Episode 15: Flexible Streets
By: City Of The Future
Tags: City Of The Future, Cities, Covid 19, Design, Technology

Sam Schwartz: The streets say something about who we are. And New York streets should say, number one: we walk. Number two: we take transit, and we bike, and we eat, and we enjoy, and we like music and all the other things. We dance in the streets.

Vanessa Quirk: That’s Sam Schwartz, a lifelong New Yorker and transit guru who’s known around these parts as Gridlock Sam.

Sam Schwartz: The word gridlock came about during the 1980 transit strike, at least publicly, I was an assistant Department of Transportation Commissioner at the time. So I put this thing called grid lock, two words, grid lock prevention plan. And when city hall saw that, they said, we don’t know what gridlock is. Let’s get the guy who knows what it is to prevent it. And so gridlock has been associated with me ever since. I released it to the lexicon.

Eric Jaffe: We had a socially distanced, fully masked meet-up with Sam over the summer to take a look at how New York City streets were opening up to people — not just cars — in response to COVID-19.

Sam Schwartz: City street space, which was totally for cars, can be used for sitting areas, for dining areas, for bikeways.

Vanessa Quirk: Even though Sam was really excited about these new Open Streets, when we happened across one on the Upper West Side, he found its design was…lacking.

Sam Schwartz: Here is a street that’s closed with a wooden sawhorse. These sawhorses were old when I started 50 years ago, and you can’t completely trust the cars. There’s a car going right through. Right around.

Vanessa Quirk: So the sign says, “Share the road. Do not enter except local traffic. Five miles per hour.”

Sam Schwartz: Alright, so that guy is not local, he’s continuing, he’s going through the next block. Pedestrians be damned, dog walkers be damned. Barely slowing down, and there could be children playing, there could be somebody darting out. That person is not going five miles an hour, he’s doing about 15 on it.

Eric Jaffe: Just to get to a red light.

Sam Schwartz: And going through the red light.

Eric Jaffe: We’re handing out tickets left and right here.

Vanessa Quirk: Our imaginary tickets.

Sam Schwartz: Those were the good days when I was doing it.

Vanessa Quirk: Even though Sam wanted to give a lot of tickets to this particular driver, he insists that he’s not about taking away streets from cars completely.

Sam Schwartz: I’m not anti-car. I want to see balanced transportation. I also want to see cars in urban areas go very slowly. Nowadays we’re killing pedestrians at an alarming rate. So we need a balance. The cars have to go slower. And how do the cars go slower? Not by just putting up speed limit signs, that doesn’t do it because you don’t have a cop everywhere, you don’t have a camera everywhere. You need to do it through design.

Eric Jaffe: As we walked through the streets of the Upper West Side, Sam saw examples of the power of good design everywhere.

Sam Schwartz: Take a look over here!

Vanessa Quirk: Sam walked us towards a crosswalk, where the sidewalk had kind of been extended out, and the space for the car had been narrowed.

Sam Schwartz: So this is called a neckdown, and this was done circa 1971 when I started with the traffic department. So this was about 50 years old. It’s the first attempt at trying to tame a street through design. And you could see that traffic has to go more slowly, nobody can go around them as they go through. The pedestrian has only about 15 feet to cross as opposed to 30 feet to cross, so the pedestrian’s exposure it’s a lot less over here. Here we see a father with a child in the stroller and within four seconds he’d cross the street, as opposed to eight seconds. Four extra seconds — multiply it by 8 million people crossing and you increase the probability of crashes.

Vanessa Quirk: If Sam were in charge again, he has some ideas for how he’d transform the streets of today into the safer, more flexible, more responsive streets of the future.

Sam Schwartz: We should use our streets in a smart way temporally. We should think of the street of the future as one that does change during the day, during the day of the week, during the season, and we should use some technology and human power combined to make it happen. We can do almost anything, technologically. These are the 2020s.

Vanessa Quirk: Welcome to City of the Future, a podcast from Sidewalk Labs.

Eric Jaffe: Each episode, we explore ideas and innovations that could transform our cities.

Vanessa Quirk: We’re your hosts. I’m Vanessa Quirk.

Eric Jaffe: And I’m Eric Jaffe.

Vanessa Quirk: And in this episode we’re talking about an idea that could allow one of our most precious public spaces to serve the needs of everyone.

Eric Jaffe: Flexible streets.