Meet Sam Schwartz

IF you live in New York, commute to New York, or occasionally visit what Russell Shorto called the island at the center of the world, you have experienced the indignity of our city’s transportation hell. You have endured the screeching, flood-prone subways. You have surrendered exorbitant carfare to escape our eyesore airports, then lurched along congested highways, over creaking bridges and into our truck-clotted city streets. You have dodged the camping homeless at the Port Authority bus terminal, or wandered lost in the miasmal misery of Pennsylvania Station. New York City welcomes you with open arms — like the zombies in “The Among the people who are paid to care about this stuff, there is often an air of defeat. Jurisdictional gridlock, warring constituencies, the death grip of private developers, shortages of vision, leadership, patience, attention and money — how can this list of impediments not leave you jaded? Thankfully Michael Kimmelman is not yet jaded. In just a few months as the architecture critic of The New York Times, my friend Kimmelman has introduced an enlightening ethos of civic purpose into a genre that can be, at its worst, precious and narrow. Rather than review new structures as if they were gowns on the red carpet, he writes with infectious passion about how we inhabit our cities. He has written about making low-income housing less dehumanizing, about applying architectural intelligence to parking lots, about what makes a city pedestrian-friendly. In the process he has made me care in new ways about the public spaces many of us take for granted, or suffer in silence. His most daring venture so far is to take on the defining but dauntingly complex problem of transit hubs. This is a category of public space in which a few triumphs, notably the glorious cosmopolitan cathedral that is Grand Central Terminal, serve as rebukes to some shameful blunders. Consider our Manhattan version of the Bridge to Nowhere: the new train station under the World Trade Center, an almost four-b-b-billion-dollar glass-and-steel vanity project that will serve a mere 60,000 riders. In one provocative bit of advocacy, Kimmelman last month laid out a plan to fix Penn Station — probably the busiest transit hub in North America, and the one that most closely resembles a Roach Motel. He pointed out that the current, much-heralded plan to add a new train hub across Eighth Avenue (called Moynihan Station) will provide relief for only about 5 percent of the 600,000 people who pass through Penn daily. Kimmelman argued instead for opening up the station by relocating the Madison Square Garden arena that squats, toad-like, above it. There are reasons to regard this proposal as improbable, starting with the owners of Madison Square Garden, who are in the middle of renovating their venue. But at least Kimmelman’s provocation has accomplished its intended purpose of reopening an important conversation. And this is exactly the right time to think ambitious thoughts about our city’s transit. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done much to make the city more livable. On his watch New York transformed a defunct elevated rail bed into a delightful urban promenade, the High Line, completed some fine new parks and turned loving attention to our neglected waterfronts. But his third term is winding down, and the issue of our shameful transit system should surely figure in the campaign to replace him. Meanwhile, after prolonged turmoil at the state level — four governors in five years — we have a shrewd, energetic and ambitious new chief executive, Andrew Cuomo, who ought to be looking for some signature projects. So far, Cuomo’s idea of a bold move is a scheme to have Malaysian gambling interests build a new convention center around the racetrack-and-slot-machine haven of Aqueduct, in an inaccessible corner of Queens. The plan may have some collateral payoff in Midtown, but I doubt that track-casinos — “racinos” is the term of art — are the sort of thing a prospective presidential candidate wants to hold up as his legacy. I fear that Governor Cuomo, capable as he is, may be reluctant to throw his political capital into projects that will only bear fruit long after he expects to have moved to Pennsylvania Avenue. I set out among the ranks of city thinkers to find a project suited to Cuomo’s political skills and impatience, something that could lift New York in a major way in short order. That’s how I stumbled upon the SoHo office of Sam Schwartz. The great bureaucratic contraption that governs our city-in-motion is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It is the largest provider of public transportation in the Western Hemisphere. It represents a patchwork of constituencies, but is dominated by the governor. It is fueled by bridge and tunnel tolls, bus and rail fares and, lately, a lot of debt. Samuel I. Schwartz, a transportation engineer and New Yorker to his kishkes, has spent 40 years — half government, half private — trying to make sense of the M.T.A. He can tell you how it rewards congestion, keeps subways and buses in a state of decrepitude, and breeds resentment. He can regale you with incentives that are utterly perverse. (He prefers “cockamamie.”) One example: If you are a five-axle trucker bound for New Jersey, you can skirt Manhattan, take the highway over the Verrazano-Narrows and pay a $70 truck toll; or you can drag your belching bulk across the narrow streets of Chinatown, TriBeCa and Little Italy — toll-free. Guess what most truckers do.) Time and again Schwartz has labored over attempted reforms — remember “congestion pricing”? — only to see them shot down because they put all the pain on the outlying car-centric suburbs, or because they ran into an antitax mood, or because people suspected the money would be siphoned off for other purposes. Over the years he has gradually constructed a plan that is a Brooklyn boy’s gift to his city. (Literally. No client paid for it.) It wipes clean the slate, replaces it with a system of tolls and fares designed as incentives to minimize congestion in the central business district, ease circulation around the region and revive public You do not have to be an engineer to appreciate the logic. The scheme puts the heaviest onus on the solo driver who has ready access to a train, and lowers the cost for drivers who have no alternative. Unlike earlier plans that amounted to a punishing tax on commuters from outlying communities, the Schwartz plan has more affluent neighborhoods (like the plusher parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens) pay a fair share. Though the main purpose is to underwrite public transport, the plan sets aside money to make the highways more bearable — in part so trucks will use them and avoid the populous business districts. Unlike plans that are all about cars and trains, Schwartz’s includes some lovely optional extras for the green at heart — graceful new bike-pedestrian bridges connecting the gentrified waterfront neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey to Manhattan. Schwartz calculates that his system would bring an extra $1.2 billion a year to the M.T.A. — enough to raise the subways and buses back to first-world standards. The plan promises 35,000 permanent new jobs, a sharp drop in traffic, and for a majority of travelers an actual reduction in costs. Over the past year or so Schwartz has gradually tested his PowerPoint slides on experts and politicians, including some of the fiercest skeptics of previous plans. He is working his way patiently toward prime time. He has not shown it yet to the governor or the mayor or the media. It’s about time for his phone to start ringing off the hook. Oh, one other thing. Schwartz presented his slides to a major investment bank and was told the plan is so solid it could be the basis for a bond issue of up to $15 billion. Who knows? With that kind of money, fixing Penn Station might not be such a fantasy after all.