Tag Archives: infrastructure

The infrastructure devil is in the (financial) details

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Here is an interesting argument: generally, people like the idea of improving infrastructure until the details about finances and completing the project come up.

But beyond the potentially divergent approaches looms the question of how the expansion and improvements will be paid for. Abernathy’s colleague Eric Harris Bernstein pointed to an infrastructure proposal released by the Trump campaign in October that would rely on public-private partnerships, tax credits, and other private-sector incentives, which would likely require toll roads and bridges to entice investment. Bernstein characterized this approach as “a huge departure from this sort of populist message Trump ran on.”“They’re talking about having it all be financed by private investment, which is essentially the opposite of targeted [investments],” Abernathy adds. “It’ll go to the communities that have the potential to pay user fees and have the highest profit and ultimately reduce access and equity and basically turn our highway system into a bunch of toll roads.”

Richard Geddes, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University and a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that there is harmony across the political lines on “the notion that overall spending on infrastructure has been inadequate.” He suggests that the best way forward is to eschew the moonshot in favor of a more “surgical” approach to improving infrastructure quality. “The spending really has to be targeted on better, more efficient maintenance and operation of what we have, plus targeted expansions in the system,” he says. “We’re not going to rebuild the entire highway system, we’re going to add capacity—meaning a lane here, a lane there, expand facilities, particularly in urban areas as people move there.”

To pay for it, Geddes suggests there is some bipartisan consensus  for public-private partnerships, but he also believes the private sector will be instrumental in funding the work ahead. One solution he encourages would include making tax-exempt municipal bonds, which citizens buy to help communities pay for local projects, available to the private companies to incentivize them to renovate infrastructure. Another possibility he offered would be to update the gas-tax system to collect revenue from drivers based on miles traveled rather than gallons purchased, which would generate more revenue from hybrid or electric cars…

Of course, many Democrats and the Roosevelt Institute suggest that some infrastructure projects be financed by tax increases, be it on the wealthy or by closing of corporate loopholes or instating carbon taxes. These suggestions are anathema to Trump and many Republicans, some of whom have vowed not to raise taxes and not increase the debt. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said that she would oppose an infrastructure bill that banked heavily on tax breaks and privatization.

This is where finishing under budget and ahead of schedule would be helpful. I don’t know if there is much hope that any large infrastructure project (especially for the huge projects like major bridges or tunnels) can do this these days.

Perhaps infrastructure could also be a leading indicator in current American society regarding a lessened ability to plan for the long term. Infrastructure is not a very sexy topic yet people will complain vehemently if it ends up falling into disrepair.

A fortified skyscraper to house telecommunications hub, shield NSA spying

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AT&T owns a unique skyscraper in Manhattan that may also serve as a key node in the government’s snooping into phone calls:

They called it Project X. It was an unusually audacious, highly sensitive assignment: to build a massive skyscraper, capable of withstanding an atomic blast, in the middle of New York City. It would have no windows, 29 floors with three basement levels, and enough food to last 1,500 people two weeks in the event of a catastrophe.

But the building’s primary purpose would not be to protect humans from toxic radiation amid nuclear war. Rather, the fortified skyscraper would safeguard powerful computers, cables, and switchboards. It would house one of the most important telecommunications hubs in the United States — the world’s largest center for processing long-distance phone calls, operated by the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T.

The building was designed by the architectural firm John Carl Warnecke & Associates, whose grand vision was to create a communication nerve center like a “20th century fortress, with spears and arrows replaced by protons and neutrons laying quiet siege to an army of machines within.”…

It is not uncommon to keep the public in the dark about a site containing vital telecommunications equipment. But 33 Thomas Street is different: An investigation by The Intercept indicates that the skyscraper is more than a mere nerve center for long-distance phone calls. It also appears to be one of the most important National Security Agency surveillance sites on U.S. soil — a covert monitoring hub that is used to tap into phone calls, faxes, and internet data.

Three quick thoughts:

  1. Telecommunications equipment and other vital infrastructure has to go somewhere in major cities. It is often covered up in a variety of ways. But, a 500+ foot building is difficult to disguise completely.
  2. Americans tend not to spend much time thinking about how many features of modern life happen. That such a large building is needed to house a “large international ‘gateway switch'” hints at what is needed behind the scenes when people use a phone to dial people outside the country.
  3. The article may be suggesting that the architecture of the building matches its sinister use. This sounds like post hoc theorizing. When construction started in 1969, the architecture fit what was needed: a protected building. I don’t know if it is possible to make such structures more beautiful or appealing. On the other hand, perhaps some can see past the functional approach used in the design of many infrastructure housings and admire such particular designs. Chic infrastructure?

