Brian T. Ketcham, an engineer and influential environmentalist who promoted mass transit and favored bridge tolls, bus lanes, limits on parking and other curbs on vehicular traffic in New York City, died on Aug. 21 in Manhattan. He was 85.
His death, in a hospital, resulted from complications of a fall, his son, Christopher, said.
As a New York City official in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and later as a consultant to government agencies and ecological groups, Mr. Ketcham lobbied for improvements in traffic engineering to protect the environment, developed evidence to support their efficacy and in many cases succeeded in having them put into effect.
He established a laboratory in Brooklyn that demonstrated the potential benefits of catalytic converters in reducing emissions from auto tailpipes without affecting fuel efficiency — countering the auto industry’s resistance to federal Clean Air Act standards.
He persuaded New York City officials to reserve lanes of traffic exclusively for buses and was a founder of Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit group that promotes alternatives to automobile use.
Mr. Ketcham played a foundational role in the ultimately successful campaign by grass roots groups in the 1970s to cancel Westway, a proposal for a federally funded highway that would have run along Manhattan’s West Side from the Battery to 42nd Street, mostly tunneled through new landfill topped by parkland and commercial development.
He was a champion of charging tolls to cross the city-owned East River and Harlem River bridges. That proposal never succeeded, but it was considered a precursor to a more recent plan to reduce traffic and finance subway improvements by charging drivers as much as $15 to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street.
Congestion pricing, as that plan was known, was to have taken effect this summer until it was delayed indefinitely at the last minute by Gov. Kathy Hochul.
“If Hochul hadn’t halted it, I would say Brian’s chief legacy is New York City congestion pricing,” said Charles Komanoff, a former city environmental analyst. “He propagated its key precepts: Driving is subject to price incentives; improving transit is in drivers’ interest; and ostensibly pro-driver measures like wider roads and easier parking actually hurt drivers by intensifying and expanding traffic.”
“But we don’t have congestion pricing, so his biggest legacy is stopping Westway,” Mr. Komanoff added, in an email. “Not single-handedly, of course, but his arguments and sheer presence were key.”
Mr. Ketcham teamed up with potent allies, including Marcy Benstock of the Clean Air Campaign and his future wife, Carolyn Konheim, another former city official.
“To this impressive cast, Brian lent highway-engineer gravitas,” Mr. Komanoff said. “His warnings that a West Side mega-highway would compound, not alleviate, Manhattan traffic and congestion didn’t just subvert the steamroller; they gave outgunned opponents courage to fight.”
In 1975, Mr. Ketcham collaborated on the first successful legal challenge to Westway on environmental grounds, arguing that it would violate the Clean Air Act by increasing traffic. That challenge, followed by similar court rulings and congressional legislation, enabled New York State to trade Westway funds for mass transit subsidies and contributed to the proposal’s demise in 1985.
Mr. Komanoff said that Mr. Ketcham’s laboratory experiments with catalytic converters helped federal officials “stand firm on emission standards, preventing thousands of premature deaths nationwide.” And, he said, they helped “enshrine the idea of ‘technology-forcing standards’: Require it, and industry will re-engineer to comply.”
In her forthcoming book, “Movement: New York City’s Long Battle to Take Back Its Streets from the Car,” Nicole Gelinas, a contributing editor of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, and a guest opinion columnist for The New York Times, cast Mr. Ketcham’s impact in even broader terms.
“Brian was integral to New York City’s recovery from the postwar population flight to the suburbs,” she writes. “He saw not just the big picture, that the city couldn’t continue to see the automobile as the engine of the urban future, but also grasped the details. Working for the state and city, he meticulously drew up the blueprint for how New York would wean itself from its car dependence, from rebuilding its subways to reducing parking spaces to creating bus lanes.”
As a transportation consultant dependent on government contracts, however, Mr. Ketcham at one point bowed to pressure from New York State officials and muzzled his public opposition to Westway. But his promoting mass transit over cars and trucks cost him business.
“No one in New York City or anywhere accomplished as much as Brian in reducing the societal harms of urban auto use,” Mr. Komanoff said. “No one paid as high a price, career-wise.”
Brian Thurston Ketcham was born on May 19, 1939, in Tacoma, Wash. His father, Clinton, was a salesman. His mother, Lucille Ketcham, was a secretary. Brian grew up in California’s Central Valley.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1962 from Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland. He completed the coursework for a master’s degree in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966.
Growing up, he was fascinated by automobile engines, and one of his first jobs was designing engines for racing cars. Shortly after he ended his studies, he moved to New York City, where he joined the progressive administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay. He helped establish a Bureau of Motor Vehicle Pollution Control, which built an automotive emissions testing laboratory and equipped the mayor’s limousine with a catalytic converter.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Ketcham was instrumental in drafting New York’s federally mandated clean-air plan to reduce vehicular traffic.
He and Ms. Konheim left city government after Mr. Lindsay’s successor, Abraham D. Beame, expressed concern that the traffic constraints that they had promoted would harm the local economy. Ms. Konheim started Citizens for Clean Air, and Mr. Ketcham, with William Hoppen, an environmental lawyer, won a federal court challenge that delayed the Westway project.
In addition to founding Transportation Alternatives, he formed an environmental and traffic engineering consulting firm with Ms. Konheim in 1981. In 1996, they established Community Consulting Services, a nonprofit that provided environmental engineering services to disadvantaged communities.
Ms. Konheim died in 2019. In addition to his son, Mr. Ketcham is survived by a daughter, Eve Ketcham, both from a previous marriage to Barbara Gent, which ended in divorce; and two granddaughters.
Asked why he switched from making a living designing car engines to promoting constraints on automobile use, he explained that, in 1968, “my ex- wife’s niece gave me a book on what we were doing to the environment.” As a newcomer to New York, struck by the congestion and smog, he became convinced, he said, that “the city had to get rid of the car.”
The post Brian Ketcham, Effective Foe of Traffic and Smog, Dies at 85 appeared first on New York Times.