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Sam Schwartz Engineering |
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March 3, 2014 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Traffic and Transportation Planning and Engineering |
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Mr. Schwartz, a former New York City Traffic Commissioner, specializes in creative problem solving for seemingly intractable situations. He is expert at getting people out of their cars and into other forms of transportation. He is also proficient at moving those people who remain in their cars more swiftly and safely. Mr. Schwartz has created many win-win-win situations whereby traffic moves better, pedestrians are safer and the community gains more sidewalk and green space. He’s been called an Urban Alchemist for making grass grow from asphalt. Mr. Schwartz, often referred to by his nom de plume “Gridlock Sam”, introduced the word “gridlock” into the lexicon during the 1980 NYC Transit strike.
He has received a score of awards for his work, including 2012 Businessman of the Year from the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, 2011 New York State Society of Professional Engineer of the Year award, 2011 Brooklyn College Alumnus of the Year, 2010 NSPE Professional Engineers Merit Award, Public Works Magazine's 2008 Trendsetter Award and Civil Engineer of the Year from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
He began his
professional transportation career as a NYC taxi cab driver while obtaining
his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics at Brooklyn College and a Master
of Science degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He
is a licensed Professional Engineer in five States. |
www.samschwartz.com
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Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – March 3, 2014
CEOCFO: What was the vision when you started Sam Schwartz Engineering? Mr. Schwartz: My vision was to create a firm responsive to the changing nature how cities and suburbs were looking to handle the transportation needs of their population. We could no longer rely on the old tools of widening highways and tearing down communities and Main Streets to accommodate more people by car. A big part of our mission statement is to move more people efficiently not move more vehicles.
CEOCFO: What, if anything, has changed about that vision today? Mr. Schwartz: That vision is more real today than I ever would have imagined. If we look at the largest cities in America, most of the cities are now growing faster than the suburbs are growing. This was unheard of nearly 20 years ago when I started the company. Every generation, until the most recent generation, has driven more miles. This generation drives fewer miles; car ownership has dropped markedly in the population. Certain forms of communications and transportation have evolved like car share, bike share, and other forms of ride share like Uber. Therefore, younger people today are more likely to live in the cities than young people have in the past and more likely not to own a automobile than people in the past. The vision that we had realized beyond our wildest imagination was bike share taking off in Washington D.C., New York and Chicago. We were getting inquiries from car capitals like Los Angeles, many cities in Florida and other places.
CEOCFO: When would a city come to the Sam Schwartz organization; what would be a typical project? Mr. Schwartz: Typically, a city is looking to accommodate its people and to rebuild its main streets and enliven the city environment. They see the opportunity largely in the land that the city owns, which in an average city more than a third of the land dedicated is to the movement of people. People on sidewalks, people on roads, people in trains. They ask us to come in and help them move people more efficiently. Move people in fewer motor vehicles, encouraging healthy forms of transportation like walking and biking. There is a whole field called active transportation which involves walking, taking transit more, and biking more. All these forms of transportation burn far more calories than sitting in a car. Even transit users consume 20% more calories per trip than car drivers.
CEOCFO: When you are assessing and evaluating, what are the steps to bring it all together? Mr. Schwartz: The first thing is not to come into a new city and assume that we really know the city well enough to make recommendations. It is very important that we get to meet with the citizens. One of the unique things we have done, and that we have the trademark for, is called walk-shops.
It is like a workshop, we go out with the public and we walk the streets. We hear from them what they need and often some of the best ideas come from people within the community. Certainly, identification of problems is more likely to come about by listening to people in the community than running elaborate computer models of how the city functions. That is our first step. A very typical second step might be to bring people together, which includes a lot of stakeholders, agencies that are involved in managing transportation, the DOTs, transit agency. Key stakeholders could be the business representatives from the community. We have groups begin to identify problems and then conceive solutions. We might approach a highway project and begin to say how the highway will function. The community will come back and say well we do not want the highway to be a wall between two communities. Let us have direct link between the communities. We do not want them to be bridges that you have to walk up and down lots of steps. We want them to blend into the streetscape. We do not want anyone to feel like they come from the other side of the tracks. We want people to be able to walk from end to end without crossing a car. We want children to feel comfortable biking along the pathway. Those are the kinds of ideas that we might get before deciding to work on a designing a major piece of infrastructure.
CEOCFO: Do you find that a city generally implements your advice? Mr. Schwartz: Often we are listened to, but there are plenty of times that the problems are so severe that it requires substantial capital investment and just lining up the money may take a long time. People may lose focus over time, so that happens too. At times we come into situations and when we leave the situation is unchanged for the most part, and we still get a good response. We generally break things up into what we consider as early action low cost solutions. Those are often done within the period of us doing the study. Then, we look at midrange proposals that are typically 1 to 3 years off. That will require some investment and then long range that would be capital investments. If you stick around long enough you begin to see the changes in those cities and localities that adopt the solutions.