Some problems with new LED street lights

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Many communities have installed LED bulbs in public areas but the rollout hasn’t always gone smoothly:

For some, those first LED lights have been a fiasco. The harsh glare of certain blue-rich designs is now thought to disrupt people’s sleep patterns and harm nocturnal animals. And these concerns have been heaped on the complaints of astronomers, who as far back as 2009 have criticized the new lights. That’s the year the International Dark-Sky Association, a coalition that opposes light pollution, started worrying that blue-rich LEDs could be “a disaster for dark skies and the environment,” says Chris Monrad, a director of IDA and a lighting consultant in Tucson…

Lately, lighting companies have introduced LED streetlights with a warmer-hued output, and municipalities have begun to adopt them. Some communities, too, are using smart lighting controls to minimize light pollution. They are welcome changes, but they’re happening none too soon: An estimated 10 percent of all outdoor lighting [PDF] in the United States was switched over to an earlier generation of LEDs, which included those problematic blue-rich varieties, at a potential cost of billions of dollars…

Whatever their faults were, those blue-rich LED lights do save energy and money. My city of Newton, Mass., which has about 80,000 residents, expects to save US $3 million over 20 years after swapping its 8,406 sodium streetlights for 4,000-K LEDs, and avoid 1,240 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually. Los Angeles anticipates saving $8 million a year after installing more than 150,000 LED streetlights, [PDF] while New York City hopes to recover $14 million a year by replacing the city’s 250,000 streetlights with LEDs.

Outdoor LEDs also illuminate streets more efficiently than sodium not so much because of their superior lumens per watt but because they are highly directional, meaning that they focus light mostly in one direction. Sodium lamps are gas-filled bulbs that emit in all directions. More than half of that light must be redirected downward by reflectors or lenses, reducing the lamps’ illumination efficiency.

It sounds like the solution is already at hand: swapping early LEDs for later ones that have warmer hues. Yet, this could serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when infrastructure changes: something that many people don’t pay attention to (street lights) suddenly changes and the world (literally) looks different. Of course, the savings are tremendous but infrastructure choices shouldn’t always be made solely due to efficiency: many residents also care about quality of life and have certain expectations about how things are lit.

While on this topic, it reminds me that I would like to eliminate fluorescent lights in buildings. Rather than use them in my office, I often don’t have my lights on. Maybe I’ve fallen prey to conditioning regarding enjoying yellower incandescent light. Given the changes in bulbs across all sorts of settings, we might all prepare for a future of harsher and colder light.

The Swiss Cheese Model for dealing with industrial accidents

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I was recently reading The Grid by Gretchen Bakke where a discussion of massive power plant brownouts led to discussing two approaches to industrial accidents:

One might be given to think that this blackout might have been prevented if somebody had just noticed as things slowly went awry – if in 2002 all of FirstEnergy’s “known common problems” had been dealt with rather than merely 17 percent of them, if the trees had been clipped, if a bright young eye had seen the static in the screen. But what most students of industrial accidents recognize is that perfect knowledge of complex systems is not actually the best way to make these systems safe and reliable. In part because perfect real-time knowledge is extremely difficult to come by, not only for the grid but for other dangerous yet necessary elements of modern life – like airplanes and nuclear power plants. One can just never be sure that every single bit of necessary information is being accurately tracked (and God knows what havoc those missing bits are wreaking while they presumed to-be-known bits chug along their orderly way). Even if we could eliminate all the “unknown unknowns” (to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld) from systems engineering – and we can’t – there would still be a serious problem to contend with, and that is how even closely monitored elements interact with each other in real time. And of course humans, who are always also component parts of these systems, rarely function as predictable as even the shoddiest of mechanical elements.

Rather than attempting the impossible feat of perfect control grounded in perfect information, complex industrial undertaking have for decades been veering toward another model for avoiding serious disaster. This would also seem to be the right approach for the grid, as its premise is that imperfect knowledge should not impede safe, steady functioning. The so-called Swiss Cheese Model of Industrial Accidents assumes glitches all over the place, tiny little failures or unpredicted oddities as a normal side effect of complexity. Rather than trying to “know and control” systems designers attempt to build, manage, and regulate complexity in such a way that small things are significantly impeded on their path to becoming catastrophically massive things. Three trees and a bug shouldn’t black out half the country. (p.135-136)

Social systems today are increasingly complex – see a recent post about the increasing complexity of cities – and we have more and more data regarding the components and the whole of systems. However, as this example illustrates, humans don’t always know what to do with all this data or see the necessary patterns.

The Swiss Cheese Model seems to privilege redundancy and resiliency over stopping all problems. At the same time, I assume there are limits to how many holes in the cheese are allowed, particularly when millions of residents might be affected. Who sets that limit and how is that decision made? We’ll accept a certain number of electrical failures each year but no more?

