Tag Archives: infrastructure

The “Pont Neuf” helped make Paris

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A new book about the history of Paris suggests one bridge played a critical role:

The construction of a new bridge over the Seine was initiated by Henri IV’s predecessor, the last king of the Valois dynasty, Henri III, who laid the first stone in May 1578. Some early projects conceived of a very different bridge, most notably, with shops and houses lining each side. In 1587, construction was just becoming visible above the water line when life in Paris was upended by religious violence. With the city in chaos, work on the bridge ceased for more than a decade.

In April 1598, Henri IV signed the Edict of Nantes: the Wars of Religion were officially over. A month earlier, the new king had already registered documents announcing his intention to complete the bridge. Henri III had offered no justification for the project; his successor, characteristically, laid out clear goals for it. He presented the bridge as a “convenience” for the inhabitants of Paris. He also characterized it as a necessary modernization of the city’s infrastructure—Paris’ most recent bridge, the Notre-Dame bridge, was by then badly outdated and far “too narrow,” as the king remarked, to deal with traffic over the Seine, which Henri IV described as rapidly expanding because new kinds of vehicles were now sharing the bridge with those who crossed on horseback and on foot. The new bridge would be financed in a previously untested manner: The king levied a tax on every cask of wine brought into Paris. Thus, as city historian Henri Sauval, writing in the 1660s, phrased it, “the rich and drunkards” paid for this urban work.

No prior bridge had had to deal with anything like the load the New Bridge was intended to bear—most significantly, a kind of weight that in 1600 was just becoming a serious consideration: vehicular transport. Earlier cities had only had to contend with transport that was relatively small and light: carts and wagons. In the final decades of the sixteenth century, personal carriages were just beginning to be seen in cities such as London and Paris. Nevertheless, with great foresight, each of Henri IV’s documents on the Pont Neuf adds new kinds of vehicles to the list of those to be accommodated. He was thus the first ruler to struggle with what would become a perennial concern for modern urban planning: the necessity of maintaining an infrastructure capable of handling an ever greater mass of vehicles.

The New Bridge became the first celebrity monument in the history of the modern city because it was so strikingly different from earlier bridges. It was built not of wood, but of stone; it was fireproof and meant to endure—it is now in fact the oldest bridge in Paris. The Pont Neuf was the first bridge to cross the Seine in a single span. It was, moreover, most unusually long—160 toises or nearly 1,000 feet—and most unusually wide—12 toises or nearly 75 feet—far wider than any known city street.

This seems appropriate given how the word bridge is often used: it isn’t just “a structure carrying a road, path, railroad, or canal across a river, ravine, road, railroad, or other obstacle” but is often used as a verb to generally refer to connecting things. I’m thinking of the term “bridging ties” in the social networks literature referring to building relationships across networks or groups that is contrasted with “bonding ties” that tend to build up in-group connections. In this case, a bridge helped bring Paris together.

This is also a good example of the enduring effect infrastructure can have. Done well, something like a bridge can help people travel, encourage commerce, and become a landmark and gathering place. Done poorly, the project may snarl traffic, repel rather than attract people, and fall apart or be demolished to try again.

Fake Georgian office building to hide electric substation next to fake Hard Rock Cafe in Chicago

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It is not uncommon for cities to have fake buildings or facades to hide infrastructure and here is an example in Chicago where the same architect designed the Hard Rock Cafe and fake mansion next door:

The most noteworthy, a faux Georgian mansion in the River North area of downtown, was designed by perhaps the city’s most famous living architect, Stanley Tigerman, former director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“The building is somewhat tongue-in-cheek , a bit of a joke,” said Tigerman, who had first designed a restaurant just west of the site. “The Hard Rock Cafe: fake stucco, fake Georgian, nothing real about it. Then they came to me and wanted me to do the ComEd substation next door, but to be contextual, to relate it to this ersatz piece of junk.”

So rather than construct a bogus building based on a fake, albeit one he designed, Tigerman cut the other direction.

