With wit and sharp insight, former Traffic Commissioner of New York City, Sam Schwartz a.k.a. “Gridlock Sam,” probably one of the most well known transportation technical engineers in the globe and consummate insider in NYC politics circles, uncovers how American metropolitan areas became therefore beholden to vehicles and why the current shift from that tendency will permanently alter America’s urban landscapes, marking nothing lacking a revolution in how exactly we obtain from spot to place.

When Sam Schwartz was growing up in Bensonhurst, about Street Smart: The Rise of Towns and nov Cars Brooklyn-his block belonged to his community: the youngsters who played punchball and stickball & their parents, who’d regularly walk to the local businesses of which they also worked. He didn’t realize it then, but Bensonhurst had been similar to a museum of the long-forgotten way-of-life when compared to a picture of America’s long term. Public transit journeyed over and under town streets-New York’s initial subway line opened in 1904-but the streets themselves had been conquered by the internal combustion engine.

America’s dependency on the auto began using the 1908 introduction of Henry Ford’s car-for-everyone, the Model T. The “fight for right-of-way” in the 1920s noticed the demise of streetcars and transformed America’s roads from a multiuse source for socializing, business, and public flexibility into distinctive arteries for private automobiles. The next destruction of metropolitan transit systems and post WWII suburbanization of America enabled with the Interstate Highway Program as well as the GI Costs forever changed just how Americans commuted.

But today, for the first time in history, and after a hundred years of stable increase, automobile traveling is in decline. Younger Americans progressively prefer active transport choices like walking or cycling and taking open public transit, ride-shares or taxis. This is not a rsulting consequence higher gas prices, or actually the economic depression, but instead a collective decision to be a lot less dependent on cars-and if American cities want to maintain their youthful populations, they need to plan appropriately. In Street Wise, Sam Schwartz clarifies how.

In this apparent and erudite presentation of the concepts of smart transportation and sustainable urban planning-from the simplest cobblestoned street to the brave ” new world ” of driverless cars and trains-Sam Schwartz combines rigorous historical scholarship with the non-public and interesting recollections of a guy who has spent a lot more than forty years working on preparation intelligent transit networks in New York City. Street Smart is certainly a book for everyone who would like to know more about the who, what, when, where, and why of human flexibility.