Location
New York, NY
Client
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Services
Transportation Logistics
Community Outreach
Traffic Engineering
Permitting
Agency Coordination
World trade center transportation planning + engineering
Sam Schwartz was retained by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) to assist in transportation logistics planning during the reconstruction of the World Trade Center (WTC). The firm coordinated all transportation, including cars, trucks, construction vehicles, pedestrians, and bicycles, on and around this complex 16-acre construction site in the middle of congested Lower Manhattan. This included over 2,000 WTC construction workers, hundreds of WTC construction vehicles, hundreds of thousands of pedestrians around the site perimeter, and around 50,000 PATH commuters every day, all in addition to 5.7+ million annual tourists/visitors to Lower Manhattan.
Sam Schwartz continuously performed pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicle counts around the WTC site to understand how circulation changed as a result of construction activities and closures. The results of the counts informed sidewalk, roadway, and bike path improvement/mitigation designs, as well as rerouting, signal timing, and wayfinding decisions.
The firm coordinated with several city, state, and federal agencies on a regular basis. Transit work included projecting the number and distribution of tour buses to the 9/11 Memorial site. Building on this analysis, Sam Schwartz devised recommendations to accommodate and manage the large number of buses throughout the day, both in the short- and long-term, as attractions at the site came online. These included the redesign and assessment of alternate street geometries, layout of bus stops, and determination of bus access/egress routings to minimize delays and impacts to general traffic.