“I decided to go absolutely hard core, as classically designed as I could, done authentically Georgian,” he said. “The brick bonding is  English cross bond, the one Mies van der Rohe used whenever he used brick. It’s very expensive to to lay bricks that way, but it makes the walls sturdy and impervious to cracking. I knew the building would never receive any maintenance, so the idea was to do as good a building as I could.”

He also had to take into account the building’s true purpose — so if you look closely, what seem to be windows are actually vents, to help cool the 138 kV electrical transmission equipment inside.

Hiding in plain sight. Here is the Google Streetview image of the two buildings, the covered substation on the left and the Hard Rock Cafe on the right:

55WestOntarioChicago

This could lead to a great architecture conversation: which of the buildings is more fake or authentic? The restaurant which is about evoking a particular spirit (a museum? an imposing older structure intended to lend more gravitas to rock ‘n’ roll?) to make money? Or the fake mansion with more pure design that does nothing but hide the infrastructure that is necessary for big cities? Both could be considered postmodern for their application of old styles to new purposes, their exteriors projecting certain images that don’t match their interiors.

Does the South beat out Chicago because of better weather?

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Here is a quick summary of research looking at how weather might affect population changes in Chicago and similarly cold-weather places versus the warmer weather of the South:

Renn pointed me towards the work of Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist and U. of C. grad who’s become one of the most prominent analysts of the American city in the 21st century. And he thinks there’s a strong correlation. He’s got a whole paper on it, in fact: “Smart Growth: Education, Skilled Workers, & the Future of Cold Weather Cities.”

Cities with average January temperatures under 30 degrees Fahrenheit grew in population only one-third as quickly from 1960 to 1990 as did cities with average January temperatures above 50 degrees. The shift of population toward the Sun Belt can also be seen at the state level: while population in the colder 25 states grew 95 percent between 1920 and 1980, the warmer 25 states saw their average population grow 309 percent…

In short, there’s something of a chicken-and-egg question with the air-conditioning solution that Glaeser cites. Adoption of air conditioning, across the South, was slower than you might expect from the weather. Its availability is a well-established boon to the South, but so is being able to power and afford air conditioning.

It’s significant that Enrico Moretti, like Glaeser an economist interested in how knowledge workers cluster in cities and regions, has most recently turned his focus back to the Tennessee Valley Authority. That’s a government project so ingrained in Southern culture that, as a kid, I thought that the Tennessee River was just called the TVA (emphasis mine):

We find that the TVA’s direct productivity effects were substantial. The investments in productive infrastructure resulted in a large increase in local manufacturing productivity, which in turn led to a 0.3% increase in national manufacturing productivity. By contrast, the indirect effects of the TVA on manufacturing productivity were limited. While we do find strong evidence of localized agglomeration economies in the manufacturing sector, our empirical analysis clearly points to a constant agglomeration elasticity. When the elasticity of agglomeration is the same everywhere in the country, spatially reallocating economic activity has no aggregate effects, as the benefits in the areas that gain activity are identical to the costs in areas that lose it. Thus, we estimate that the spillovers in the TVA region were fully offset by the losses in the rest of the country.

The intensely regressive economic (and cultural) practices of the South damned up potential across its old borders; once they began to fall, it created a flood, draining Yankee knowledge, technology, and workers.

While everyone wants to talk about the weather, it isn’t the only factor nor the most important factor in population and economic growth. To suggest this is the case is to rely on strong ecological arguments, perhaps like those made by Jared Diamond in his more popular books. Yes, air conditioning matters but humans were able to live in both the warmer South and colder North before air conditioning or central heating. More broadly, factors like electricity and water (see the recent troubles in the Southwest) matter more and are essential to even having air conditioning in the first place. Thus, the twist of invoking the TVA, an important adaptation to nature, makes the matter all the much more complex: essential infrastructure makes all sorts of other things possible.

