“Gridlock” Sam Schwartz

While Parisians are starting to complain that "an invasion of noisy scooters and motorcycles and a rise in accidents involving pedestrian and motorcyclists" is one of the "unintended consequences" of Mayor Bertrand Delanoe's traffic reduction policies, "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz's consulting firm just issued a report claiming that New York City could better meet its long-term sustainability goals by adding more scooters to the traffic mix. Commissioned for Piaggio, the Italian manufacturer of Vespa scooters, the study says:

Sam Schwartz, aka "Gridlock Sam," is best-known to many New Yorkers through his Daily News column about the city's quotidian traffic woes. Schwartz is the president and CEO of Sam Schwartz LLC, a traffic planning and engineering firm that has worked on projects including the JFK AirTrain, the IKEA project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the World Trade Center Memorial.  Before he moved to the private sector in 1990, Schwartz served as NYC traffic commissioner and as deputy commissioner of transportation in the Koch administration. He sat recently with Mark Gorton, president and founder of the Open Planning Project, to discuss congestion pricing, cars in parks, and the way pedestrians in this city don't get much respect from traffic planners. As the city begins looking for a new transportation commissioner to replace Iris Weinshall, this interview is worth watching:

People are starting to kick around the names of potential successors to outgoing DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall. This morning, Crain's Insider reports:

This Morning's Forum: Road Pricing Worked in London. Can It Work in New York?

Though many New Yorkers are learning about congestion charging for the first time this week, the transportation policy community has been working to sell this idea to a resistant public for more than three decades. What happens when Nobel Prize winning theory meets bare-fisted New York City politics? A heavily condensed version of this story ran in this week's New York Magazine:  

Last weekend, former DOT Deputy Commissioner "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz wrote an op-ed in the New York Times urging the city to start creating bike lanes that physically separate cyclists from motor vehicle traffic at some locations. This weekend, as DOT laid down a brand new "shared lane" design on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, a letter to the editor from a regional director of the New York and New England League of American Bicyclists criticized Schwartz arguing that physically-separated bike lanes are more dangerous than riding in the street (it's worth noting that the writer lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, not New York City).