Samuel I. Schwartz has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is Street Smart.
Street Smart
Summary
With wit and sharp insight, former Traffic Commissioner of New York City Sam Schwartz, a.k.a. "Gridlock Sam", one of the most respected transportation engineers in the world and consummate insider in NYC political circles, uncovers how American cities became so beholden to cars. He also explains why the current shift away from that trend will forever alter America's urban landscapes, marking nothing short of a revolution in how we get from place to place. When Sam Schwartz was growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, his block belonged to his community: the kids who played punchball and stickball and their parents, who'd regularly walked to the local businesses at which they also worked. He didn't realize it then, but Bensonhurst was already more like a museum of a long-forgotten way-of-life than a picture of America's future. Public transit traveled over and under city streets - New York's first subway line opened in 1904 - but the streets themselves had been conquered by the internal combustion engine. America's dependency on the automobile began with the 1908 introduction of Henry Ford's car-for-everyone, the Model T. The "battle for right-of-way" in the 1920s saw the demise of streetcars and transformed America's streets from a multiuse resource for socializing, commerce, and public mobility into exclusive arteries for private automobiles. The subsequent destruction of urban transit systems and the post-World War II suburbanization of America, enabled by the Interstate Highway System and the GI Bill, forever changed the way Americans commuted. But today, for the first time in history, and after a hundred years of steady increase, driving is in decline. Younger Americans increasingly prefer active transportation choices like walking or cycling and taking public transit, ride-shares, or taxis. This isn't a consequence of higher gas prices, or even the economic downturn, but rather a collective decision to be a lot less dependent on cars.
©2015 Samuel I. Schwartz (P)2015 Gildan Media LLC
No One at the Wheel
Summary
The country's leading transport expert describes how the driverless-vehicle revolution will transform highways, cities, workplaces, and laws not just here, but across the globe. Our time at the wheel is done. Driving will become illegal, as human drivers will be demonstrably more dangerous than cars that pilot themselves. Is this an impossible future or a revolution just around the corner? Sam Schwartz, America's most celebrated transportation guru, describes in this audiobook the revolution in self-driving cars. The ramifications will be dramatic, and the transition will be far from seamless. It will overturn the job market for the one in seven Americans who work in the trucking industry. It will cause us to grapple with new ethical dilemmas - if a car will hit a person or a building, endangering the lives of its passengers, who will decide what it does? It will further erode our privacy, since the vehicle can relay our location at any moment. And, like every other computer-controlled device, it can be vulnerable to hacking. Right now, every major car maker here and abroad is working on bringing autonomous vehicles to consumers. The fleets are getting ready to roll, and nothing will ever be the same, and this audiobook shows us what the future has in store.
©2018 Samuel I. Schwartz (P)2018 Hachette Audio