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Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016)
- schoen 10y agoThis article is from almost a year ago; any update on what's happened on this issue since then?
- GFischer 10y agoIt seems that this might be a new push by their PR firm (which is very good I guess, the article is very flattering and small-guy vs union side and all the right buttons) http://gothamgr.com/media-coverage/ http://gothamgr.com/media-coverage/
- schoen 10y agoIt looks like they subsequently received their certification: http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/ http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/ > NYC SKYPICKER CERTIFICATION > The SKYPICKER MDS is approved for use by the New York City Department of Buildings division of Cranes and Derricks This article might have been organized by a PR firm, but if so, I guess it's already been successful.
- GFischer 10y agoGood find :) .
- djrogers 10y agoGood find - the video of the crane 'vertically relocating' itself is pretty amazing.
- joatmon-snoo 10y agoHoly crap, yes, that video should be the center piece here. That's an absolutely amazing idea.
- schoen 10y agoIt looks like that feature is also part of what the regulators were concerned about the safety of (in terms of how firmly it manages to attach to the building levels).
- ksherlock 10y agoPer the payback machine, that text was added in late 2014 or early 2015, well before the article was written (It was approved in 2012 but then revoked in 2013 though).
- matthewmcg 10y ago"Crain's Cranes of New York"
- pkamb 10y ago> During the many hours of downtime on job sites, perched hundreds of feet above the street, he would pull out a journal and sketch new ideas for cranes, hoping to solve some of the machines’ fundamental problems. Per last week's discussion, who owns those sketches? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433
- lwf 10y agoWell, he owns the company, so it's moot: > The 50-year-old crane operator and president of crane leasing company Vertikal Solutions was helping to build the 34-story Hilton Garden Inn in midtown.
- learc83 10y agoI really doubt a crane operator's contract said anything about assigning IP to his employer. If that is the case, he owns them.
- jakelarkin 10y agoThis is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install. Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.
- stcredzero 10y agoextract a lot of questionable value from society. So they've become "extractive" in the parlance of economists and sociologists studying 3rd world economies?
- JBReefer 10y agoRight, or you could say that they were successful rent-seekers.
- tyingq 10y agoWe're often guilty of the same sort of thing in IT. I've seen IT leaders go on witch-hunts for areas of a business solving their own small issues with Ms Access, FileMaker, etc. Or developers complaining about simple crud apps and their support being outsourced overseas.
- derefr 10y agoThe Access/Filemaker thing is frequently an "actual" problem at the enterprise level, because in large-enough companies, the concern isn't just "does it get the job done" but also: • Is the data being backed up? Is that backup process actually correct (i.e. if the backing data-store is a file on a SAN, and we perform filesystem-level snapshots of that SAN, can all the data actually be restored from such a snapshot, or will it be partially corrupt?) • For that matter, is there a documented process for restoring from such a backup, such that whoever's on the ops shift could do it if need be? • Is the backing store transparent/auditable, esp. for compliance to our privacy policy—i.e., can we write an indexing agent to determine whether any Personally Identifiable Information is being stored, without needing to ask the software's ISV for their format spec? • Can the backing store be locked down with ACLs such that getting access to the app's connection to its backing store as an unprivileged user, doesn't let them grab our entire database, or execute arbitrary storage changes (e.g. DROP TABLE)? • Can audit-trail logic be installed in the backing store (rather than in the app layer by the ISV), so that we will know if some contractor takes a copy of the data home with them? When your software speaks to a formal DBMS, all these questions have easy answers. When it manages its own little proprietary DB/file-format thing, they're up in the air.
- wodencafe 10y agoJust an exposé of Corrupt Bureaucracy.
- tbirrell 10y agotl;dr - It's like a crawler (mobile with a boom, street level crane) but you put it on top of something already there. Since its on top of something, it's not a "mobile" crane and couldn't get certified as one, however, it also didn't fit into the tower crane (tall, lifts things) certification. So it got stuck in between two classifications and as a result made it too hard for construction companies to bother including it in their building proposals (the only way that NYC would allow anyone to use it... maybe).
- cperciva 10y agoIt could, and did, get approved as a mobile crane. Then it was unapproved, thanks to political pressure.
