brooklyn—by encom- congestion-pricing plan. But it has cau- passing a whole conversation about the tiously supported Move NY—as has the Throg’s Neck bridge and the Verrazano New York Motor Truck Association, anoth- Narrows bridge, and things like that—he er past foe of . Schwartz put regional coordination on the radar. And says he also has about 50 state legislators he does it in a kind of commonsensical way.” lined up behind the plan, which would “Sam is one of most influential plan- require state-level approval. ners of his generation, and an inspira- What’s eluded him, so far, is the most tion,” added Wright, who is a planner of important player in a game that will ulti- some renown in his own right. mately be decided in Albany: New York As we drove around, Schwartz credited Governor Andrew Cuomo. At the outset of Move NY’s political merits to the fact 2016, Cuomo unveiled a transportation- that he’d been able to shape it as an inde- infrastructure capital plan that he billed pendent actor. as the largest in the state’s history. But on “He pushed back against this accepted wisdom that the city should just tear the whole thing down and start again,” Sadik-Kahn told me, “which would have leveled much of Williamsburg and the Lower East Side.”

“I did not want to leave city government,” balance the emphasis falls on the upper The Williamsburg Bridge: Rehab, not rebuild. he confessed. “I would have died with my portion of the state—where toll reductions boots on, had it not been for another mayor on the New York Thruway were a political have to start talking about the next capital who came in and didn’t reappoint me.” But selling point. And Cuomo’s pledge to con- plan.” Congestion pricing “will happen some his second career as a private consultant, tribute some $8.3 billion in state money day,” he said. “And I think that when it does advising cities on transportation policy, to the MTA’s capital plan rests on unspec- happen, it will be a lot closer to Sam’s itera- has its advantages. ified funding mechanisms. Transit advo- tion” than anything else that’s been pro- “When you’re in an administration, cates fear that it will rely on debt, that posed. Sadik-Kahn agrees, saying that “it’s ultimately you’re all speaking for the subway straphangers will ultimately bear a matter of when, not if.” mayor, or on behalf of the city, or gover- the burden via higher fares, and that Meanwhile, Gridlock Sam soaks up a nor,” he observed. “And once a mayor Manhattan’s mounting city life that has in many respects gotten endorses a plan, there’s far less room for will inch closer to gridlock. better since his first 50 years of stubborn negotiations. There’s far less room for In a mix of worried and wishful think- loyalty to it. And he takes pleasure in the change, because people have to go back ing, Komanoff believes that this year will thought that he helped push the pendu- up to the mayor to make the change. And be a fateful one for Move NY. “By June 30, lum that has lately begun to swing so far so the plan is what the plan is, and then either we won or game over. That’s when in his direction. Momentum can take a you go forward and try to push that plan. the legislative session ends,” he told me. long time to shift in New York. But when “This plan doesn’t have to be set,” he The indebted MTA will have to adopt a it does, it can be a powerful force. added. “So it’s evolved over time. It’s not five-year capital plan, he thinks, and Move Most weekends, Schwartz plies one of the exactly the same plan that I had first NY represents the most realistic way to few parts of Manhattan that stands apart presented. Some of the projects I’ve right its finances. “This is kind of the last from the grid. The Hudson River Greenway removed, because of trying to gain con- year that our plan has a real chance.” The bike path has an access point a stone’s throw sensus with a lot of people. I don’t have longer it sits without gaining traction, he from his Riverside Drive apartment. The a client here … So it makes life much fears, the more it will begin to seem like route hugs the tidal estuary’s bank nearly easier. I’m doing it as a private citizen.” yesterday’s scheme—and the more likely the entire length of Manhattan. The upside of this approach is perhaps politicians will be to wait for tomorrow’s “I ride it just about every week,” he said most apparent in the Automobile Club of next big thing, be it real-time GPS-based with satisfaction as we returned to the New York’s position on the plan. When, metering or self-driving cars. Upper West Side at the end of our day. “I in 1980, Schwartz’s department proposed Wright is at once more pessimistic and go up to the George Washington Bridge. banning single-occupant cars from the more optimistic. “I think the window on I chill out at the Little Red Lighthouse East River bridges during the morning [the MTA’s five-year capital] plan has closed,” and just sit and look at the river, which

JIM HENDERSON rush, the AAA affiliate successfully sued he told me. “But in two or three years, we’ll flows both ways.”◆

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 2016 59