Gov’t plan to reduce infrastructure barriers between communities

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Several months ago, the Department of Transportation started a project intended to reverse infrastructure barriers between communities:

Wednesday marks the launch of an initiative from the Department of Transportation aimed at mending some of those old wounds. The Every Place Counts Design Challenge calls on local governments to identify neighborhoods that face barriers to (or created by) existing transportation infrastructure, and to compete to work with experts who’ll assist in knocking them down.

Four communities around the U.S. will be selected to receive a specialized DOT design session in their hometowns, which will offer “in-depth facilitation of design strategies, on-site advice from subject-matter experts, targeted guidance related to USDOT program funds, and identification of resources to address an existing transportation infrastructure project challenge,” according to a federal notice provided to CityLab.

To be eligible, elected officials, urban planners, designers, and a cross-section of local residents must all convene around a transportation project that is already in the works and has the potential to reconnect communities to essential services such as jobs, healthcare, and schools. Applications (due June 3) must demonstrate how the existing infrastructure cuts people off from those needs, and how working with transportation and design experts could help these areas achieve better outcomes.

As this later article suggests, such monies could be used to counter earlier efforts that often emphasized driving (particularly in the form of highways in urban areas) or development at the expense of poorer neighborhoods. There are numerous classic cases of this including the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago between the Bridgeport (white) and Bronzeville (black) neighborhoods or Gans’ classic study Urban Villagers involving an Italian neighborhood in Boston. Instead of enforcing outside interests on existing communities – usually along racial/ethnic or class lines – planning today would often advocate for more community input. At the same time, there are still plenty of current situations where neighborhood and outside interests are not aligned and conflict can arise. Additionally, what may look advisable now may seem crazy in a few decades even as we would often imagine that we would never do something as destructive as post-war urban renewal.

Perhaps efforts like this are simply necessary: while better planning could help limit future remediation, monies should always be available to address past plans that didn’t quite work as intended or that were more misguided.

The power grid, Wall Street, and presidential elections as “critical infrastructure”

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The Department of Homeland Security is considering oversight of the critical infrastructure of the presidential election:

“We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process, is critical infrastructure like the financial sector, like the power grid,” Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said.

“There’s a vital national interest in our election process, so I do think we need to consider whether it should be considered by my department and others critical infrastructure,” he said at media conference earlier this month hosted by the Christian Science Monitor…

DHS describes it this way on their website: “There are 16 critical infrastructure sectors whose assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, are considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”…

Johnson also said that the big issue at hand is that there isn’t a central election system since the states run elections. “There’s no one federal election system. There are some 9,000 jurisdictions involved in the election process,” Johnson said.

The term infrastructure usually brings to mind public services like electricity, water, and transportation. This is a broader definition that hints at what the government think is essential to American society. Wall Street as infrastructure? If something crashed for a significant amount of time – whether through error or malfunction or nefarious intervention – the ripple effects could be huge. If the national election system couldn’t be trusted, it could have significant implications for a democracy.

See the full list of the 16 areas identified as critical infrastructure – including food and agriculture as well as critical manufacturing – at the DHS website. I wonder what other sectors could be added in coming years…

Adding aerial cable cars to cities

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According to Curbed, cities looking for new transportation options are considering gondolas:

Here in North America, gondolas are usually used on a ski vacation to access amazing terrain in ritzy towns like Aspen or Whistler. Increasingly, however, urban areas in the United States are considering proposals for gondolas and cable cars to efficiently move people from place to place. The Chicago Skyline project wants to use cable cars to transport tourists along the city’s riverfront, while in Austin the Wire proposal would create an aerial system akin to a “moving sidewalk” that would be much less expensive than a comparable light rail system.

Elsewhere in the world, trams, gondolas, and funiculars are common, supplementing other mass transportation systems in an effort to reduce pollution, traffic, and crowding. Compared to subways, highways, or rail lines, which often require displacing huge numbers of people in urban areas or extensive (and expensive) below-ground building, gondolas are a relatively cheap option. City planners only need to find locations to build the cable car towers and the requisite airspace. Gondolas don’t move as many people as other types of mass transit, but as a supplement to existing systems they can be quite effective…

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, aerial cable-propelled transit systems are being considered in Brooklyn, Washington, Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Baton Rouge, Austin, Tampa Bay and Miami.

And you can see a number of gondola systems already in place around the world.

While the thrill of flying through the air is unique, I suspect there are some serious difficulties in seeing this as a major mass transit option:

  1. Can gondolas move similar amounts of people compared to buses, trains, and subways?
  2. Are these primarily about tourism?
  3. Do gondolas contribute to visual pollution, clogging up views of buildings and scenery?
  4. Do these work better in cities with hills or varied terrain?
  5. Is a crash or mishap with a gondola more detrimental (since passengers are falling out of the sky) than other forms of mass transit?

