Engineering Inc - September/October 2017 - 41

the way back to the plan that he and Mayor Lindsay developed in
the mid-1970s to ease Manhattan's gridlock.
"Move New York is a program to overhaul and reform the toll
regime in the city of New York in a way that would vastly reduce
traffic gridlock and improve public transportation," says Komanoff.
The program would toll all the routes in and out of the Manhattan Central Business District (CBD) and the four East River bridges
while at the same time reducing the tolls on bridges in the outer
boroughs.
"Most residents from the outer boroughs don't drive regularly
into the Manhattan CBD, but they pay high tolls to cross the outerborough bridges because there aren't any mass transit alternatives,"
says Komanoff. "Sam came up with a solution that would take away
this unfairness and generate so much more revenue that it would
revive capital investment in the subways, buses and commuter rails."
ACEC/New York has backed the Move New York initiative from
the beginning. Despite opposition at the state level, Simson says,
"I think it can get done. And Sam deserves a lot of credit for that
because of his history and credibility."
LEAVING A LEGACY

Schwartz has expanded his notoriety beyond New York City and
outside the engineering industry with the publication in 2015 of
Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and The Fall of Cars. Part autobiography, part manifesto, the book tracks the rise of the automobile to
its current status of cultural dominance and then looks at what the
future might hold.
While Schwartz doesn't doubt the continued primacy of the car
in America, he says we are in a time of huge transition. "We have
never seen such a rapid change in transportation as in the past five
years, and I expect the pace of change to accelerate," he says. "It's
even more dramatic than Henry Ford's making automobiles affordable or the building of the Interstate Highway System."
In the book, he focuses on three related developments: the
decline in driving among millennials, the growth of mobility
as a service (MAAS) and the
promise of automated vehicles
(AV).
Schwartz highlights the
25 percent decline in driving
miles by millennials in the early
2000s-the first generational
decline in history. He attributes
much of that decline to millennials' preference for urban living,
with its plethora of transportation alternatives, including mass
transit.
"In spite of this trend, however, we're still seeing highway
expansion programs," he says.
"The federal government talks
only about highway and bridge
improvements and nothing
about transit at all."
Many cities, on the other

Since 1990, he
has been writing
a Gridlock
Sam column
in the New York
Daily News,
answering
questions
from
commuters
and commenting
on transportation
issues in the
New York City
metropolitan
area

hand, have recognized the value of attracting millennials. "There is
a close correlation between millennials and technology centers and
the GDP of cities," he says. "Cities like Boise and Fargo are recognizing that the ways of the past are not what young people today
desire. They want walkable and bikeable cities. They want transit
systems."
In the years since he wrote the book, millennial driving has
inched up, says Schwartz, due to lower unemployment and plummeting gas prices, but the overall decline in millennial driving
remains. "Especially among younger millennials," he says.
Millennials also have helped to fuel the rapid expansion of MAAS
through companies such as Uber and Lyft. While he is a big fan of
MAAS, Schwartz says it's not an unqualified positive.
"The free market element should be part of MAAS, but society
also has to have a voice in how we want to do this," he says. "We
didn't do that with Uber [in New York City]. The city was caught
flat-footed. The number of MAAS trips now exceeds taxi fares, vehicle miles traveled in the city has increased by 7 percent, and traffic
speeds in Midtown are down by 20 percent. We're strangling here."
He says MAAS has a lot of space to grow beyond app-based car
sharing services. "We're working with Ford, which is looking to
transform itself from a motor company to a mobility company,"
says Schwartz. "They clearly recognize that in 20 years their business
will be fewer cars and more mobility as a service."
The biggest development, however, will undoubtedly be autonomous vehicles.
"I'm impressed with the speed at which they're coming to the
market, but they will have a long way to go," he says. "If you were
to say that Stage 5 will be the driver never being called upon to do
anything, then I would say we're only at Stage 1 right now." He predicts the market will reach Stage 5 within 20 years.
Engineers, though, need to start preparing now, says Schwartz.
"We're going to need to adapt to AV," he says. "Calculations for
infrastructure are going to have to come down significantly. Lanes
will be narrower and capacities will increase. Will we need one-way
streets anymore? Lanes? I think the vehicles will just figure it out."
And it's not just infrastructure. The combination of MAAS and
AV will mean far fewer cars on the roads and less need for parking.
"The parking garages we build today will need to be something else
in 20 years," he says. "What if, for example, we built garages that
could be easily converted to residential?"
No, Schwartz is not your typical traffic engineer. n
Gerry Donohue is ACEC's senior communications writer. He can be
reached at gdonohue@acec.org.
Sam Schwartz's Transportation Consultants
provided logistics planning, agency
coordination, traffic analysis, and
development of traffic and pedestrian
mitigation plans for the Barclays Center at
Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn, N.Y.

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2017

ENGINEERING INC.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Engineering Inc - September/October 2017