Sam Schwartz, former New York City traffic commissioner and head highway and bridge engineer, is chief executive of Sam Schwartz Engineering in New York City. He writes about everything related to transportation and engineering practice.
Traffic
engineers are being marginalized and viewed as anachronisms, like Mad
Men from a bygone age. As Christopher B. Leinberger, senior fellow at
The Brookings Institution and professor of planning at the University of
Michigan, writes in a recent NY Times op-ed,
“traffic engineers dismissively call [bus and light-rail systems, bike
lanes and pedestrian improvements] ‘alternative transportation.’”
In saying so, he, and planners around the world, are being dismissive of me and my profession. We are the GEICO Neanderthals of society.
And who’s to blame? Yes, we deserve a lot of it. We, as a profession, continued to build more roads, wider roads, and faster roads while knowing full well we were running out of capacity and making transport systems less efficient.
An example I've used time and time again in New York City is that the Brooklyn Bridge, when it was largely a rail and walking bridge, handled 430,000 people daily. In the 1940’s, we ‘modernized’ it by removing the rail; its daily person carrying volume dropped to 180,000.
During my lifetime, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island was built with 12 car lanes but no bikeway, walkway or transit right-of-way. As a teenager I was able to bike from Brooklyn to Staten Island by taking a ferry. Once the bridge opened, the ferry stopped running and driving was the only choice—here in transit-rich New York City.
Most of the Interstate System built in the past half-century had no provisions for walkers, bike riders or transitways.
Why weren’t we as engineers screaming, “This is folly!”? It’s no wonder the transportation leadership of cities around the country is no longer in the hands of transportation engineers. In fact, we haven’t had an engineer at the helm of USDOT in nearly 20 years.
Now
is the time to re-assume a leadership role in planning of our future
for cities, towns and suburbs. We can do it by joining the medical
professionals by demanding and designing healthy communities. It turns
out that healthy neighborhoods are transportation efficient and safe. I
stumbled across the field of Active Transportation a couple of years ago
and now I preach it. Here’s what it’s about:
Active transportation is any method of travel that is all or partly human-powered. The term refers to transportation that supports walking, stair use, cycling, and transit. It includes long-term land use and transportation planning to encourage alternate (non-motor vehicle) forms of transport.
The proven health benefits of active transportation are overwhelming: prevention of weight gain, lowered risk of type-2 diabetes, lower high blood pressure and cholesterol, decreased risk of colon and breast cancers, and increased life expectancy.
We as engineers have the technical know-how to implement active transportation. The methods are deceptively easy: Build good transit systems and integrate them into existing infrastructure. Design transportation systems with pedestrians and cyclists in mind. Construct multiple, direct connections within dense, mixed land-use developments. Coordinate transit, walking, cycling, and automobile networks.
For far too long, we’ve considered these concerns outside of our job descriptions, even though we know better.
If we continue to stand by when politicians like Senator Tom Coburn, R-Okla., deride pedestrian and bicyclist funding as wasteful extravagances, we deserve all the derision that planners like Leinberger can throw at us. Worse yet, we risk getting pushed out of the transportation planning process entirely.
Co-written with Laura MacNeil