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Why Are New York City’s Streets Always Under Construction?
- joe8756438 10y agotl;dr. Because there are a ton of them. There is a ton of stuff below them. And there is a ton of stuff above them.
- davidf18 10y agoI'm in NYC currently attending a tech meetup. I received an Apple alert telling me that traffic was heavy and to allow for 40 minutes. Yet, I was able to arrive in 15 mins by subway: two stops express from 96th st to 42nd st. Then transfer local 4 stops.
- Spooky23 10y agoWhile the world may seem to center around Manhattan, some people start their trips in savage lands like Queens. Others find the prospect of standing on a hot crowded train that runs late and smells like urine less appealing.
- nononosisisi 10y agoDrama queen. Is not that bad.
- galdosdi 10y agoYeah, and the tokens are a frigging hassle! I assume you have not ridden the subway in decades.
- Spooky23 10y agoJust last week. It was like 120 degrees and awful. Travel-wise, It was the best option for me, but I totally sympathize with anyone wishing to avoid the experience.
- casta 10y ago120 degrees in the train or on the platform? The trains have usually A/C, and if not, you can report it. I commute on the 8 ave line every day and I've never been on a train without A/C.
- lobster_johnson 10y agoOh, it happens. Not often, sure, but you will experience it one day. The first sign is that everyone else will immediately turn upon entering the carriage, just like they do if some homeless person is using it as their personal toilet.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoI caught an uptown C without air conditioning tonight. It was hot, but not as hot as the stations, and I got a seat. It happens, but not very often on that line.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- davidf18 10y agoThe trains have AC. Occasionally broken in one car but then just move to another car on the 8 or 10 car train (depending on the line). Apple maps can show you how long it takes to travel by subway. Also a monthly pass for as many subway and bus rides as you want is about $115.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- acafourek 10y agoI am highly skeptical of other replies to this post that make the subway seem like a summertime Shangri-La. While I think it's better than a urine- scented tardy hassle, I don't think many people who have spent a few years in NYC would describe their summer commutes as "pleasant". Overall it's a miracle public utility that you don't appreciate as much as you should until you've left the city, but that July/August trip is a sweaty mass of humanity no matter how you crunch it.
- ddt_Osprey 10y agoPeople literally take shits in subway cars, especially at night. When people aren't taking a dump in the corner, the new subway cars have air conditioning systems that smell like stale halitosis. But, the worst part about the new subway cars is that the robotic johnny cab voice doesn't have a weird accent. I actually enjoy the strange unintelligible squawking in a Brooklyn accent, drenched in the electromagnetic feedback of unshielded motors. Mostly because the robotic voice never has anything to useful or relevant to say, and if someone's going to say something pointless, I'd rather not understand it, and hear some kind of funny accent. THIS THE NEW YORK CITY SUBWAY SYSTEM WITH AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM THE MTA. KEEP YOUR VALUABLE BELONGINGS OUT OF SIGHT. PROTECT YOURSELF. STAY ALERT, BE COURTEOUS AND HAVE A SAFE DAY. Sure thing, HAL.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago> People literally take shits in subway cars, especially at night. Yeah, boy, I sure do hate my morning commute, just ankle-deep in shit, while the Robot Overlords whip the Poles and Italian immigrants bloody.
- namaemuta 10y agoCouldn't be the robotic voice more understandable for foreign people than one with a funny accent? Specially with messages like those that seem to be aimed at foreign people than native ones.
- ddt_Osprey 10y agoI'm sure that's what the robot voices are for. The problem is, they only have ten or fifteen pre-sets, and all of them are useless.
- jon-wood 10y agoI consider these pointless announcements to be a form of auditory pollution, they do nothing but make you tune out all announcements, making it more likely that you'll miss the occasional useful one. I'm in the UK, rather than NYC, but our rail system is full of useful warnings such as "Don't leave your belongings unattended, they may be taken", and "It's been raining, so the floor might be slippery". Seriously people, if you need warning of those things maybe just stay at home until you've grown up a bit.
- CameronBanga 10y agoI don't mean to be rude, but if you can't smell the the urine on the MTA, then your nose is broken from years of being conditioned to the smell. I love NYC, and spend a few weeks there a year, but it always amazes me how natives argue that the MTA (and really all of Manhattan) doesn't smell like piss.
- Spooky23 10y agoMy cousins lived in Manhattan for years and we'd hang out from one to time. I remember having this argument with them when crossing the street on garbage day in June or July. In addition to the background rotting garbage smell, some steam chimney thing in the crosswalk was basically spewing hot piss vapors. They were immune.
