OUT FOR A SPIN: While you’re snarled up on the FDR or the Cross-Bronx today, WCBS traffic reporter Tom Kaminski will be watching from above. (
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Tom Kaminski is a fast-talking guardian angel of sorts for commuters in the metro area, the guy you turn to every 10 minutes to get rapid-fire reports on the Cross-Bronx crawl and the backups at the Holland Tunnel.
And on days like today, he’s the one up there circling in the WCBS 880AM helicopter to let you know if you’ll be stuck in a traffic jam — and take it from a man with 24 years of experience, if you’re driving today, you will be.
Those years have taken Kaminski, 50, from a guy driving around in a car with a two-way radio and a “bag of maps” to the eyes-in-the-sky guy in the chopper, buzzing over the skyline each morning starting at 5:30 a.m.
While he’s found his niche reporting on backups and bottlenecks, traffic wasn’t exactly the first thing on Kaminski’s mind when he graduated from Montclair State with a degree in broadcast journalism in 1984.
“My mindset at that point was: disc jockey or newscaster,” says Kaminski, who speaks with the effortless lilt of one who’s spent years talking into a microphone professionally.
He took an internship for what was then Shadow Traffic, then was hired as a driver. That was back before helicopters became the standard, and also before highway cameras, cellphones, Google Maps and Twitter made traffic reporting a crowd-sourced affair.
“On my first day, the producer handed me the keys to the car and a two-way radio and said ‘Go get lost,’” Kaminski recalls. “That’s where I learned how to read a map.”
When he was hired at WCBS in 1988, he started by riding along with the station’s then traffic reporter, Neil Busch. He soon became the afternoon traffic guy, then took over the morning shift as well when Busch left in 1999.
All these years later, Kaminski has kept much the same routine. He works out of a hangar in Linden, NJ — a few minutes’ drive from his home in Cranford — where his small office is adorned with Giants and Mets memorabilia and pictures of his 9-year-old son, J.T. He heads skyward twice a day, for morning and evening rush hours, giving updates every 10 minutes (save for the days when he’s grounded by ominous weather).
Camping out in the passenger seat while a pilot mans the controls, he combines his bird’s-eye observations with information from producers in the studio, phoned-in tips from listeners and info gleaned from police and emergency officials. He uses a clipboard to keep track of it all, split into sections for the Long Island Expressway, the five boroughs and North Jersey.
“It’s probably 30,000 miles of road to report on and I have 90 seconds to do it,” he said. “There’s no way I’m going to do this off the top of my head.”
While the routine doesn’t vary, there are occasional surprises. Most notable was the morning of Sept. 11, when his chopper, flying south along the Hudson, passed beneath Flight 11 as it headed for the North Tower.
“We just saw a flash and fireball from the top of the Trade Center,” he said. A minute later it was 8:58 a.m., time for Kaminski’s regular “traffic on the eights” report — which became what is often credited as the first media report on the attack.
His lofty perch has given him a unique perspective on other things as well. In the years after 9/11, for example, as economic pundits consulted statistics and spending reports to gauge the status of the economy, Kaminski had his eyes on the Holland Tunnel.
“For two or three years, traffic getting into the Holland in the morning was reduced,” he said. “It’s slowly built up over the years. It’s not great for commuters but in terms of the revitalization of downtown, it’s great to see.”
As the city reeled from the recent recession, Kaminski noticed another trend: traffic moving away from the five boroughs and into New Jersey and Long Island.
“That volume really has built up,” he said.
Of course, he’s also had an aerial view of the city’s eccentricities — including a couple making love on a Brooklyn rooftop.
“The bottom line is if you can see us we can see you,” he said. “Always remember that.”
Some rules of the roads
At @work our mandate is giving advice about careers, not car routes. But while we had Kaminski’s attention we figured we might as well cull a few tips for navigating summer-weekend slowdowns.
First, your plan to beat the traffic by rising at the crack of dawn won’t work.
“It doesn’t help all that much,” he said. “If you can postpone the trip, we’ve seen traffic really start to drop after 6, 7 p.m.”
Leaving Thursday instead of Friday doesn’t help much either — too many others do the same.
The worst choke points? The Garden State Parkway to and from the Jersey beaches and the Hamptons routes, especially the Montauk Highway.
His best advice: Ditch the car entirely.
“I’m a big proponent of taking mass transit if you can possibly do it,” he says. Observing all those jam-ups, “I think to myself, ‘I don’t know how people do this every day.’” — T.D.