Arguments for and against bus rapid transit in Nashville

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Here is an overview of arguments for and against plans to introduce mass transit in the form of rapid bus service to Nashville:

The Amp, a referential name in Music City, is the $174 million bus-rapid transit project proposed to link the western stretches of the city to East Nashville over a 7.1-mile span. It’s the first in-earnest attempt at reliable mass transit in Tennessee, and it has been pitched as a way to keep pace with peer cities like Austin and Charlotte. Nashville is poised to add a million more residents in the next two decades, further snarling already-jammed travels along the busiest corridors. The hope is that the Amp, running in a bus-only lane and with priority at traffic signals, will, over time, help unclog commutes and improve quality of life…

Detractors include residents from North Nashville, a mostly lower-income African-American neighborhood, who feel like they’re being left out and would prefer to see increased regular bus service in their community. (One state representative even threatened to sue city officials if North Nashville is not more integral to the project.) Fiscal conservatives, of which Nashville has plenty, say the project is an example of government largess. And then there are the residents in and around the mayor’s neighborhood, whose traffic and parking concerns have been rolled into an increasingly fraught class war.

Back when public debate over the BRT first started heating up in fall of 2012, a West End resident actually told a transit planner at a public hearing that “we don’t want the riffraff from East Nashville in our neighborhood.” Another homeowner said an influx of “burger-flippers” into the western precincts was a worry, prompting one East Nashville merchant to propose a T-shirt idea: “Burger flippers for the Amp.”…

Malcolm Getz, an economist at Vanderbilt University and a lightning rod of the opposition, has tried to make the case that the Amp’s route, which starts in a gentrified East Nashville neighborhood, crossing the Cumberland River before coursing its way up the densely developed West End Avenue, was chosen to benefit landowners, who are banking on increased land values and more development.

But Jason Holleman, a city councilman who supports public transportation but whose western district includes some of the loudest naysayers, counters that in reality, the route was chosen to serve areas with the highest commercial density, including the city’s two largest employers, HCA and Vanderbilt University…

Opinion polls on the Amp have offered mixed results. One survey, funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant aimed at boosting transit support, found that around 77 percent supported the Amp after surveying 500 registered voters. In another survey conducted by the Nashville Business Journal in which 2,200 participated, the results yielded an almost 50-50 split. Anecdotally, support appears to be tied to where residents reside, with the East-West divide coming up again and again.

Common themes that come up with major projects: who exactly is the mass transit going to serve? Do the costs lead to increased business and revenues down the road? Who benefits from all of this? Aren’t buses for lower-class residents? It is interesting that Nashville feels like it should catch up with other cities it competes with; bus rapid transit as an exciting amenity for visitors and tourists! And, as is noted in the final paragraph, a single bus corridor may not be able to do much for a big city built around cars but it could be part of a larger package that eventually effectively utilizes mass transit (though this may be a long time off).

All of this reminds me that it is often easier to have mass transit or major infrastructure from the past to add to rather than trying to create something new in today’s world where there are so many competing interests and costs seem so high. Of course, older projects had their own problems. For example, a lot of major post-World War II projects involved more liberal use of slum clearance with little regard to the people who lived there. (I’m thinking of the construction of interstates through Chicago as well as the University of Illinois-Chicago campus.)

Potholes can be avoided by spending more on road upkeep

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Communities can limit the number of potholes they experience each winter if they spent more money upfront on maintaining roads:

The answer doesn’t lie in a revolutionary new cement or asphalt mix — yet, experts say. Instead, it comes down to a few simple things: quality materials, experienced builders, plus regular road maintenance and reconstruction.

“A lot of things cause potholes, but at the core they’re caused because we don’t do enough road maintenance. We push our roads too far and too hard,” said engineer Don Hillebrand, head of Argonne National Laboratory’s Transportation Research Center…

Avoiding potholes starts with getting it right the first time, said Mohsen Issa, a University of Illinois at Chicago structural and materials engineering professor…

Hillebrand, a former auto executive with Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz, spent time in Germany, where “they view roads as a serious thing and spend much more on road maintenance than we do and expect them to last longer,” he said. Deeper foundations and thicker concrete help preserve German roads, he noted.

Roads seem to be the sort of thing many people don’t pay attention to until things start going wrong. However, as this article notes, roads have to be built well and continually maintained. This requires a good deal of resources that people may not want to spend until something goes wrong. Yet, when things do go wrong, fixes are not necessarily quick or easy. This provides a classic lesson in infrastructure: spending money upfront pays off down the road.

