![]() “It allowed Beame to skate and not implement congestion pricing.” Subsequent proposals had no better luck.īoth conservatives and liberals support congestion pricing: the right likes the market-pricing mechanism, and the left hates cars. “Two of the most progressive elected officials that one would think would be supportive of such a plan … came out and wrote the Moynihan-Holtzman Amendment,” Schwartz says. “Only an act of Congress could stop it now,” says Schwartz. The city fought back in federal court, and lost. But the Natural Resources Defence Council and others sued the city to enforce it, and the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the city to put tolls in place by 1977. In 1974, Abe Beame took over from Lindsay as mayor and tried to cancel the plan. “He signed the plan to do tolls on all the bridges, and then the feds approved it as part of the Clean Air Act.”Ī street market on pedestrianised Broadway in 2009. Not only was the then-mayor committed, but New York’s governor backed the plan, too. “In 1973 we got further than any other time – further than Bloomberg,” Schwartz says. This time, however, the stars seemed aligned. Repeated tolling attempts were beaten back. City officials soon realised they had blundered, but discovered that it’s a lot easier to give people something for free than to convince them to start paying for it again. In 1911, however, the city removed tolls on the Queensboro, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg Bridges. The main bridges into New York had originally been built as toll bridges, between 18. After the Red Zone failure, he and Lindsay tried again in 1973 – but this time, rather than simply banning cars, they would implement congestion pricing, in the form of tolls on the East River bridges. Sam Schwartz with longtime New York mayor Ed Kochīut Schwartz had been fighting gridlock even before the phenomenon had a name. He was eventually promoted to New York City traffic commissioner, and “gridlock” has since become synonymous with stalemate and immobility, not just in traffic but in politics and beyond. ![]() “It worked so much better than 1966 that people hailed us as heroes,” Schwartz recalls. ![]() And his plan – which, among other things, would have prohibited any cars with just one occupant entering Manhattan – worked wonders during the 11-day strike. ![]() The new term, coined by Schwartz and a colleague, became a media sensation. His big break came with the transit strike in 1979: he landed the job of developing transportation contingency plans, and produced his now famous “Grid-Lock Prevention Program”. One of the few officials not caught up in the corruption scandals of the 1970s, Schwartz earned the nickname Gridlock Sam under mayor Ed Koch, when he was selected by David Gurin, a founder of advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, as deputy traffic commissioner. “He used to badger me about it in traffic meetings.” “It was conceived here in New York by William Vickery, a Columbia University professor, who later won the Nobel Prize,” says Schwartz. Today, we tend to think of congestion pricing as a new idea, but New York has been trying to implement some variant of it for decades. The city even went as far as manufacturing “No Cars” signs.Īt the last minute, however, mayor John Lindsay – who had initially championed the plan – got cold feet, and the Red Zone was cancelled. And by 1971, when Schwartz joined the New York City traffic department full of “crazy” ideas such as bike lanes and public plazas, a plan like the Red Zone seemed like its time had come. “Even progressive groups who you’d have thought would say ‘slow down’ supported removing tracks from the Brooklyn Bridge,” says Schwartz.īut in the tumultuous 1960s, with the freeway revolts and environmental movement, the pendulum began, very slowly, to swing the other way. When streetcar tracks were removed from the Brooklyn Bridge (the last were ripped up in the early 1950s), the number of people crossing daily dropped from 400,000 to 170,000. The city even went as far as manufacturing ‘No Cars’ signs.
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