Passing For Knowledge

Minimizing Infrastructure Commitment and Maximizing Public Benefit

In the midst of all the MTA Chairman buzz, a poignant example of the perils of complex infrastructure in the case of the the ill-fated Second Avenue Subway (SAS) fell through the cracks.

From the New York Times:

Early last year, Manhattan prosecutors concluded that the New York area’s largest concrete testing company, Testwell Laboratories, had been systematically falsifying its results on many public and private construction projects.

The eventual indictment of the company and several officers left close to a dozen government agencies, as well as private developers, scrambling to evaluate how much retesting was needed to ensure the strength of concrete on existing projects, and to find alternative labs to perform that work, and testing on current and future projects.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority chose as a replacement American Standard Testing Laboratories to evaluate the concrete on the $4.3 billion Second Avenue subway project, authority officials said.

But now, according to several people briefed on the matter, American Standard is also under criminal investigation, suspected of having falsified reports and engaged in other improprieties. It is unclear whether the matters under investigation involve its $250,000 contract to test the Second Avenue subway concrete.

Let’s take a detour — a few blocks west. Central Park is beautiful — masterfully envisioned by Frederick Law Olmstead. But what of the execution of his plan? The park’s construction was overrun by the ubiquitous mass-corruption of the Tammany era. In that sense, it is founded in disgrace. New Yorkers — except for those getting “hookup” jobs — got robbed before they could get their free space.

The infrastructure commitment of the SAS is analogous to the landscaping of Central Park in that each has the capacity to be fueled with corruption. In the old days, your politician brokered you the contract, took your kickback, and passed on jobs to his constituents, in what constituted a heinous corruption. In this modern era, negligent or fraudulent contractors are able to function without the aid of corrupt politicians, by projecting a false aura of transparency by having participated in a public bidding system.

We can see that infrastructure contracts subject to the public bidding system need to be complemented with stringent third-party testing. This adds yet another layer of complexity, and cost, to the process. But if it’s not taken, we effectively take a gamble on safety.

Nobody wants that. But everybody’s broke. Is it worth it?

Glorious.

The rail-fan inside of me desperately wants to ride the SAS. I’ve always loved trains, ever since I was a kid and I would glare out the front window of a Redbird on my way to enjoy watching the Mets lose. I think a lot of planners, developers, and elected officials married to the project have some sort of sentimental attachment to NYC’s subways, and this is causing them to be stuck inside a mindset of a transit improvement model whose associated infrastructure upgrades are likely infeasible in the given day, even without considering the current financial turmoil.

But we need to get past that, and face the reality that the infrastructure commitment of a “full-length” SAS is too much of a gamble in its construction, and has a price tag that we’ll never be able to afford. Even with our best forecasts and five-year Capital Construction plans we can’t escape the reality of unpredicted financial instabilities (coupled with the perennial poor-budgeting of New York).

Streetcars, light rail, bus rapid transit (BRT), and other solutions might not be as fun to ride, or may not necessarily have the same ridership capacity as a full-fledged subway line with intra-system rail connections, but they can be implemented in little time (compared to the 90 years, and counting, of the SAS), and require little infrastructure commitment. There’s much less monetary commitment and business and/or residential displacement. Budgeting their construction, and sustaining their operations, is easier and less vulnerable to economic fluctuations, by merit of the smaller and simpler scale of their infrastructure.

I know it’s hard, but we need to let the inner cost-benefit analyst inside us overpower the nostalgic rail-fan if we’re every going to bring New York City a transit solution on Second Avenue which is an appropriate compromise of span and sustainability.