Does public transit need a PR campaign?

I have a magazine, which I’ll show you. I took Playboy and Playgirl magazines and put the title of the magazine Infrastructure Finance on top of them, and used them at a conference saying "infrastructure must become sexy." The civil-rights movement became sexy. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy–they were real leaders, incredibly attractive individuals. The men and women singing folk songs made the civil rights movement sexy, and it widened that whole arena. The thousands became millions. Maybe we should use Hollywood. I always thought that it would be great, instead of LA Law to have NY Engineer.

You’ve been a taxi driver, a traffic commissioner, and are now an urban-design and engineering consultant. What can these professions learn from one another?

One of the biggest problems we’ve had is that so many people doing planning have suburban mentalities. When I ask city kids to design a bridge, they’re busy figuring out where to pedestrians will go, where the bikes will go, where the trains will go. But here in NYC in the late fifties we designed the Verrazano: twelve lanes with the most majestic view of the harbor and bay and ocean, and there’s no bikeway, walkway, or train. It’s a suburban mentality. If we’d given it to a city kid to design, it would be the most romantic spot in the city. It think it’s great that the people who run Chicago Transit Authority have to be either a bus driver or a conductor for one month out of each year–in some way, do it.

From an Interview with Sam Schwartz from Metropolis magazine

June 2002