‘Gridlock Sam’ Gives Back

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find out what’s next for the transportation expert known as Gridlock Sam. We’ll also get details on a death in the Rikers Island jail complex, the fifth fatality among people in city custody in the last two weeks.

Since college, Samuel Schwartz has been a cabdriver, a city commissioner, a newspaper columnist, a chief executive and a visiting professor.

He may also have been the wheelman in a getaway car after a robbery.

And he earned a footnote in the annals of etymology, the study of word origins — as the person credited with coining the word “gridlock.”

That was during a transit strike in 1980, when Schwartz was a midlevel official in the city’s Traffic Department. Someone had prepared a document called the “Grid-Lock Prevention Plan.” “It was the first time it was ever written down,” he said. When reporters heard the word — and asked Mayor Edward Koch if it could happen — the hyphen disappeared, and “it got attached to me.”

It helped him get a big promotion, to traffic commissioner. A few years later, when his agency was absorbed into the Department of Transportation, Schwartz became the first deputy commissioner and chief engineer, only to leave city government when he was not reappointed by Koch’s successor, David Dinkins.

Other work followed, like the newspaper gig. “My older brother Brian said, ‘Why don’t you write a newspaper column called “Gridlock Sam” and be the weatherman of traffic?’” Schwartz recalled. “I did that for 32 years with The Daily News.”

Now Schwartz, 77, is putting $1 million from the sale of his consulting firm into a transportation research program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, where he did his teaching stint. “I went to a CUNY school” — Brooklyn College — “and got a first-class education for free, and thought, what better way to show my appreciation than to give some of the earnings I got from the sale of the company to a CUNY school?”

The new program will be named for him. Harold Holzer, the director of the Roosevelt House institute, noted that the building where Schwartz’s program will be based was where Franklin D. Roosevelt lived when he was working out the transportation elements of the New Deal, before he moved to the White House.

Schwartz has plans for the Sam Schwartz Program for Transportation Research. “We’re going to issue a report card on how well or how poorly New York City is providing transportation,” he said. “We’ll have parameters, such as traffic volumes, what the speed of traffic is, the on-time performance of transit, the number of crashes. And of course we’ll be tackling specific topics, like autonomous vehicles and congestion pricing.”

He had argued for congestion pricing long before it became a reality at the beginning of the year. “It’s working,” he said. “There are fewer cars coming in.” But he said that traffic speeds in the toll zone had slipped. In the first four or five months after congestion pricing took effect, the speeds were higher “by 15 to 20 percent,” he said. “But of late, the improvement is less than 10 percent.”

“One of the reasons that the speeds are not as good as people thought they would be is we have more for-hire vehicles on the streets,” he said. “Taxis, in particular, have grown significantly since congestion pricing went in, which I think is good, but we have 100,000 Ubers and Lyfts on the road” as well. “It could be a function of the charges, that taxis and for-hire vehicles were set too low,” he said, at 75 cents for a taxi that goes into the congestion pricing zone and $1.50 for a for-hire vehicle.

He followed that with a warning: Traffic is about to slow down even more. “Not even congestion pricing will help during the United Nations General Assembly,” he said. And this year it’s not just the General Assembly that will bring world leaders (and their limousines) to the U.N. and the diplomatic missions and hotels in Midtown Manhattan. There is also the 80th anniversary of the U.N. itself, starting with a high-level meeting on Sept. 22.

But back to Schwartz’s taxi-driving days. What about that getaway car?

“I never verified this,” he said, before telling how he picked up a passenger who had apparently just robbed a candy store in Brooklyn.

“He had a paper bag filled with money,” Schwartz said. “He told me to step on it, like in the movies. I said, ‘Where to?’ He said, ‘Get out of here.’”

The man did not flash a gun. “Just the paper bag,” Schwartz said. “After about a mile, he said, ‘Drop me off here.’ He reached into the paper bag and gave me $5 for a $2 fare.”

“Which was great in those days,” he said — the equivalent of paying about $43 for what would be a $17 fare in today’s dollars.

Weather

Today will be another mostly sunny day, with a high near 83. Expect clear skies tonight, with a low around 71.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Sept. 23-Sept. 24 (Rosh Hashana)

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In less than 2 weeks, 5 people in city custody have died

A man being held at the Rikers Island jail complex died on Wednesday after suffering an apparent seizure. The man, whose name was not released by the authorities, was at least the fifth person to die in New York City custody in the last two weeks.

The Department of Correction, which runs the city’s jails, said that “every aspect” of the detainee’s death would be investigated.

A spate of deaths of people in city custody in recent weeks has prompted criticism from legal and advocacy groups that say the city is not doing enough to ensure the safety of its detainees. The man who died on Wednesday was at least the third person to die on Rikers since Aug. 23.

Two others — most recently a 29-year-old pedicab driver — have died in police custody since then. The pedicab driver, identified as Musa Cetin of Brooklyn, was taken into custody because his pedicab lacked a registration sticker. He was found unconscious in a holding cell at the Midtown South Precinct station house on West 35th Street. The city’s medical examiner’s office said that he had hanged himself.

Tina Luongo, the chief attorney of the criminal defense practice at the Legal Aid Society, called the deaths in city custody “a devastating result of a system that continues to fail in its most basic duty: to protect those in its charge.”

“We have seen absolutely no indication from City Hall of any plan to address this crisis,” she said in a statement.

METROPOLITAN diary