- jandrese 10y agoApparently the regulators thought it was mounted on a truck, but when they went in person to inspect it they discovered that he had built some sort of jury rigged contraption to move it around instead. This made it fall outside of their definition of a mobile crane. The article insinuates that the union was behind it all, but I'm not convinced he didn't just piss off the regulators in this case.
- djrogers 10y agoThat version of events turns out to be inaccurate: -- Delia Shumway, a professional engineer and the executive director of the agency’s Cranes and Derricks Unit when the Skypicker was approved, emailed me that Chandler confused the Skypicker revocation with a ruling about an entirely different crane. Shumway wrote, “He’s the one that’s misinformed. The piece of equipment that he’s referring to was not the Skypicker but IBK’s knockoff of the Skypicker. That machine was not in compliance. There was never any argument about that.” -- [1]http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his-side-of-the-citys-ban-and-backs-it-up/ http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his-side-...
- 10y ago
- zyztem 10y agoHow operation of this machine is different from pretty standard small derrick cranes? Like Liebherr DR? Or even spider cranes (Maeda & others)?
- djrogers 10y agoThe Liebherr you reference is a dismantling crane, so obvious difference in usage there, and spiders/mini crawler are mobile cranes. The Skypicker is bolted to the floor of the building, and when the next level is ready to go in, it hauls itself up to the height of the next floor through a hole, which is then finished around the crane, which is once again bolted to the floor. The last 30 seconds of the video on this page show how it relocates: http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/ http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/
- nkrisc 10y agoUnions have a purpose. Suppressing innovation and competition to protect their gravy train monopoly should not be one of them.
- djrogers 10y agoThey often don't see it that way - they see goals, not purposes, and suppressing competition is one of the more common and obvious means to achieve that goal.
- ThomPete 10y agoNot all unions are bad. Unions serve a purpose in many industries but today a lot of them are antiquated echoes from the past. Uber drivers should have a union IMO, but the ATeachers Union and Manhattan construction industry should have theirs disrupted by something more fitting for the new reality they have too much power. The construction industry literally have people holdning signal flags the entire day. Furthermore when it comes to Manhattan lets not forget how much wiseguys control many of the cities industries.
- sfall 10y agopeople are not holding signal flags bc the contractor wants to higher more people but DOT state or federal require it.
- ThomPete 10y agoI wouldn't be surprised that it's because the unions have been fighting for it. Other places around the world can figure out to slow traffic down without having flaggers.
- pcurve 10y agoI support union, but when a crane operator makes $500,000/year just because of union and location factor, I become ashamed. This reminded me of story from a few years ago about Spanish air traffic controllers making $1,000,000/year+ while others in far more wealthy Eurozone made 1/10th of that.
- jbigelow76 10y agoDumb admission of the day: the domain name, crainsnewyork.com, combined with a story about cranes caused a temporary brain short circuit. I thought "holy shit, this is a really impressive website for NY crane wonks".
- eric_h 10y agoHa! I didn't even register that the domain was not spelled cranesnewyork. I, too, saw the URL and thought "a story about a crane on a crane blog, I should be a bit wary of a bias of some sort" It is, however 1am for me currently and I did not sleep well last night (beware drinking Armenian homemade vodka (a.k.a. Moonshine made with things other than corn) with native Armenians, they don't allow empty glasses until the vodka is gone), so I'm not firing on all cylinders.
- ChristianBundy 10y agoJust a side not, I have to admit that I love the nested parens.
- eric_h 10y agoHaha, programmer's grammar. I couldn't be bothered to construct the sentence correctly, nested parens did the job clearly enough.
- gist 10y agoThis is interesting. That said for some reason I think that posts like this stray far from the purpose of a site like this as it is more of a general interest and not specific to startups or technology. I wonder if PG's 'anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' conflicts with his 'If they'd cover it on TV news' (where I assume TV news is actually broader than just what would be on TV news and includes items of a more general audience business interest). What's the issue exactly? It crowds out and distracts from stories that might be of more value and relevance than simply something that is interesting. Maybe a new way to describe would be 'of interest to hackers and relevant to what they do in a strong way'.
