Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

by Samuel I. Schwartz Narrated by Don Hagen

Overview

With wit and sharp insight, former Traffic Commissioner of New York City, Sam Schwartz a.k.a. “Gridlock Sam,” one of the most respected transportation engineers in the world and consummate insider in NYC political circles, uncovers how American cities became so beholden to cars and why the current shift away from that trend will forever alter America's urban landscapes, marking nothing short of a revolution in how we get from place to place. When Sam Schwartz was growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn-his block belonged to his community: the kids who played punchball and stickball & their parents, who'd regularly walk to the local businesses at which they also worked. He didn't realize it then, but Bensonhurst was already more like a museum of a long-forgotten way-of-life than a picture of America's future. Public transit traveled over and under city streets-New York's first subway line opened in 1904-but the streets themselves had been conquered by the internal combustion engine. America's dependency on the automobile began with the 1908 introduction of Henry Ford's car-for-everyone, the Model T. The “battle for right-of-way” in the 1920s saw the demise of streetcars and transformed America's streets from a multiuse resource for socializing, commerce, and public mobility into exclusive arteries for private automobiles. The subsequent destruction of urban transit systems and post WWII suburbanization of America enabled by the Interstate Highway System and the GI Bill forever changed the way Americans commuted. But today, for the first time in history, and after a hundred years of steady increase, automobile driving is in decline. Younger Americans increasingly prefer active transportation choices like walking or cycling and taking public transit, ride-shares or taxis. This isn't a consequence of higher gas prices, or even the economic downturn, but rather a collective decision to be a lot less dependent on cars-and if American cities want to keep their younger populations, they need to plan accordingly. In Street Smart, Sam Schwartz explains how. In this clear and erudite presentation of the principles of smart transportation and sustainable urban planning-from the simplest cobblestoned street to the brave new world of driverless cars and trains-Sam Schwartz combines rigorous historical scholarship with the personal and entertaining recollections of a man who has spent more than forty years working on planning intelligent transit networks in New York City. Street Smart is a book for everyone who wants to know more about the who, what, when, where, and why of human mobility.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

“Equal parts transportation-planning compendium, autobiography and love letter to New York City, Street Smart lays out Sam Schwartz's vision for the future of multimodal and multinodal transportation systems…. Touching on everything from the rise of the automobile and the decline and resurrection of streetcars to traffic calming, ride-sharing and the advent of driverless cars, Schwartz combines an engineer's precise logic with broader societal and cultural considerations—and plenty of wry Brooklyn humor—to provide an engaging examination of once and future urban transportation trends.” —Engineering News-Record

“Nobody is more qualified to write a book about transportation than Schwartz.” —City Journal

"A delightful new book." —Michael Sorkin, The Nation

“An engaging trip down memory lane, where trolleys and pedestrians and bicycles intersect and collide with cars in what Schwartz calls ‘an accident of history,' replete with a promising path toward a multi-modal urban revival.” —MoveNY

"Schwartz sees the writing on the asphalt, even if the federal government, intent on building ever more highways, does not. The future isn't on four wheels. If you want your area to attract young people, entrepreneurs, and capital, you have to make it walkable." —Downtown Express

“Street Smart doesn't read as if you were stuck on the Cross-Bronx Expressway ('the most congested corridor in the entire country,' [Scwartz] writes). Rather, it's mostly accessible, discerning and even revealing.” —Sam Roberts, New York Times

“A snappy read…[Schwartz's] account of President Eisenhower's creation of the interstate highway system is riveting, as is his informed discussion of the rise and fall of streetcars.” —Wall Street Journal

“Schwartz…chronicles in Street Smart the history of urban transportation in the U.S. (growing up in Brooklyn, he has lived through a lot of it). … He takes a strong stand, in some cases calling upon personal experiences that streets belong to communities, not cars, and that sustainable transportation planning is helping to revitalize cities.” —Chicago Tribune

Library Journal

08/01/2015
New York Daily News columnist and former New York Department of Transportation chief engineer "Gridlock Sam" debuts with this lighthearted but comprehensive history of Americans' ten-mile average trip to work, shopping, school, and recreation. While Schwartz isn't antiautomobile, he does predict the further decline of the use of private cars, as the linked trends, in the United States and globally, toward walkable cities and shared transportation (trains, carpools, Uber, etc.) continue to increase. Schwartz weaves his experiences in a folksy, effective manner and is unapologetic about his Brooklyn bias. His major themes include "active transportation" (using muscle power), multimodal transportation solutions, accessibility, and the use of intelligent systems to plan traffic routes, while discussing transportation regulations such as the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance of 1927 in an entertaining way. Historical sections highlight the heroes and villains of U.S. traffic planning as well as key roadways such as the first freeway, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, which connects Los Angeles and Pasadena. VERDICT Anyone interested in how people get from place to place will find this first-person narrative instructive and entertaining.—Sara R. Tompson, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Lib., Archives & Records Section, Pasadena, CA

Kirkus Reviews

2015-07-15
How to fix our transportation nightmare? Former New York City traffic commissioner Schwarz ventures some ideas—and while many are oddly counterintuitive, they just might work.One projected infrastructure improvement in which "Gridlock Sam" took part would have rebuilt the Williamsburg Bridge into lower Manhattan, costing $700 million and adding a maintenance bill of $20 million per year precisely in order to add more cars to the traffic mix on the most crowded streets in America. "You could say the costs of the bridge outweighed the benefits, if there had actually been benefits," writes Schwartz, who casts a jaundiced eye on much of the received wisdom, economic and social, around infrastructure improvement. The author instead offers a program that many cities use in part but none in whole. For example, he advocates congestion pricing, a New York innovation applied across the Atlantic in London, to the chagrin of Top Gear but the relief of traffic-trapped drivers. Schwartz's economic lesson is unimpeachable: "when you give something valuable away for free, demand is essentially infinite. As a result, urban traffic congestion just keeps getting worse." Other planks in the platform include multimodal transport systems that facilitate a smooth switch from rail to light rail to bus and the like. Overarchingly, though, a livable city, from a transportation standpoint, is one in which people walk and bike. Schwartz allows that cars are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, but he looks to Internet-smart millennials to create demand for a system in which an individual needs not a car but a smartphone. Traffic circles, streetcars, diagonal crossings: they're all here. And so is Uber, even though Schwartz warns that such an unregulated ride-matching service will mean yet more gridlock: "the numbers won't add up to more mobility, but less." A readable and provocative book making the convincing claim that the best city is one in which people can move around easily.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170405336
Publisher:	Ascent Audio
Publication date:	10/01/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos