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 Aug. 15, 2007 | Vol 6 No. 14 |
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In This Issue: – On Crumbling Bridges and Roads, Drive More, Invest Less And more of these miles are driven by more and heavier trucks carrying more weight. The number of trucks is up by almost three times from 17 million to 49 million, the number of heavy trucks is up by three-quarters, and the ton-miles they carry have doubled since 1980. And over the years we are allowing heavier trucks to use our highways, with a maximum weight allowed of 40 tons. And, by the way, even the passenger cars have gotten heavier with the well-documented shift to SUVs. Meanwhile, our highways are getting older, and just like our house, our car or ourselves, require more intensive (meaning money) maintenance. For example, among the 1,900 plus route-miles of highways ever built in the New York – New Jersey – Connecticut metropolitan region, 94 percent are more than 30 years old and half are more than 50 years old. The recipe for more common disasters then was set – more driving, with more heavy vehicles driving on ageing infrastructure. So it should come as no surprise that a major bridge collapsed recently in Minneapolis with tragic consequences. Not in the sense that we should have known that that particular bridge would fail, but we should have known that some bridge somewhere in the United States was bound to fail. What then should our response be to this situation? Of course we should conduct more frequent inspections of bridges and other key pieces of infrastructure, but that’s a stopgap measure. It’s no use inspecting a bridge if you don’t have a budget to make the necessary repairs. For a long-term solution, it makes sense to focus our highway funding on fixing what we have rather than trying to squeeze more highways into our built-up urban and suburban environments. You don’t add a wing to your house when you can’t pay to fix the hole in your roof. Finding the funding for this change in priorities will not be easy in our tax adverse climate. But it is heartening to hear the Governor of Minnesota contemplating gas tax increases he previously rejected. We simply cannot afford to allow our past investments crumble, much less put our live in jeopardy because we are unwilling to add a few, mostly unnoticed cents a gallon at the pump. Part of the money could be found by shifting funds from building new roads to fixing those we have. But this fix-it-first mentality will require a political change. Right now, developers and other interest groups push new road construction because they like to make money off the new development around it. Putting that money instead into repairing an old bridge will be difficult for politicians and state DOTs, but it will be the right thing to do. This mentality shift is needed both nationally and regionally. Another way we can tackle our crumbling roads and bridges is to give people an alternative to driving on them. This means investing in good mass transit, as well as things like bike paths. This is why those who suggest we find money to repair our bridges and roads by taking money from mass transit are particularly wrong headed. Recent investments have led the way to a 26 percent growth in transit ridership in the last ten years. This is the wrong time to turning away from the best method we have to divert drivers off crowded highways and bridges. As detailed in the August/September issue of Planning Magazine, more driving is driving our carbon emissions up, swamping the gains in fuel efficiency. Better mass transit would give people an alternative to driving more. Bottom line: inspect better, fix the highways we got rather than build more of them, and invest wisely in transit where it can do the most good. The annual average precipitation increased 5 to 10% in the Northeast U.S. since 1900. Climate modelers predict that annual average precipitation will increase an additional 10% by the end of the century. During the winter season there will be less snow and more rain. Currently there is an average of 10-12 Nor’easters typically during the months of November and December. However, global warming means at least one additional storm will come up the coast due to the extended season, November through March. All this increased precipitation means that wet days will become wetter and more frequent. The precipitation intensity, or the average amount of rain that falls on any given rainy day, is expected to increase 9% by 2050, and to 15% by the end of the century. The frequency, or the number of heavy rainfall events, is expected to increase 8% by 2050, and 13% by the end of the century. These heavy rainfall events are defined as more than two inches of rain falling in less than 48 hours. Downpours like the one on Wednesday August 8 are increasingly common under the climate of the future. And this will happen even if we cut our carbon emissions today. The subway has a history of storm failures, but what’s troubling is that they seem to be getting more frequent in recent years. Trains were stopped in September 2004 because of storm flooding and drainage problems. In August 1999, after months of drought, flash floods crippled the region’s transit system. Nor’easters have also affected the regional transportation system. Most notable were the storms in November 1950 and December 1992 that caused severe flooding in the airports and New York City subways. The 1992 storm closed the Hoboken PATH Station for 10 days. Following that storm, floodgates were installed at the top of stairways leading to PATH station platforms. The mechanics of flooding are easy to understand. During a heavy rainfall event water simply runs off the roadways and buildings, unless soaked up by grasses, trees, dirt or some other porous material. The water floods the streets and sewer system and ends up pouring through subways vents. Last week, the millions of gallons of water ended up knocking out the transit’s signal system, flooding the third rail on some lines and forcing the shutoff of power. If the transportation system is to have a chance of handling these events, you have to either reduce the amount of storm water runoff, or give the system additional capacity to handle runoff. Or both. In existing developed areas, a range of opportunities exists to reduce the amount of storm water runoff by improving our urban green infrastructure. These strategies include greening roofs, parking lots, and medians. Additionally, street tree plantings and maintenance programs are all part of the urban component of a regional strategy, along with intensive sustainable development in the right locations. In extensively developed urban areas such as Manhattan incorporating more green roofs into urban design is especially promising. Green roofs, which are essentially small gardens or even forests on the top of buildings, offer the potential to dramatically lower storm water runoff, often by more than half. They essentially suck in rainwater and heat-causing carbon dioxide, while giving off healthy oxygen. In cities like New York that rely on combined sewer systems this translates to a significant reduction in the demand placed on wastewater treatment plants during extreme storms. So let’s plant green roofs. Well, even the simplest green roofs installations are often removed from consideration because costs are high, $7 to $10 per sq ft. So how do we make it easy to incorporate green roofing into new construction? We need to find ways to capitalize on incentives making the process a win-win situation for developers and the City, who consequently is stuck with the building and its impacts for decades to come. Another solution is to elevate financing of existing green infrastructure maintenance programs. Currently, trees that fall down in extreme weather are often just replaced with concrete sidewalks. This is amazingly short-sighted. Trees are an important part of maintaining the local hydrological cycle. They slow down and capture rainfall. Cities that lack trees have to increase storm water management capacity. New connections are desperately needed for storm water management and tree planting/preservation programs. These are just a few options of many in handling storm water runoff, as well as other problems caused by weather. In general, a reliable infrastructure system that takes account of climate change would be both resilient and redundant. It would include less obvious things, like getting people from one place to another through alternative modes of transportation such as ferries, bicycles, and safe pedestrian walkways. All in all, a multi faceted approach is going to be necessary to tackle two trends that are not going to get better on their own: aging infrastructure, and more inclement weather. An Epic Struggle against More than Nature Whether it’s New York City’s first subway, its first water system or its many big bridges, the construction of each was preceded by decades of false starts and jockeying for position by public and private actors who had something to lose or to gain. In almost every case, the engineering challenges were the least difficult. Nowhere was this truer than in the construction of the train tunnels under the Hudson River to a beautiful new Pennsylvania Station. Detailed in wonderful readable prose in Conquering Gotham. A Gilded Age Epic: The Construction of Penn Station and its Tunnels, the book essentially tells how this Herculean task was accomplished. The book is mostly about the construction of the tunnels. So much attention has been paid over the years to the sad and tragic destruction of the old beaux-arts Penn Station at 33rd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue, that it is sometimes forgotten that the station was the easy part. What made the station necessary, where no station had been before, was the construction of the tunnels under the Hudson River, which until then had been uncrossed by any tunnel or bridge into Manhattan. As Jonnes, a professional historian, explains so well, for decades in the 19th century the gargantuan Pennsylvania Railroad had dropped its passengers off in New Jersey at huge terminals and then ferried them into Manhattan. The company’s leaders had dreamed of direct access into Manhattan, which was the monopoly of the Vanderbilts, who ran New York Central that ran into Grand Central Terminal. The Vanderbilts, who in the past had used courts to block attempts to cross the Hudson, were just one of many obstacles necessary to overcome to build a new direct train link into Manhattan. The railroad also had to gain the cooperation or at least acquiescence of the Tammany Hall political machine that controlled New York City, as well as the support of the state legislatures of New York and New Jersey. And it had to amass the capital necessary to do such a project. Then there were the engineering challenges. To construct a bridge or tunnel across the Hudson into Manhattan was comparable to building, say, the Suez Canal, engineers at the time said. Neither had ever been built. And the entire project was awesome in its scope. It would eventually include not only the two tunnels under the Hudson, but complete lines under Manhattan, four tunnels under the East River, the mammoth train yards in Sunnyside, Queens, and of course the fabulous Penn Station. Although spearheaded by the railroad company, the state helped out with low-interest bonds, franchises and other subsidies. The book is in many respects a biography of Alexander Cassatt, the president of PRR at the time. An independently wealthy man who nevertheless rose up through the grimy world of railroads, Cassatt was lured out of an easy retirement of gentleman’s farming to lead the charge to cross the Hudson. The project essentially took 10 years, from 1900 to 1910 when the station opened. At first PRR backed a mammoth North River Bridge across the Hudson, an endeavor that had been sanctioned by the U.S. Congress provided it was open to all railroads. But the other railroads were not willing to back the bridge financially and the effort collapsed. The idea of tunneling to Manhattan was conceived only when the bridge effort failed. It was interesting to learn that the tunnels and design of Penn Station were inspired by the Paris d’Orsay train station, now a legendary museum of impressionist art. Cassatt, in Europe to visit his now famous sister Mary Cassatt, one of the first impressionist painters, saw the Quai d’Orsay station shortly after it opened. He saw how electrification allowed smokeless trains to enter the d’Orsay station underground, thus freeing up space for passengers and the fitting of the station seamlessly into the city. Before the tunnels and station could be built, enormous challenges remained but were eventually conquered. But not in the best of all possible ways. Things like subway access would have to wait a decade, since August Belmont, who controlled the first subway line, did not want any rivals and so blocked attempts to have subway access to the new Penn Station. American style capitalism is not always efficient. To those contemplating new projects for the 21st century, such as, say, new tunnels under the Hudson or the new Moynihan Station, it is educational to read how this big project a century ago was done. It perhaps provides a compass during what are always stormy times. . |
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August 18 August 25 September 18 October 16 and 17 |
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Spotlight on The Region A publication of Regional Plan Association, Robert Yaro, President, Alex Marshall, Senior Editor 212-253-2727, x360 alex@rpa.org www.rpa.org |
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