- mschuster91 10y agoHmm. I think it is a relevant post - given I worked at construction sites (as an excavator) and my granddad as an actual crane operator, I have a bit of background in the field ;) Also, it's about legal blabla that is abused to protect certain classes of work from any disrutption by startups - just like the dozens of similar startup posts, only that this one is in the "non-digital" spsce.
- nwatson 10y agoThis has everything to do with regulation, certification, union relations, etc., issues in some ways similar to what an AirBnB, Uber, or other tech company will deal with when introducing innovations or different business models.
- wmil 10y agoThis is arguably a story about a disruptive hardware play that's being hampered by legal troubles.
- dzdt 10y agoThe New York Department of Buildings response to this article (June 2016) : Skypicker presented the department with plans for a small, truck-mounted crane... However, when we inspected the Skypicker in use at a construction site, we found something significantly different: The crane was attached to a building slab, and appeared to be a hodgepodge of parts from other cranes, mounted on a homemade, untested base. http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160623/OPINION/160629905/why-the-city-shut-down-the-skypicker-crane http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160623/OPINION/160629... And the inventor shoots back: The executive director of the [Department of Buildings] Cranes and Derricks Unit when the Skypicker was approved emailed me that [Department of Buildings Commissioner] Chandler confused the Skypicker revocation with a ruling about an entirely different crane... He’s the one that’s misinformed. http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his-side-of-the-citys-ban-and-backs-it-up/ http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his-side-...
- falcolas 10y agoAn important piece of the story which was missing. Thanks for linking and summarizing.
- thekevan 10y agoTrue, but remember this is New York City. In the original article, when the crane was first used on jobs and word got around about it being less expensive and required fewer operator man hours, his job sites were picketed by unions. There were anonymous calls to 311 reporting violations but when the inspectors got there, they didn't find anything wrong. In my mind, I'm skeptical and it could have been the cranes or it could have been union influence.
- Zach_the_Lizard 10y agoIt's the unions. On my way to work, I pass by a giant inflatable rat inflated by a gas motor that's hauled around by a truck. It's rather annoying when its tail gets loose and covers the sidewalk, as can happen on windy days when it's not tied down appropriately. It's probably 10 or 12 feet tall, at least, and the tail is maybe 12 feet long or longer. (3 feet is about one meter for those in metric land). It's parked there because one of the buildings under construction here didn't use the right amount of union labor, so there's always a rat present. Walk around and you'll see this same rat in different places; they've got a number of them. They've also got some rather impressive pigs and fat cats. This is the city that couldn't get rid of two operators per train on the L, even though technically they could more or less get by with zero (the trains mostly drive themselves on that line; the operator, to my understanding, just has to keep acknowledging that the train should proceed). Why? The unions protested and won, citing hitherto unknown safety reasons that should be plaguing cities like Madrid, Barcelona, London, Paris, Washington D.C., etc. due to their lack of two people. Doubly so for those lines (including the AirTrain to JFK in NYC) that do not have operators at all...
- dmix 10y agoToo bad they weren't as popular, well known, or well funded as Uber/Lyft to deal with this type of anti-progress nonsense. I've been meaning for a long time to start a site to track these events of businesses getting sidelined over regulatory hurdles - similar to those sites who track police shootings. Collecting data is the best way to bring light to prevalent but maligned issues like these. I get the impression there are hundreds of these small stories that could have had an impact on the marketplace but get crushed by regulatory/incumbent barriers. We only ever hear about it when a big company runs into these issues. But for the most part it's usually people who are already taking a huge financial risk to do an entrepreneurial activity and they don't have the runway/capital to deal with the problem, let alone invest the time to draw attention to the issue in the press or politically.
- RangerScience 10y agoThis sounds amazing! What's blocking you?
- jessaustin 10y agoOppressive regulations?
