Samuel I. Schwartz

On a Saturday morning in December 1973, a section of New York's West Side Highway collapsed under the weight of a truck full of asphalt. The road was closed, seemingly for good, and the 80,000 cars that traveled it each day had to find a new way to their destinations. It ought to have produced traffic chaos, but it didn't. The cars simply vanished. It was a moment of revelation: the highway had induced the demand for car travel. It was a classic case of "build it and they will come," but for the first time the opposite had been shown to be true: knock it down and they will go away. Samuel I. Schwartz was inspired by the lesson. He started to reimagine cities, most of all his beloved New York, freed from their obligation to cars. Eventually, he found, he was not alone.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a surreptitious revolution has taken place: every year Americans are driving fewer miles. And the generation named for this new century -- the Millennials -- are driving least of all. Not because they can't afford to; they don't want to. They have better ideas for how to use their streets. An urban transformation is underway, and smart streets are at the heart of it. They will boost property prices and personal fitness, roll back years of congestion and smog, and offer a transformative experience of American urban life. From San Francisco to Salt Lake, Charleston to Houston, the American city is becoming a better and better place to be. Schwartz's Street Smart is a dazzling and affectionate history of the struggle for control of American cities, and an inspiring off-road map to a more vibrant, active, and vigorous urban future.… (més)

This book has aged a lot in 7 years, and not in the way a good bottle of red wine will age. The book goes to great pains never to say the word "racism" and uses the term "white flight" only once when discussing the rise of suburbs. The author barely mentions the racism inherent in the placement of Interstate Highways, and very briefly discusses inequity in public transit.

While the book makes great arguments in favor of multi-use streets, and how a number of different travel modalities are required for safer streets, it spends a lot of time about the author's personal history and brings up the Dodgers more times than my 98-year-old grandma (who used to live in Brooklyn).

Furthermore, the book frequently discusses transit systems or transportation infrastructure and fails to include ANY illustrations or photographs. Of the six photos in the book, one is of the author with a baseball player from back in the 1950s, one is of a map where the author got rid of a road that would have caused traffic issues (without actually indicating on the map which road it was, or where it would have been), one is of the cover of a brochure, one is of a street sign, one is of the NYC metro system, and one is of the Paris metro system. None of these photos or illustrations was helpful in understanding the actual infrastructure being discussed in the book. I still don't know what the Grand Concourse looks like, or the Williamsburg Bridge, or Vancouver's transit system, which the author spends a LOT of time discussing. (Discussion of the Paris metro: maybe two sentences. But somehow that gets a photo.)

The author made many predictions about the future that turned out to be untrue not only in the long term, but in the short term.

The discussion about Millennials was a little pained. The VMT decrease appears to have been a blip (of course, Covid put a huge dent in VMT, but nobody would claim that was ever going to be a permanent change), with VMT now much greater than it was in the 2010s.

The chapter about driverless cars was also written during the olden days when the ideas were still larger than the actual failures. I also found it interesting that the author never stopped to consider that driverless cars are only going to be adopted in the US if individuals own the driverless cars. He mentioned driverless car technology would take 90% of cars off the road. No way. If the options are drive my own car to work, or wait for a driverless car, then I'm going to be driving my car to work. And based on the very real failures of driverless cars, they are only safe when cars are the only users of the road -- exactly the opposite of a smart street.… (més)