- eggy 10y agoI grew up in Brooklyn in the late 60s/early 70s and spent most of my first 30 years in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I can tell you it used to smell a lot worse. When we were young gutter snipes, we used to jump the wooden turnstyles, and if the cops chased us, head into the tunnels. We then spent our youth exploring the tunnels (the old station just off DeKalb Ave.). I miss those tokens with the 'Y' punched out in center! They cost 0.35 cents, and you could ride the subway to Coney Island, and still have money left for a slice of pizza when getting home by end of day when you started out with a $1.25 or so. I was just visiting in January 2016, and it seemed great to me, and I am coming from having lived 8 years in SE Asia. I still go home 1 or 2 times a year to Brooklyn and Manhattan. Still I am amazed at the Hong Kong MTR. The cars don't have doors between them, so you can see all the way down to the front and back. They have sliding doors on the platforms, so no jumping in front of an oncoming train! Very clean too. Hong Kong is very vertical, and lot of wiring is alongside buildings in exposed trays or bundles. I am not sure about the rest of the infrastructure. Don't get me started on Vietnam or Indonesia. I have photos of electrical 'routing' that would give a NYC union electrician a stroke!
- gozur88 10y agoEvery big city smells like urine to me. I don't know how people stand it.
- santaclaus 10y ago> While the world may seem to center around Manhattan, some people start their trips in savage lands like Queens. Queens has subways too, bro. Used to live in Astoria, never once drove a car. I think I took the m60 into Manhattan like once.
- kraig 10y ago'peek and shriek' is great and totally describes some of the stuff I have to deal with at work too
- eddd 10y agoI just wonder, why do people in NYC bother to use cars? Bikes, subway and taxis are not enough?
- notatoad 10y agoi think a lot of them don't. but there's so many people in the region that even if a lot of people don't use cars, there's still a ton of cars.
- nixos 10y agoNo. 1. NYC is _BIG_. It's 304 square miles, which is about 17 by 17 miles. There are many places where biking is too far. 2. Subways, in contrast to popular opinion, don't go everywhere. Mainly, unless you live in Manhattan, or that's the only place where you want to go, the Subway system is quite lousy. Going from the airport to Coney Island takes an hour and a half by subway (according to Google), rather than half an hour by car. Now what happens if you have what to do in Queens, Far Rockaway, or NJ? 3. Expensive and no point. Due to #2, most NYers have to have a car, if at least for those off days when they want to leave the city or what. Once you have the car, driving it is much cheaper than taxi.
- superuser2 10y ago#3 holds if and only if there is affordable parking. UberPOOL to downtown Chicago and back can be cheaper than parking there, particularly for a long time.
- markbao 10y ago> Going from the airport to Coney Island takes an hour and a half by subway (according to Google), rather than half an hour by car. Now what happens if you have what to do in Queens, Far Rockaway, or NJ? Unless if it's during commuting hours, in which case they're pretty much equal I'd say. > Due to #2, most NYers have to have a car Definitely not. 56% of NYC households don't have a car, the highest proportion in the US among cities. Compare to SF where 31% don't have a car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_households_without_a_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...
- cyberferret 10y agoI am thinking it is a bit like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which has been continuously painted since it was built... The work crews when they get to the end of the bridge simply go back to the other end and start again... :) EDIT: Just clarifying that it is not as simple as starting at one end and painting to the other and back again - simply that I have heard that there is always someone with a paintbrush or spray hose somewhere on the bridge working away.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- themartorana 10y agoThey say the same thing about the Ben Franklin Bridge here in Philly. I don't know if it's true, but it is under some amount of perpetual work.
- leviathant 10y agoA few weeks (months?) ago, I started setting my old iPhone up to do time lapse videos, and once or twice noticed some kind of maintenance tram running between the two towers: https://vimeo.com/179417477 https://vimeo.com/179417477
- themartorana 10y agoNice! Also you don't live too far from me :)
- bitwize 10y agoThat's a common factoid about San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge -- so oft repeated that it appears in the halls of LAX airport. The Sydney Harbour Bridge is also mentioned, but the fact they chose for that one is that it is "affectionately known as The Coathanger".
- bhrgunatha 10y agoThere's hope yet! They finally finished painting [1] the Forth Bridge [2] in Dec 2011. [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-14789036 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-1478... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Bridge
- bogomipz 10y agoDid anyone else click on the Empire City Subway link in the Article? This organization has intrigued me since I learned about them. You don't see their trucks often and when you do they are very low key looking, matte grey, simple block letters. They have nothing to do with the subway. Anyway if you missed it: "Empire City Subway Company (ECS) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon that specializes in subsurface engineering and construction services. Since 1891, ECS has held a franchise from the City of New York to build and maintain a conduit and manhole infrastructure in Manhattan and the Bronx. ECS rents this space to telecommunications and cable television service providers." If you want to run fiber in in either of those boroughs you need to pay Verizon. Kind of odd that a public asset is controlled by a private company. Its basically a shadow company. A 125 year old franchise?
