Sam Schwartz | Tony Guida's NY

Sam Schwartz. Good to see ya. It's been a while.

Great to see you again, Tony.

Well, I'm not completely packing it in, Tony. Yes, I own the company. I started the company in 1995, so I owned it for 26 years. I had an investor starting to invest from Spain a few years ago. That investment kept growing until they became majority owners last year. And they sold their company to an international company out of the Middle East. But I'm going to still do some consulting for that company. And I'm always going to be a gadfly and a kibitzer and if there's a mayor out there that's, or governor, who's doing something I don't like, you could be sure you'll still hear from me as Gridlocked Sam. I'll still be in the Daily News writing my regular columns.

Well, Tony, I've written a few books in the past and those books are really on the science of transportation or traffic engineering. And I wrote a book about autonomous vehicles. I decided this time to try my hand at writing a novel.

On autonomous vehicles. And I don't want to give away too much but there are a couple of bad guys in there. There's a good guy who turns bad and a bad guy who stays bad and autonomous vehicles are simply computers on wheels. And so we've seen the hacking of computers and you can imagine some of what takes place, but there are plenty of surprises that I don't want to give away.

Yeah. We're talking to a few people. A friend of mine is a screenwriter and we're talking about the possibility of a movie. I think it lends itself very nicely to that, because there's obviously a lot of action with autonomous vehicles and the kinds of things they can do. So you don't know, it could be both a novel and a movie.

Tony, my goal has never been to eliminate cars. It's really to get it to the level where it's manageable and where it's safe and that's a lot lower than where it's been historically. And so for many years I've been pushing for some kind of pricing control. People refer to it as congestion pricing. And four years ago, the governor finally endorsed congestion pricing. In 2019 legislation was passed. And then we had a Republican administration that did not give any clue to the state as to the kind of environmental statement it needed. The Biden administration has done that. So we have the possibility of completing the work for congestion pricing. And we're going to need it more than ever, because with the pandemic, what happened is the mode of transportation that got hit the hardest was public transportation, even though study after study showed that it's not a vector. It's not a place where there's transmission if you're wearing a mask. In transit, even in the subway system, nonetheless, people are shying away from the transit system and driving. So driving numbers are pretty close to normal in the New York area. And if traffic feels worse, particularly on expressways, it's because truck traffic is at 110% of where it was pre-pandemic. Why is that? Because we're all expecting those trucks to come right to our house instead of us going to the store where the truck would have delivered whatever products we're buying. So traffic is indeed worse than it was before on expressways. Not quite as bad as it was in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, because a lot of people are still working from home, but on the highway system, it's pretty bad.

Yeah, congestion pricing is targeted to bring about $15 billion in capital funds to the MTA. And we know the MTA can certainly use that. And it's not just the subways and buses. It's also Metro North and the Long Island Railroad. So that's quite a bit of money. There's been some good infusion of money. But the work could be done in 2021 to get this implemented at the beginning of 2022. However, the big however is what is 2022? It's an election year. The state next year. So I find elected officials get pretty shy of implementing something that means people will take money out of their pocket to pay the government. So I predict that we're likely two years away from seeing congestion pricing.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a puzzle. So that leaves us with an amorphous plan. We know the area. We know it's Manhattan south of 60th Street. We know that the West Side Highway and the FDR Drive are exempt if you ride them that entire distance, 60th down to the Battery, to the Brooklyn Bridge. We know that low-income people within the district may have some exemptions to it and for vehicles carrying people with disabilities. But we don't know the price. We don't know the time of day. We don't know if it will be seven days a week. We don't know if it'll be seasonal. So there are already people screaming about a plan that you know so little about.

Yeah. I believe the environmental assessment is largely written by now. So I think there is a document. They've been working on it since 2019. While they haven't released it to anyone, one of the curve balls that the Biden administration has thrown is they've said they want to include New Jersey and Connecticut in this discussion.

And that means a lot of public hearings. So I think there will be a document followed by a lot of public hearings. And once the public gets involved, and it always takes months, if not longer, just to go through that public process of announcement. At that point New York is a very litigious place, I suspect there will be some type of lawsuit or injunction. And the more likely date seems to be 2023. As you know, I've been pushing this for decades. People coming in through the Lincoln Tunnel or through the Holland Tunnel from New Jersey are already paying a hefty fee. About $13 during the peak periods, $11 off peak. That should be deducted from the congestion fee. So let's say the congestion fee is $15. They should only have to pay $2. Same thing for the Battery Tunnel or the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

That's going directly into the MTA. There's a direct fund in which the money that is collected every single time you take a taxi south of 96th Street. This is a different area than the congestion zone, which is south of 60th Street. But if you take a Uber or a Lyft or a Via, or a taxi cab or now these new Revel Teslas, I suspect they'll have to pay a fee as well. Those fees have been collected since February of 2019, and those fees have been supporting the MTA.

So it looks like no matter what we do we're not going to get subway ridership back where it was before for a couple of reasons. One is, work from home will be greater than it's ever been. This was a game changer for a lot of businesses realizing they don't need to have their workers showing up every single day. So we're not going to see as many people riding the subway, going into the central business district. The second thing is I think there will be some lingering fear and people who've already made some modal changes. Some of them are very good, to bicycles and some have made it to e-bikes and some are walking more and that will continue. Some are doing it on scooters, motorized scooters. So we may look more like Rome or Barcelona with all the scooters out there. So that will continue going into the future. What we may need to do, because there still will be a lot of people that have switched to cars, is what we did during the 1980 transit strike and what we did during Hurricane Sandy and after 9/11 and that's occupancy restrictions on cars coming into the central business district. So back then, I was in charge of the city's strike plan. In 1980, you needed two or more people to come into Manhattan. The same thing after 9/11 and after 9/11, that lasted for over two years for the Lower Manhattan crossings and the same thing after Hurricane Sandy. So the city does have some tools if the traffic numbers get too high.