A question: just how many pothole stories can the media run this winter?

Addressing the lack of big city toilets with an $8 a day NYC toilet membership

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It is not easy to find a decent restroom in many big American cities and a new company in New York City wants to fill this hole in the market:

A New York company has started marketing what amounts to an upscale pay toilet service. Posh Stow and Go will offer visitors to the Big Apple “clean, safe and soundproof” bathrooms worthy of “the greatest city in the world,” in addition to such other amenities as “luxury showers” and private storage rooms.

Prices for the Midtown facility, which is set to open around June, start at $24 for a three-day pass (or $8 a day), plus a mandatory $15 annual membership fee. The company envisions opening other locations throughout the city—lower Manhattan is next on the list—but warns that “only a limited number of memberships will be sold so as to provide the best possible experience.”…

Parks may have a point: The lack of clean and comfortable public restrooms in major American metropolitan areas—especially New York—is an issue that’s been raised for years. The aptly named Phlush , a public restroom advocacy group based in Portland, Oregon, goes so far as to argue that “toilet availability is a human right” and “well-designed sanitation systems restore health to our cities.”

But the issue for cities remains twofold: Public restrooms are expensive to build and maintain and they are seen as a potential magnet for vagrants. For the latter reason alone, the city of Pensacola, Fla., recently approved an ordinance making it illegal for homeless individuals to wash or shave in public restrooms. (The ordinance was part of a larger push to address problems involving the homeless, though city leaders are now considering reversing the policies.).

I had never heard of Phlush but they make some good points: it is hard to be in a city if bathrooms are not available for all. Additionally, a city planning expert is cited later in the article suggesting that pay toilets go against the “democratic urban ideal.” This seems like one of the basic requirements of having a truly public space. Think of a space like Times Square that is consistently full of people: if most bathrooms are privatized, what is everyone supposed to do?

It would be really interesting to see the business plan of Posh Stow and Go. Just how many memberships can they sell before they reach a tipping point and the restrooms are not as luxurious and exclusive? Just how much money do they think is in private bathrooms? How much does it cost to retrofit existing retail space to fit this new use?

Limit power outages by burying power lines

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An editorial from USA Today argues for burying power lines in order to limit the effect of storms:

People served by buried lines have dramatically fewer outages, according to two studies by the Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utility companies.The idea is good enough that many American cities put most lines underground years ago, and lines for most new subdivisions are buried. Overall, though, roughly 80% of lines in the USA still hang overhead.

Such “undergrounding” of power lines can be pricey. But the figure opponents commonly cite — 10 times as expensive as stringing lines overhead — is misleading. The actual cost can be half that, or less, depending on local conditions and whether lines are buried when developments are built or when roads are being torn up anyway.

The best idea is to identify the lines most likely to get knocked down and begin by burying those. A study for Pepco, the underperforming Washington-area utility, found that while burying all lines would cost $5.8 billion and add a ridiculous $107 a month to customer bills for 30 years, burying just the most vulnerable lines would cost about one-sixth as much and prevent 65% of outages, a more reasonable tradeoff.

Even with a reduced figure for burying the power lines now, this serves as a reminder that the best time to bury the power lines would have been years ago when the developments were first built. Doing so after the fact costs more money and mars a lot of property while the burying is taking place. Putting the money into burying the lines in the first place saves a lot of hassle down the road (hence, different rules for newer developments).

An added bonus: having fewer overhead lines looks better. Imagine pristine residential or commercial streets without power lines and poles all over the place.

Exploring the meanings of Chicago’s underground Pedway

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A Chicago artist and teacher has spent years exploring and analyzing Chicago’s large underground Pedway:

You want to know the best thing about the Chicago Pedway? It’s not that, despite this Polar Vortex winter, you can cover almost 40 city blocks on the Pedway without ever stepping foot outside. It’s not that the Pedway began modestly in 1951 and now stretches through the North Loop, jogs beneath Millennium Park and ventures as far east as the mouth of the Chicago River. It’s not that the Pedway could be regarded as a kind of yardstick of municipal progress, always seeming as though it might extend just a little bit longer someday. It’s not even that the Pedway’s generally mundane, charm-free hallways offer little to see — look, another “For Rent” sign! — and therefore it works perfectly as a daily treadmill for ambulatory meditation…

Where you see putty-colored corridors leading to a job in a cubicle farm, she sees dreams of the American frontier. You pass convenience stores selling gum; Tsen, 38, a native of Cambridge, Mass., passes through a long, winding metaphor for a Chicago never realized — “the by-product of projected futures,” she writes in “The Pedway of Today,” her new, perversely compelling guidebook/consideration of the Pedway’s cultural meanings.

