Today’s Trucking: Tell us about your evolution from being a New York cabbie to the city’s chief traffic
engineer:

Schwartz: I got a job as a cabbie during the ’60s to pay for college. I had an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania, and I didn’t really know what to do next. I landed a job in the traffic department in 1971 and worked my way up the ranks, becoming assistant commissioner for planning in 1978.

TT: What did you learn as a professional driver that helped you as a traffic planner?

S: Anyone who drives for living has a whole different perspective. Time is money, so you have to become much sharper. Almost instantly you have to think about different routes. Having the practical knowledge of how traffic really works helped later on. But my training in physics also shaped me, because I was taught to see things spaciously, and really see the close linkages between physics and traffic flow.

TT: We’ve all seen the movie where the guy has to catch the girl getting on a plane or she’ll be gone forever. So he jumps in a cab at 5:00 in the afternoon, and yells at the cabbie to step on it ’cause he’s gotta be at JFK in 15 minutes. You’re the cabbie that can actually do it, I guess?

S: Yeah, I suppose. I always thought if there was an auction to auction me off as a cab driver as a day, that’s how I’d [be used]. I wrote a book called N.Y. Shortcuts, and Traffic Tips, (Fodor’s, 1993) which shows you how to get around the worst traffic jams we have, and how to use the street and highway system, as well as understand the brain behind the traffic light system. If you know how it works, you know how to take advantage of them. I’m always jumping on and off the highway to find new shortcuts and routes.
I live on Long Island and, with my daughter, mapped out the perfect shortcut to New York, which has no fewer than 30 turns. Everybody during the summer and holidays is stuck in traffic. And at one point I can actually see them through the brush all sitting there, as I’m zooming by.

TT: When the transit strike hit your city, did you feel like you were thrown to the wolves?

S: We knew a strike was inevitable. I was nominated by the mayor to oversee traffic operations, and so I prepared for a long time. But I got the call that they had gone on strike at 2:00 a.m. on April Fool’s Day 1980. Of course, this wasn’t a trick. I remember that moment and thinking how awesome of a responsibility lay in front of me. There was a police helicopter almost at my door. I paused for a moment and savoured it. I was also quite frightened. But before I knew it they gave me an office next to the police commissioner and I was barking orders at people.

TT: If you had to pick one single decision you made that minimized the impact of the strike, what would it be?

S: Prohibiting driver-only cars from coming into Manhattan and requiring three or more people in a car. That almost immediately solved the transportation problem for a million people. People went over to the city bridges and stood there and hitchhiked, because you needed extra people to come in to the city.

TT: I imagine on that day you were about as popular with New Yorkers as Boston Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez is today?

S: (laughs). Yeah, well. But over time, they said we were heroes. It all worked out.

TT: It was during that event the term gridlock came up, earning you the moniker you still possess today. How did that happen?
S: I was working with a traffic engineer named Roy Cottam, and the two of us were talking about the grid system in Manhattan locking up. We routinely used the words grid, lock, lock-up, and interchanged them. But still no one had heard it yet. In 1980, in preparation for the transit strike, a reporter overheard me talking about having a grid-lock prevention program. It was hyphenated back then because I didn’t see it as one word yet. Soon enough every reporter was banging on our door asking “what is gridlock?” “Why are you worried about gridlock?” It sounded so ominous, like the word meltdown, or something. Now it’s become part of the lexicon.

TT: Manhattan and Windsor, Ont. aren’t exactly twin cities, but they have a lot in common when it comes to traffic problems. What are your general impressions of the truck- traffic issue at the Windsor-Detroit border?
S: The kinds of congestion I’ve seen in the months I’ve been working on Windsor are really unprecedented. I say that because not only are the queues very long they also extend on to Huron Church Road, which is a local street. Usually you have queues backing from highways, not local streets. You have a hazardous condition of fast moving traffic in the right lane, fast moving traffic in the left, and a truck queue stopped in the centre, and pedestrians crossing the boulevard. It presents so many safety problems for trucks, cars, and pedestrians.

TT: I once heard someone say that the busiest border crossing on earth can grind to a halt because a pedestrian on Huron Church Road presses the crosswalk button.

S: It’s very unusual, not only a pedestrian crossing, but also a railroad, at the foot of the bridge. You have a highway system that ends miles from the river crossing. It’s something that doesn’t occur anywhere else, to my knowledge. It just has to be corrected, and certainly one of my challenges is to solve that problem.

TT: I imagine all the various interests in the border make the job of finding remedies very difficult?
S: It’s a complex situation. There are so many entities involved or thinking of dealing with the border, both public and private. The fact that the bridge is owned, for one thing. The profit motive behind the bridge, as well as new crossing proposals like another bridge or tunnel, is a new experience for me. It’s a very exciting and complex. I can’t give too many details right now, but I think we’re making progress.

In any case, there needs to be a champion. All the stakeholders really have to be interested in solving this problem, and in some cases, have to put aside self-interest. Because there’s no way you can develop a long-term solution that doesn’t gore somebody’s ox.

TT: More often than not, what causes gridlock?

S: Sometimes I need to go back to my physics training with atoms and molecules, which all follow laws. But drivers sometimes follow the laws of traffic and sometimes they don’t. So the driver himself is often the culprit. Drivers that are tailgating make the highway less efficient. Drivers that block intersections make it less efficient. Then you have crashes, often because of driver inattention. On linear situations, like on the (Ambassador) Bridge for example, it’s usually because of following too closely. Yes, sometimes it’s about too many vehicles in too small a space, but drivers are the single biggest culprits.

TT: A civil engineer who commands the snowplows on Ontario’s 400-series highways told me that a stalled car in the centre lane for 15 minutes can create a traffic backlog two hours long. That sound about right?
S: True. Although it depends on the hour. At a peak hour, a 15-minute incident can have a propagation ranging from two to three hours. But it’s been known that, if traffic begins to back up–with no movement, because an intersection is blocked, for example–in five minutes it may not be recoverable.
That means a perpendicular movement will get blocked. In a grid system, the parallel movement gets blocked, followed by the second perpendicular movement. Now–and this is the true definition of gridlock–you have a square of everybody blocking each other. And that happens very fast, in about five minutes.

TT: Finish the following sentence. I hate getting stuck in traffic because…

S: … I know what’s going wrong up ahead, and I know I can do a better job to fix it. sThe letters are I-T-S. They stand for Intelligent Transportation Systems, and engineers around the continent are working on a myriad of them. Essentially, they’re strategies for dealing with congestion. Some of the more dazzling proposals–which are becoming more feasible daily–include things like on-demand carpooling, and variable message transit signs at bus stops.

Will ITS improve trucking?

According to Gridlock Sam Schwartz, the answer is yes.
“Part of the whole field of ITS is incident detection,” he says. ” The faster you know about an incident, the faster you can respond to it and either fix it or get the message to the driver as fast as possible.”

And this will have particular resonance for Canadian truckers, who make their living wresting with unpredictable weather patterns.

“ITS,” Schwartz says, “is going to let us know more about weather conditions on the roads, and we’ll be able to develop algorithms on the spot that will be personal to the driver or trucker.

“It’ll tell him that he’ll go through three different weather conditions, the average speed will drop to X, the predicted time of arrival is now this, and it will all be reasonably accurate.

Schwartz also predicts that road and bridges will have detectors built into
them so the surface will recognize icing conditions and react accordingly by either salting itself or activate heating coils. Says Gridlock Sam: “It’s very exciting stuff.”