As noted in the Wall Street Journal article cited above, some of the more serious proposals are private enterprises. Perhaps it will require the private sector to test this out before many large cities are willing to put substantial public funds into this.

Mass transit users want three basic things

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Fast wi-fi? Cushy seats? A recent survey of mass transit users suggest they want more basic features:

Analyses in the TransitCenter report suggest that riders agree. In one, the researchers compared satisfaction levels with various attributes of regional transit systems between respondents who said they’d recommend their transit service to others and those who wouldn’t. Of all the attributes (charted above), frequency of service demonstrated the largest gap in satisfaction between transit boosters and detractors, and it got the very lowest rating from transit detractors. That suggests that frequent service is essential if you want happy riders…In that same analysis, the second-largest gap in satisfaction was travel time—how long it takes to get from station to station. Translation: Fast trains equal more satisfied riders. A second analysis supports this conclusion. Respondents were asked to ranked the relative importance of 12 potential improvements to a hypothetical bus route (the results are charted below). They ranked travel time number one. (Frequency is a close second, with cost reduction in third place.)…

Finally, the report identifies walkability—here, the ability to walk to transit—as the third key factor at the heart of effective, useable transit. To arrive at this conclusion, the researchers broke down riders into three types: Occasional riders, who use transit only once in a while; commuters, who use transit regularly, but only to get to work; and “all-purpose” riders, who take transit regularly to travel to all types of destinations—work, dining, entertainment, and shopping. That last category is especially important for cities to pay attention to, Higadishe said: “When you have lots of all-purpose riders, that’s a signal that a transit system is really useful.”

Across all three rider types, most survey respondents said they typically walked to access transit. But all-purpose riders did so overwhelmingly, with 80 percent typically getting to transit on foot, compared to 53 percent of commuters and 57 percent of occasional riders. In an additional, more fine-tuned analysis of spatial data from TransitCenter’s national transit database AllTransit, the researchers identified a similar relationship…

Infrastructure tends to work this way: it has to work well and consistently. Perhaps then some extra frills could be considered but as long as they don’t compromise the basic features.

So, if these findings hold across a majority of transit users, why don’t politicians and infrastructure authorities pay more attention to these issues? Are they too expensive to address? Or, are these leaders always looking for cool new features (i.e., wi-fi) to impress the public? Perhaps this exposes a gap between who uses mass transit and who doesn’t – politicians and business leaders likely use it less.

Slow process for possible new rail line around Chicago area

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While the mayor of Aurora praised plans for a new railroad line around the Chicago area, the process of approval will take some time:

Not that everyone loves the idea. At a recent public hearing in Belvidere, near Rockford, some 400 people showed to say the train line would be dangerous in their areas, and would impact farms and groundwater. The U.S. Surface Transportation Board held a series of hearings on the proposed railroad, and took public comment through the middle of June. The board will issue an environmental impact statement, followed by more public hearings. A final impact statement is likely two to three years away, and then the Surface Transportation Board must approve the railroad before construction could begin.

Not only does new infrastructure require large sums of money, it often involves a lengthy process involving federal and local agencies as well as local residents and local officials. As has been noted by multiple commentators, this can make infrastructure projects very difficult to construct. By the time all the hoops have been jumped through, the money secured, and bids and plans approved, a significant amount of time has passed. At the same time, not all major infrastructure projects are worthwhile. I’m thinking particularly of highways in major cities, like along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, the elevated highway in Boston which was replaced in the Big Dig, or the Lower Manhattan Expressway that was never built. So, we have a system that slows down the process, which helps in some circumstances and is burdensome in others.

This is a reminder that perhaps the best way to deal with all of this is to have good foresight. Plan ahead and fewer residents might be affected, costs are lower, and society can benefit from the infrastructure for longer. When governments or private firms wait – for lack of funds, lack of need, political pressure – the construction only becomes more difficult.

The most common job in 37 states

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Moving goods around the country requires a number of drivers:

More than 3 million people drive trucks in the United States. In fact, according to Steve Viscelli, author of “The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream” and a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, it’s the No. 1 occupation in 37 of 50 states.

Americans don’t generally pay much attention to infrastructure but the trucking industry may be lower than average on the list of infrastructure components. Outside of complaining about large trucks on the road (driving next to them, the noise they generate), it is difficult to remember that so much of what we purchase comes at least part of the way through trucks. And if trucking all moves to self-driving vehicles, perhaps trucking will become even more faceless.

But, perhaps one way we will hear about the future changes in trucking: a significant loss in jobs. Will drivers be able to transition to new jobs better than millions of manufacturing workers or others who have lost jobs because of a changing economy in recent decades?