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One of the few officials not caught up in the corruption scandals of the 1970s, Schwartz earned the nickname Gridlock Sam under mayor Ed Koch, when he was selected by David Gurin, a founder of advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, as deputy traffic commissioner. “He used to badger me about it in traffic meetings.” “It was conceived here in New York by William Vickery, a Columbia University professor, who later won the Nobel Prize,” says Schwartz. Today, we tend to think of congestion pricing as a new idea, but New York has been trying to implement some variant of it for decades. The city even went as far as manufacturing “No Cars” signs.Īt the last minute, however, mayor John Lindsay – who had initially championed the plan – got cold feet, and the Red Zone was cancelled.

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And by 1971, when Schwartz joined the New York City traffic department full of “crazy” ideas such as bike lanes and public plazas, a plan like the Red Zone seemed like its time had come. Director Pat Foye and MI Senior Fellow Nicole Gelinas.īut in the tumultuous 1960s, with the freeway revolts and environmental movement, the pendulum began, very slowly, to swing the other way. Sam 'Gridlock Sam' Schwartz (L) with Port Authority Exec. “Even progressive groups who you’d have thought would say ‘slow down’ supported removing tracks from the Brooklyn Bridge,” says Schwartz. When streetcar tracks were removed from the Brooklyn Bridge (the last were ripped up in the early 1950s), the number of people crossing daily dropped from 400,000 to 170,000.

Mass transit infrastructure was allowed to decay, or actively ripped up, even when doing so made a city’s transport network less efficient. The automobile, despite being highly controversial in its early days, was as dominant in New York as it was in all cities across North America. In those days, cars were the technology of the future. Schwartz’s hair and beard are grey now, and it’s been two decades since he left city government to found a transportation planning firm, but he’s just as gregarious as he was back in the 1970s.

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“There we were – going to do the first car ban.”įew people know that, 45 years before the bike lanes and public plazas New Yorkers now take for granted, there were people inside the city’s transport department, people like Schwartz, trying to crack down on cars. “It was just a very exciting time to be in city government,” he recalls. Within this zone, private cars in Midtown would be banned, outright, between 10am and 4pm. For Sam Schwartz it was exciting, because it was data collection for a clean air proposal known as the “Red Zone”. “We tend to think of congestion pricing as a new idea, but New York has been trying to implement some variant of it for decades.”Īt least, it would have seemed dull to most people. Decades before New York installed bike lanes and pedestrian streets, Sam Schwartz – the man who coined the term ‘gridlock’ – was at the centre of a bitter fight to create a car-free Red Zone in downtown Manhattanīefore the eager young New York traffic department employee who would eventually become known as Gridlock Sam had begun his long war against cars in earnest in the early 1970s, he got a dull assignment: standing out in the cold weather, timing car traffic as it crossed into Midtown.