Samuel I. Schwartz, a.k.a. Gridlock Sam, is an American

transportation engineer Transportation engineering or transport engineering is the application of technology and scientific principles to the planning, functional design, operation and management of facilities for any mode of transportation in order to provide for th ...

, formerly the

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

Traffic Commissioner, notable for popularizing the phrase "

gridlock Gridlock is a form of traffic congestion where "continuous queues of vehicles block an entire network of intersecting streets, bringing traffic in all directions to a complete standstill". The term originates from a situation possible in a grid ...

Life and career

Schartz was educated at

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

(BS Physics) and the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

(MSCE), and first worked as a New York City cabbie before being hired by the City of New York in 1971. He served as NYC Traffic Commissioner from 1982 to 1986, and when the traffic department became subsumed by the Department of Transportation he held the second-in-command post of First Deputy Commissioner and Chief Engineer from 1986-1990. While employed with the city, he attempted to introduce bicycle lanes and public plazas. They were vetoed at the last minute by then-mayor

John Lindsay John Vliet Lindsay (; November 24, 1921 – December 19, 2000) was an American politician and lawyer. During his political career, Lindsay was a U.S. congressman, mayor of New York City, and candidate for U.S. president. He was also a regular ...

. He earned the nickname Gridlock Sam during the 1980 transit strike when he developed a series of transportation contingency plans, called the Grid-Lock Prevention Program. It was under Schwartz's watch that the city almost became the first city to implement

congestion pricing Congestion pricing or congestion charges is a system of surcharging users of public goods that are subject to congestion through excess demand, such as through higher peak charges for use of bus services, electricity, metros, railways, tele ...

. The city's bridges had not been tolled since 1911 and beginning in 1973 he worked with Mayor Lindsay to reintroduce them. Even with a change in leadership (Mayor Lindsay was replaced by Abe Beame in 1974) it looked like the tolls would be reinstated. However, an act of Congress nixed the proposal in 1977. See: Congestion pricing in New York City. After he left city government around 1996, he started his own firm. He writes columns for New York City's ''Daily News (New York), Daily News'', lower Manhattan’s ''Downtown Express'', The ''Queens Chronicle'' and in the Yiddish ''News Report'' as Gridlock Shmuel. He also tweets, and blogs for the Public Broadcasting Service and ''Engineering News-Record''.

References

External links

BiographyOfficial Gridlock Sam websiteSam Schwartz' consulting firm
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schwartz, Sam Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Brooklyn College alumni University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni Transport engineers American civil engineers American columnists American taxi drivers