- rayiner 10y agoIt's not an atypical arrangement (though, usually it's more likely that the power company owns the conduits rather than the telephone company). Those arrangements arose because the city doesn't want to get into the business of building and maintaining conduits. ECS provides non-discriminatory access to conduits at public rates: http://www.empirecitysubway.com/ratesbill.html http://www.empirecitysubway.com/ratesbill.html. They charge Verizon the same rates as anyone else.
- nashashmi 10y agoIt is interesting how the work is divided up. Ecs is a company from way back when that Verizon bought. They only are in manhattan, Bronx, queens (I think). The other two Boroughs verizon handles the conduits. Everyone is pretty much able to run their own lines down city streets. They just have to pay the city to lease space. They also have to agree to move the utilities when asked. And pay other contractors to work around the tightness their utilities cause. Ecs does this management and maintenance for verizon and for all the other companies like AT&T, cable vision, level3, federal govt, tmobile, etc. Of course the other companies may also run their own conduits depending on the economics.
- oneplane 10y agoIt's somewhat strange to me that they have this whole article, but is't mostly just excuses for types of problems that just come from USA's perspective and actions on infrastructure... You don't see the same excuses in other places. They either fix the problem, or admit that it's not organised well enough, yet this article does neither. (as far as I understood from the text)
- et-al 10y agoInteresting. For me it was eye-opening because I had naïvely assumed all the construction was either for road repairs, or to build new subways; not the utility companies cutting up the road: > But unlike Paris or Tokyo, where tubes and wires are usually bundled inside a cavernous sewer system or tucked underneath sidewalks, much of New York’s underground infrastructure lies within five feet of the asphalt surface. > Last year, the [transportation department] issued 223,271 permits, about half of them to utility companies. What do you propose that they do, though? Ideally we'd build a utility-only tunnel like Paris or Tokyo, but there's no space. You have the subway further underneath, and the sidewalks have basements. Without a massive overhaul requiring eminent domain or a fire, the only solutions are better construction techniques, which they're looking into.
- eggy 10y agoI always thought an elevated road like computer flooring for access. It would be a massive project, you'd have to step up to cross the street, and you'd still need access to the road below for the older, unmovable stuff. Either way, not happening, too much scope. It falls back on evolving into something like the movie 'Brazil' with all of the ductwork ;)
- RyJones 10y agothis is essentially the story you will hear on the "Seattle Underground" tour. Instead of raising the city like they did in Chicago[0], Seattle built taller streets[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
- wallflower 10y agoI highly recommend Kate Ascher's "The Works: The Anatomy of a City" if you are fascinated by underground and other workings. https://www.amazon.com/Works-Anatomy-City-Kate-Ascher/dp/0143112708 https://www.amazon.com/Works-Anatomy-City-Kate-Ascher/dp/014...
- Tomte 10y agoGood book, but too NYC-centric for my taste. OTOH, that made everything pretty concrete. Another great book is "Underground" by David Macaulay. Beautiful, breathtaking drawings.
- chirau 10y agoIf there is one person I would like to meet in the world, it is the NYC Subway Dispatcher. When you are on the subway, he/she never carries good news. It always starts like this... "Ladies and gentlemen: We are being held momentarily by the train’s dispatcher..."
- pavel_lishin 10y ago> he/she never carries good news That's kind of subjective. Every once in awhile, the stars align, and your slow local C train is now running express all the way to your stop at 145th... ... which is great, unless you're actually really trying to get to 103rd.
- chirau 10y agoFor you perhaps it's advantageous once in a while, but in the overall analysis, all commuters considered, any change to the schedule is more negative than positive.
- yolesaber 10y agoThe "Ladies and gentlemen, we are being held momentarily" is not the dispatcher, it's an automated message and is the voice of Charlie Pellett (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-most-recognizable-voice-in-new-york http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-most-recog...).
- chirau 10y agoI know it's not the dispatcher himself. The voice, however, often says we are being held up by the dispatcher and we will be moving shortly.
- snake_plissken 10y agoI wonder about the breakdown of pothole causes. Yes, Nature's way will cause potholes and they will naturally expand if not rectified. But then I think about the construction crew down the street from me, in Philadelphia, that didn't properly fill in and tamp down the trench they dug for a new sewer line. "Just fill it with some stones and dirt, and throw some Home Depot black top down on it," the foreman said, I imagine. The thing grew, and became a gargantuan pothole. Eventually the city fixed it, and granted this probably has everything to do with the contractor in question, and I've seen larger construction companies doing things right, but I'm convinced we could eliminate a lot of potholes if crews just did the job right.
