Hunter College announced today the establishment of the Sam Schwartz program for Transportation Research at its Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute.
The program, funded with a generous $1 million gift from Schwartz, seeks to solve urban transportation problems, with a focus on research and policy analysis that can shape the future of mobility.
Schwartz, known for more than 40 years as “Gridlock Sam” for his role advising New Yorkers on how to avoid traffic congestion, is a former New York City Traffic Commissioner and an internationally recognized transportation expert, adviser, and engineering consultant.
More recently, he has spent three semesters at Roosevelt House as the Theodore W. Kheel Transportation Fellow in Residence. As a Kheel Fellow, Schwartz organized and hosted public programs, taught transportation policy to graduate and undergraduate students, and mentored interns into transportation professionals. He emphasized issues such as autonomous vehicles, New York City transportation infrastructure, and congestion pricing.
Under the research program, Schwartz and newly named Director Kelly McGuinness, a certified planner, will conduct research and data analysis on local and national transit and transportation needs, issuing reports to the press, public, and other urban academic institutions.
Another focus will be education and workforce development, community engagement, transportation-planning education, and policy influence. Schwartz will also lead Roosevelt House public programs on transportation topics, open to students, faculty, and the community. The program will offer internships to Hunter students and bring noted experts to Roosevelt House for professional seminars and civic engagement.
“One could hardly imagine anyone better positioned than Sam to lead transportation research and programming at Roosevelt House, with his decades of immersion in public policy and years of experience in residence at Hunter,” said Hunter College President Nancy Cantor. “The Sam Schwartz program will build on Hunter’s legacy of vital urban research, establishing an epicenter of cutting-edge study for both preserving public transportation in our city and advocating for its evolution to better serve the public good. We could not be more grateful to Sam for his generosity and for his enduring commitment to catalyzing collaboration between planning professionals and new generations of our scholars and students—who, themselves, depend so much on transit access—to pave new two-way streets of policy development, if you will, between Hunter and our home community.”
Cantor and Roosevelt House Board Chair Rita Hauser also announced the appointment of Schwartz to the advisory board.
Commented the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House Harold Holzer: “No venue could be more suited to hosting the new Sam Schwartz program. This is the one-time home of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the site where FDR and his Brain Trust conjured up the public works programs that transformed transportation infrastructure in New York and the nation, including: subway line extensions, new stations, ferry service expansion, and new roads, bridges, and airports. Thanks to Sam, this unique legacy of transportation innovation can be explored and enhanced.”
Commented Schwartz: “I am delighted to support much-needed transportation research in these dynamic times, and Roosevelt House at Hunter College is the perfect platform. I’ve been teaching there for several years and found the students to be naturally transportation savvy, traveling to school by just about every mode imaginable. With Kelly McGuinness, a proven researcher and urban planner at the helm, supported by Hunter students, we can expect some groundbreaking findings and myriad plans forward for the city, state, and country.”
Schwartz has long been New York City’s leading advocate for traffic and transit reform in New York. A graduate of Brooklyn Technical High School and Brooklyn College (BS ’65, physics), he earned his advanced engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania and found his first job as a New York City cab driver before securing a position as a junior engineer in the traffic department. He served from 1982 to 1986 as New York City Traffic Commissioner in Mayor Edward I. Koch’s Administration. He invented the term “gridlock” during the 1980 transit strike, when he introduced a series of contingency plans called the “Grid-Lock Prevention Program.” As “Gridlock Sam,” he later spent years writing a regular column on the subject for the New York Daily News.
When the traffic department was subsumed by the city Department of Transportation, Schwartz served as first deputy commissioner and chief engineer from 1986 to 1990. During his long career in public service, Schwartz was among the first to propose bicycle lanes, traffic-free public plazas, East River bridge tolls, and congestion pricing.
After leaving city government, Schwartz became a traffic and transportation consultant, leading his own firm and serving clients in the United States and abroad.
Schwartz is also the author of the 2015 book Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars, followed in 2018 by No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future — about autonomous vehicles — a project for which several Kheel students served as credited research assistants.
In praising the book as a guide to avoiding future traffic deaths, the New York Times (November 27, 2018) commented: “If we heed Gridlock Sam and this valuable, humane book as we move toward a future in which we largely surrender the wheel, we can avoid messing up again. From his perspective, we don’t have a choice.”
The new program announced establishment of its own advisory board of distinguished transportation experts (which Schwartz will chair), to include: Erich Arcement (vice chair), president and CEO of transportation firm EA Creative; Nicole Gelinas, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car; Meera Joshi, a one-time NYC Taxi and Limousine Commissioner and the city’s former deputy mayor for operations; and Gerard Soffian, a former deputy commissioner of the Department of Transportation.
About Hunter College
Hunter College has been making higher education accessible and affordable to New Yorkers since 1870. Founded by education reformer Thomas Hunter, it was the first institution to offer free public higher education for women in New York City and today is one of the nation’s most effective engines of opportunity and social mobility. One of the founding colleges of The City University of New York in 1961, Hunter is now the largest college in the CUNY system, generating innovation and catalyzing creativity across the School of Arts and Sciences, School of Education, Silberman School of Social Work, Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, and School of Health Professions. Among Hunter’s student body of 22,538, 87% are from New York City’s five boroughs, 70.5% are students of color, 154 countries are represented and 70 languages spoken, 37% of undergraduates are first-generation college-going, and 58% are eligible for federal Pell grants. These characteristics add up to make Hunter a designated Minority-Serving Institution, Hispanic-Serving Institution, and Asian American, Native American, and Pacific Islander-Serving Institution that is #1 for social mobility among regional universities in the Northeast (US News & World Report) and #2 nationally for “best value” (The Wall Street Journal).
About Roosevelt House
Roosevelt House, an integral part of Hunter College since 1943, re-opened in 2010 as a public policy institute honoring the distinguished legacies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived here from 1908 until 1933. Its mission is three-fold: to educate students in public policy and human rights, to support research, and to foster creative dialogue and civic engagement through public programming. Roosevelt House also offers tours and exhibits that bring the history of the Roosevelts to a wide audience.