Yeah, there needs to be a whole review. Now, one thing to remember is if we went back a hundred, 120 years, you'd see most of the sidewalks are wider than they are now. So maybe, maybe we go back to some extent to wider sidewalks. Fifth avenue, for example, had a 30 foot sidewalks and then we added two car lanes and they went down to a 22 foot sidewalks. Park avenue had this huge median in the very center of it and lots of our streets had wider sidewalks. So that's one possibility. The biggest problem is curbside access for trucks. So we're going to have to figure out something clever where the trucks can get in, perhaps in the morning before the restaurants are as active and before the traffic volumes get too high and get their deliveries in. So it is a puzzle, it is a conundrum because everybody wants to share that curb space. It's the truckers, it's the restaurants, it's the bike riders, the buses on the right side of the street. We need a plan rather than what we did, which was good, but is somewhat just wherever there was demand, somebody put up a restaurant. We now need a firm plan going forward.

I think we're going to see a number of them made permanent pretty quickly. New businesses that also want to use the street. There are now businesses that are saying, well, why just restaurants? Why can't we use the street as well? So this is going to be a challenge for the current mayor and probably a bigger challenge for the new mayor.

The Queens Ribbon is something that I and a few other engineers have worked on during the early days of COVID. Many of our businesses were reduced. We had a lot of free time. We decided to do some pro-bono work. And we, when I say we, it includes the NYU School of Engineering and it includes a company called TYLin. I led the effort to conceptually design a bridge that would go from Long Island City, which is a burgeoning community with lots of development, lots of opportunity. It's the area that Amazon wanted to expand to. There are lots of businesses, lots of residents there. Right across, right in the middle is Roosevelt Island, with the Cornell Technion campus, there you have lots of young people that would love to be able to ride. And then as you cross the river into Manhattan, you have a big promenade that is going to be constructed in the East River, which you can touch down to. So imagine you can go from Long Island City to Cornell Technion campus to Midtown Manhattan, strolling or bike riding. And we need, as Michael Kimmelman points out, we do need more bike lanes. We have over 60 car lanes across the East River, and we have just about four or five lanes for bikes and pedestrians. We could use more. And the Queens Ribbon is one of the ideas. We have another one from Brooklyn to Manhattan, which is what's behind me if I move a little bit. And then there are no, there's no way for people from New Jersey to get to Manhattan central business district directly by bicycle or walking. That's a shame and that's a mistake. People in Jersey City have Citi Bike. Right opposite in Battery Park City, you have Citi Bike. They're one mile apart and you can't get from one place to the other place. So I also think we should be looking at crossing the Hudson with bikes as well.

Yeah. It's an interesting question. And, and Tony, yeah, you got those, those stats right. The Brooklyn Bridge, I would add when it opened in 1883, had a toll across. It was a penny for a pedestrian, it was 3 cents or 2 in a carriage. And by the 1900s, those automobiles that came along, they would charge 10 cents. In 1911, Mayor Gaynor removed the tolls from the bridge. But it's kind of interesting, because the statistics of the bridge once handling 400,000 and after we modernized, it moves 170,000. I heard Bill de Blasio used that in a news conference and one of the press people told me where he got it from, me, on it.

But what he did is pretty courageous. He's took a lane from the Brooklyn Bridge, from the Manhattan bound Brooklyn Bridge, and he's completing it so that it will be a bicycle lane. So instead of three car lanes, we're gonna have two car lanes, one bicycle lane. And therefore the promenade, which is beautiful, has become so hard to use because pedestrians and bike riders have conflicts all the time. It will be the pedestrians on the promenade, the bike riders on the roadway. And you'll see a turn towards a better balance of the use of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Queens Ribbon, the bridge itself, would cost about a hundred million dollars. And then there's the approach roads or the approach ramps that would go down to Long Island City and go somehow tie into the promenade around Manhattan, so add another 50 or 75 million. So probably we're talking about 175 million. With all the rescue funds that we did get, this would be a pretty good use of our money. It's a healthy way to travel ecologically on air quality. Excellent for the environment.

Yeah. You know, it's not just a biking city. I call it more balanced transportation, which the car certainly has a role but rather than having a role of moving people more than 50% of the time, maybe 25% of the time and bicycles taking up part of that and transit taking up part of that. What happens is the process goes through every community board and then every community board, when you put it in a bike lane, someone loses a parking spot or a few people lose parking spots. And in the planning process the losers scream much louder than the winners sing. So what we hear from are the people that feel that this is going to negatively affect them as opposed to the people that this will benefit. The biking community has gotten itself so well organized and has placed many of its members in community boards so it's getting a little bit easier for a mayor to proceed with a plan like that.

The why in a place like Manhattan doesn't seem to make sense. We can walk just about every place. We can take the subway. We can take the bus. We could take an Uber, taxi. There's so many forms of transportation. And it's going to be a long time before they can solve the problem of pedestrians. However, when it comes to trucks, freight, there is a shortage of truck drivers. It may make sense to have some autonomous vehicles on freeways, on the expressways. It may also make sense in areas that are poorly served by transit to have a form of micro transit rather than the big lumbering bus with a driver associated with every bus. Maybe triple the number of buses at the same cost and that driver becomes a maintainer and a monitor of the three buses. So there are places where autonomous vehicles make sense for those people who can't get around. They can't drive any longer, or they have some type of disability that prevents them from driving. So there's a lot of good reasons for some autonomous vehicles, but it's not going to replace the car very soon.

Okay. You're on, Tony. You'll be the first.

Thank you.