- imtringued 10y agoThere was a case of a german geothermal company that drilled a hole down to the ground water without sealing it properly. Turns out there was a huge deposit of Anhydrit below the town. In combination with the water it formed plaster and expanded in volume causing cracks on the buildings on the surface. http://www.sbz-online.de/Cache/GENTNER/10024/0609-01-OPT1_MzEwNzc3Wg.JPG http://www.sbz-online.de/Cache/GENTNER/10024/0609-01-OPT1_Mz... https://hausmannskost.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/risseg.jpg https://hausmannskost.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/risseg.jpg
- erlehmann_ 10y agoThe story mentioned by the parent seems to be this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebungsrisse_in_Staufen_im_Breisgau https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebungsrisse_in_Staufen_im_Bre...
- iamleppert 10y agoThe street outside near my apartment has been under constant construction during the entire 5 years I've lived there. They literally tear open the same part of the street multiple times, and cover it back up again, only to tear it open again, etc. One day I asked one of the workers why they keep tearing open the same part of the road, why couldn't they just replace everything that is broken in one go? He told me that they often do find and fix the problems, but sometimes they can't find them and give up, or sometimes they do and only kind of fix them. Other times they do fix the problem, only to have another in the same area. He also said sometimes an electric guy will mess up the plumbing, etc. And they aren't allowed to touch and telecom stuff. He said that sometimes some crews will just cut out his work, or cut into their pipes, drill and bolt into their pipes or riggings, causing leaks, etc. I'm sure at some level this keeps these guys busy but its a wonder we haven't been able to come up with some kind of better system or way of doing things in all these years.
- casta 10y agoI find interesting that you could read what the worker said as a metaphor to software development. And if a worker were to look at how some code changes just looking at the files modified, he would probably notice that we keep tearing open and modifying the same piece of code many times, he might ask why can't we just fix all the bugs at once.
- amelius 10y agoImho, that is not a good metaphor, because all streets are basically the same, whereas software is always very different (and way more complicated).
- dalore 10y agoThat's very reductive. All lines of code are the same, they are just letters right? Streets I imagine would be very different depending on what's underneath.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
- nashashmi 10y agoAs an engineer who has worked in both the design and construction side of utility work in NYC, allow me to explain why utilities are such a big problem. Every utility not owned and operated by the city or MTA must pay the city for use of their right of way, meaning streets and sidewalks, in between property lines. If a utility were to operate within outside of the right of way in private property they would have to pay the property owner to use the land As an easement. A utility company has an agreement with city and pays the city on those terms to move the facility when told to do so at own cost (gas lines are exempt because they are international lines). It also must pay contractors when working near those lines for the discomfort they cause. Utilities don't just have conduits or pipes running down, but also manholes and chambers, and some of them are huge. I once came across a 90' x 60' x 40' underground substation. These chambers cause other utilities to avoid them by switching lanes and going to the sides. These switches cause greater infrastructure density, or more pipes in an area. For places like manhattan, telephone company requires more conduits and wires in every street than any where else. Some companies insist in a conduit just for themselves, like Amazon AWS to run their own services. Parallel to that are electric lines that require large pipes for the huge area it serves. Same goes for gas main and the next annoyance e.g. Steam, which is difficult to move around. If the city were to come and build something, pretty much everyone has to move things around. This is what causes a significant spaghetti buildup. Eventually, it becomes virtually impossible to locate or record location of everything. Add to that the age of records and the frequent loss of records. Designing utilities is an art of patience. Constructing around them is far worse. Recording them is poorly done. I was very peculiar about accuracy of records but even I had to sometimes wing it. And I am pretty sure few take the time to painstakingly record and draw stuff like I did. Problems like this make me imagine that all utilities should be placed vertically in a chamber easily accessible and maintainable. But that is naive.
- honkhonkpants 10y agoThat explains a bit but it doesn't explain why manhattan's streets are so much more fucked up than cities of comparable size and complexity elsewhere, many of which are much older.
- 10y ago
- CM30 10y agoSo, does anyone know how this compares to other cities? Because over here in the UK (especially in London), it feels like there's a never ending stream of roadworks being done at any one point in time. Heck, the roads themselves look like a patchwork quilt made of whatever pieces of asphalt and cement were lying around that week. So any comparisons? Is New York worse than other cities of a comparable size? In the US or abroad?