This feature is an excerpt from a new book out from Viking, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, by Janette Sadik-Khan, former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, and Seth Solomonow.

I love the smell of asphalt, its acrid odor, its superheated shimmer and sticky texture as it tumbles from shovels and is flattened by screeds. Most of all, I love watching a crew transform a street in a few hours from a lunar landscape to a flawless mat as black as squid ink. In this regard, the tabloids got it right. I am wacko, although my partiality to heavy infrastructure helped me as commissioner.

Maybe this love of the inner workings of cities comes from my great grandfathers, who helped build the viaduct over the rail tracks on Manhattan’s Park Avenue and laid the tracks for the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad. Their passions are the creosote in my bones, and probably why I love the scent of the subway’s railroad ties.

Some of my favorite memories from this period were of filling potholes with Staten Island borough president James Molinaro. Staten Island is the least dense and most car-dependent borough in the city, and transportation is one of the most sensitive issues for its 472,000 residents. The ferry aside, Staten Island has the least developed public transportation system and no subway or train connection with other boroughs. Its streets were built in a hurry after Robert Moses oversaw the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opening in 1964, but most of its roads lack a concrete base. Its few main roads and lack of grid road network were never expected to carry the volumes of traffic that now strafe it daily, making the system painfully vulnerable to disruption by a single breakdown.

While we made headlines in other boroughs by building bike lanes and plazas, and were accused of social engineering by the Brooklyn borough president, across the Narrows on Staten Island we were all-infrastructure-all-the-time. Staten Island was the target of some of the city’s largest infrastructure investments, including a $175 million rehabilitation of the ferry terminal, whose ramps had not been updated in more than fifty years. Molinaro was legendary for importing transportation ideas he saw on vacation in Sarasota, Florida. Overhead street name signs that can be seen from hundreds of yards away, stop signs outlined with flashing red lights to make them more visible, smart traffic signals equipped with sensors that turn green only when they detect traffic, crosswalks paved with brick-style materials. Being responsive to Molinaro’s requests helped create goodwill and paved the way when we came back with big asks, like Select Bus Service with dedicated lanes along Staten Island’s main street, Hylan Boulevard.

Our infrastructure summits with Molinaro sometimes lasted hours and often included a stop at the local pizza parlor or deli for a real Staten Island lunch, then decamping for handmade pastas and fresh mozzarella at Pastosa Ravioli to bring home. I enjoyed the trip to Staten Island, boarding the ferry five minutes from my office at the southern tip of Manhattan, often greeting deckhands, and ferry captains, a commissioner perk. The ferry is an extraordinary form of public transportation for seventy thousand people every weekday. It’s also a workplace for some four hundred transportation department employees. Some grew up working on fishing vessels out of Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay. A growing number were professional mariners who came through Kings Point or the State University of New York’s maritime school. The latter school’s former commandant of cadets, Captain Jim DeSimone, ran the ferry during my tenure. He commanded the respect of the deckhands, mates and marine engineers as well as that of budget eggheads and administrators. Captain DeSimone took over the ferry system following the 2003 ferry tragedy, years before my time, when eleven people lost their lives after a ferry pilot blacked out at the controls as his vessel bore down on St. George’s ferry terminal. DeSimone helped reorganize and professionalize the ferry operations into the most efficient system of its kind in the world.

The Staten Island infrastructure love didn’t get much play outside of the borough. If transportation were covered in media proportionally to the actual dollar investment, building bridges and paving streets would be daily front-page headlines. We knew that we could not get the political leeway to reorder the streetscape unless we had mastered the basic stuff of city care. Throughout my time as commissioner, New York City witnessed numerous spectacular infrastructure failures — a steam pipe explosion on Lexington Avenue in Midtown, numerous water main breaks, and city-altering floods from storms like Sandy — that were constant reminders of the cost of disinvestment and potential price of replacement. And that’s where most city investment goes: into its guts. Virtually all of city transportation departments’ budgets go straight into repaving streets, producing asphalt, and maintaining and rebuilding roads and bridges.

A crew use rakes and shovels to smooth newly laid asphalt. (AP Photo/The News Tribune, Janet Jensen)

Paving New York is a dirty, expensive business, at $1 billion over six years. One thousand lane miles are paved each year. Paving asphalt in New York City is produced from stone mined in quarries up the Hudson River — massive boulders and outcroppings of solid stone cracked, crushed, refined, and smoothed into minute, round pebbles called aggregate. Heated up to more than 200 degrees and combined with a tar-like asphaltic cement, the mixture becomes a sticky, almost culinary mélange of material that is laid on top of the city’s concrete base, like an asphalt mat. Many miles of asphalt weren’t made from scratch but remade, literally, from other streets. New York City greatly expanded the use of asphalt recycling, which involves replacing some of the virgin asphalt material with old pavement that has been scraped off the street before laying new asphalt. Thanks to many experienced and innovative leaders at DOT, New York City now produces asphalt with 50 percent recycled content, recycling more than 1 million tons of materials in the last seven years. We could rip up a street in Manhattan, reconstitute some of the old asphalt into fresh blacktop, and lay it out in Brooklyn. Reducing the amount of new asphalt required to pave streets saved 174,000 tons of milled asphalt from winding up in landfills each year and eliminated the need for 840,000 barrels of oil, also saving money on landfill fees. Trucks full of crushed asphalt drive 321,000 miles every year en route to landfills, producing needless emissions and damaging the region’s roads. The recycling program saved $60 million over six years.