CEOCFO: Are there some general areas that most cities miss that might be easy to remedy if changed quickly? Mr. Schwartz: A number of cities do not emphasize walking as an efficient form of transportation. It was our first form of transportation - we all walked, even as cave dwellers. That is how we got from place to place and many cities do not make it easy for people to walk. They create these very, very wide intersections with traffic signals that are not timed to help people to cross the street. They often neglect the people who are not drivers. They are frequently elderly people, who no longer have the skill sets for driving. They are also young people and lower income people who cannot afford cars. That is a very particularly problem that we encounter. We also encounter a number of people who are married to their car. What we tell those people is we are not going to change your behavior, but if you want your children when they grow up to live near you, you should begin embracing their kinds of lifestyles and encourage your government to have walking, biking environments and central locations for people to enjoy. What I hear repeatedly from younger people that are living in suburbs is they cannot wait to get out. There is no place for them to go and just spend some time. They really like the urban environment of streets, storefronts as opposed to the malls. You will see developers around the country beginning to recognize that one of the nicest developments are the ones done by Rick Caruso out west. He creates city streets instead of a shopping center that is enclosed. He has a storefront and at times, he has people living above the stores. He loves to have a little bit of transit; it could be an electric battery powered trolley down the center of it. Like, in The Grove in Los Angeles, the Americana and Glendale and California. If you listen to the young people, you will hear that are looking for a different life style and their parents adopt it.
CEOCFO: What are one or two highlights from your time in New York City government that influence what to do and what not to do at Sam Schwartz Engineering? Mr. Schwartz: The first thing is do not plan for planning’s sake, just to get it done. We made the city much safer and we cut down on the number of traffic deaths. We reduced driving by encouraging other forms of transportation, by introducing high priority bus lanes, bicycle lanes throughout the city and other forms of treatment that encourage active transportation. That is a very important lesson for what people did before me and what people will do after me. We are just temporary caretakers of the infrastructure. I’m very proud of a period in which bridges of New York City were collapsing several of them did collapse. I played a role in restoring them to their grandeur, in particular the East River bridges. People said at the time the Williamsburg Bridge connected two blighted neighborhoods and should be demolished. A new bridge should be in its place because the neighborhoods were blighted. However, they are two of the hottest neighborhoods in New York City, Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. I’m proud of the fact that I saved the Williamsburg Bridge from demolition and now we watch the city evolve from what some might have considered a poor neighborhood or a blighted area come back roaring with excitement.
CEOCFO: How was the term gridlock started? Mr. Schwartz: I was working over 40 years ago in the early 1970’s as a traffic engineer in the old New York City traffic department and working with another engineer named Roy Cottam and we were doing hand calculations on what would happen if we implemented different kinds of programs. Mayor John Lindsay was suggesting that at the time and we began to say well this might lock up this intersection or that intersection eventually we would lock the grid and soon we interchanged the term, that we would have grid-lock. The word did not go any further for almost a decade. In 1980 there was a transit strike and that was the first time that gridlock was written. That was when it took off in the lexicon.
CEOCFO: Would you tell us a little about business today? Mr. Schwartz: Business today is a fun business. I enjoy coming to work it is a very people-oriented business. It is not so complicated that the average person cannot understand it. It is about trying to solve safety problems, which is very much on the mind of New Yorkers today. It is about enlivening main streets. I just returned from the island of Aruba, which is a client of ours. We did a redesign of Main Street and introduced a little trolley that runs from the cruise ship terminal to Main Street. Business was very good this year, and I feel great hope in watching bike share take off in the city of Chicago to doing roundabout design and construction in Florida. This reduces traffic crashes and it is trying to rethink Los Angeles and to bring it back to its heyday when it was one of the transit capitals of the United States back in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The new mayor there was very excited about building great streets and we hope to be working closely with him on that.
CEOCFO: What is the key to bringing people into the firm and what do you look for to ensure the enthusiasm?
Mr. Schwartz:
What I look for is as if I pass a Geiger counter over a person and sometimes
the needle barely moves and sometimes the needle goes wild. I want people
with energy and so that is one of the key ingredients. I want people who
really care about the environment around them. Whether it is a suburban or
urban environment, they should really care about the planet itself, what our
impact as human beings is on the planet and what we are going to leave to
future generations. If they have energy and they really care it is almost a
given if they walk through our doors. If they are talented and smart they
will find a place here. |
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Clean Tech, Sam Schwartz Engineering, CEO Interviews 2014, Traffic and Transportation Planning and Engineering, Recent CEO Interviews, Clean Technology Stock, Companies looking for venture capital, Angel Investors, private companies looking for investors, clean tech companies seeking investors, technology companies needing investment capital |
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