Indeed, Tsen, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and photography/video teacher at Wilbur Wright College on the Northwest Side, has come to see the longtime walkway as her canvas. About four years ago, the Chicago artist — and former Wendella Boat tour guide, who says travel and The Path Not Taken have become the preoccupations of her art — began offering tours of the Pedway (she has since stopped). But she never charged her audiences, she said, because the tours would also quietly double as performance art, as free-associative strolling lectures in which your guide (Tsen) would dole out not dates or landmarks but thoughts on Jules Verne, revolving doors and how the Pedway is like Florence…

Eventually she stumbled across an entrance to the Pedway in the back of the Renaissance lobby, the path itself so low-key that you can see it every day without quite recognizing it. “The Pedway struck me not as the frontier that I had been looking for but a reminder of the glamour of early cities and a promise of future frontiers.” At this point in her guide Tsen asks readers to imagine that it’s 1893 and — though the Renaissance was built a century later — they are relaxing in the lobby before returning home from the World’s Fair, where they “attended Frederick Jackson Turner’s fabled lecture ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ … still pondering his words: ‘The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American History.”

Sounds like a very interesting and interpretive tour. All sorts of large infrastructure and urban projects would benefit from people who know them well enough and are enthusiastic about what they offer to share it with others.

If Chicago tried to advertise the Pedway more, would regular users complain that too many tourists are clogging the passages a la New Yorkers and the subway?

Still lighting fires on railroad tracks to keep the switches working

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Here is a brief look at using fire on the Long Island Railroad to keep the switches operational in the cold temperatures:

When the cold hits, isn’t the trains that have trouble. It’s the switches that direct the cars between tracks that freeze, and when a switch fails, it can compromise an entire line. To keep the switches functioning, the Long Island Railroad uses the centuries-old method of burning kerosene or natural gas to keep everything running.

The Long Island Railroad, the busiest commuter rail line in the United States, has dozens of switch heaters throughout its 700-mile system. Most use electric heating elements, other older ones burn natural gas, and the even older “switch pots” burn kerosene. Trackmen work through the nastiest of storms, lighting the heaters and dousing switches with Hexane, which is then ignited to melt the ice.

Yes, there are more civilized methods, like hot air blowers that clear debris, but in an era of self-driving cars and other modern marvels, simply using  fire to melt ice has a quaint retro feel to it.

While the picture is cool, I don’t know if “quaint retro” is the way to describe this. It is the 21st century, right? I’ve seen several stories about the use of fire this winter – including in the Chicago area with the maligned Metra tracks – but no one has mentioned how this is done in other countries. What about Siberia? Are there any technologies that could solve this issue?

“Without Lake Mead, there would be no Las Vegas”

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The 14 year drought in southern Nevada, northern Arizona, and southern California threatens Lake Mead and the water supply to Las Vegas and other communities. The ability to have such a city in the middle of a desert is quite remarkable. It rests on the construction of Hoover Dam:

HooverDamJul12

I’ve been there twice and I was impressed both times by the ability to put this all together in the 1930s. Yet, the dam is highly dependent on available water and weather patterns. Here is a look at the lower Lake Mead from the top of Hoover Dam in July 2012:

LakeMeadJul12

While this is partly a cautionary tale about the the limits of human consumption, it also presents an opportunity for human ingenuity. As the news report notes, “Las Vegas actually reuses 93% of its water.” Imagine if all cities in the world reached such levels. Thus, even with an extended drought, Las Vegas may continue to thrive:

BellagioFountainsJul12

The show must go on…