- Houshalter 10y agoThe first subway in New York City cost about $100 million per kilometer in 1900 (adjusted for inflation of course). The new subway line being opened this year cost $2.2 billion per kilometer. This is despite over a century of improvements in technology. Here's an interesting HN post, "Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11736696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11736696 In that article is a statistic that three fourths of the square footage of Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930. If a freak hurricane somehow destroyed New York, we would be literally unable to rebuild it. For both cost and legal reasons. Someday soon we might be like the later generations of Romans. Living amongst the great crumbling structures built by our ancestors. Wondering how on Earth they could have achieved such things.
- gnud 10y agoAnd the answer, much as it was in ancient times: By exploiting workers - and often letting them die.
- Houshalter 10y agoEurope and Korea still manage to build subways 10-20x cheaper than New York. As far as I know they don't have tons more worker deaths. With all our modern technology, we should be able to achieve what our ancestors did. Even with our higher standards for safety.
- distances 10y agoHelsinki is currently building a metro expansion for $103 million per kilometer, at least if I got the numbers right. Of course the setting is very different in New York vs. outskirts of Helsinki, but yes, it's cheaper.
- greglindahl 10y agoBuilding on the outskirts of New York City is also cheaper than building in Manhattan.
- xienze 10y ago> The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 14-14B lays out the wage floor for its operators at $73.91 per hour. That’s $150,000 a year before overtime, plus benefits equal to $32.50 an hour. When the operator is behind the controls of a tower crane, he gets a $2-an-hour bump. On weekends, when cranes are moved, pay doubles. With overtime, many union members earn half a million dollars a year. And they don't have to take their work home with them! Wow, I'm in the wrong line of work.
- fr0sty 10y agoI wonder whether the inventor would have better luck shipping his cranes to another state where the regulatory barriers would not be so steep. Lots of mid/high-rise buildings going up in places that are not NYC...
- jameshart 10y agoSeriously - the NYC-centricity of this article is astonishing. People need a basic lesson in logic - just because "if you can make it there you can make it anywhere," doesn't imply the reverse - if you can't make it in NYC you can always try somewhere else.
- cylinder 10y agoI think the main advantage of this crane is that it is bolted to the building, therefore falls under the general insurance policy of the development, whereas tower cranes require a separate policy, which as the article states, are basically impossible to secure right now in NYC. It's interesting to see this article now, as I was just reading about the litigation following the crane collapse at One57 which involved a dispute with the insurer over whether it should be covered by the general insurance policy. If your crane can be deemed a part of the structure itself, you save millions in insurance costs. Insurance costs for tower cranes are insane in NYC due to the risks - there were big payouts after a few collapses which killed people. As there are not that many tower cranes in NYC to begin with, this risk pool is not very large.
- karlkatzke 10y agoQuestion: Why didn't the guy just pack up the crane and take it elsewhere? The issues that make tower cranes unsafe and expensive aren't unique to New York City, and if Austin, TX was any indication, there has been a shortage of cranes due to construction activity worldwide. Is there something about the economics or the licensing that makes this crane only work in New York City?
- bigethan 10y agoHe still works as a crane operator in NYC and likely knows (only) that market.
- codyzazulak1 10y agoThat was my thought too, I'm sure there's many cities to market his product. He needs to get on his GaryVee train and start calling every city until he finds places to land. Bring it up to Vancouver, most of our downtown is low rise and would probably make this ideal. And making $400,000 means he could probably take a year off as well.
- dade_ 10y agoHe should try peddling it in Toronto. There are over 100 high-rises under construction in the area.
- tmnvix 10y agoThey do a really good job of painting the union as the culprit here without any evidence whatsoever. The first comment on the article suggests a competing crane company was responsible. I think that is just as likely. Anyhow, as others in this thread have pointed out, the skycranes are back in business.
- battlebot 10y agoNo, unions are basically filled with assholes. Growing up, my dad was in the Boilermakers. I know firsthand what a bunch of drunken, miserable, violent, and wholly ignorant people they are. My dad made the mistake of crossing them over their crappy nepotism and broken ethics and so we ended up having death threats called in and idiots in a van driving by our house with guns sticking out the windows. Know what the cops did? Jack and shit. Know what the FBI did? Nothing. Zero. Also, NYC is a den of misery for most of those who inhabit it and a good number of those miserable SOBs belong to unions. Honestly, if the whole place got taken out by an asteroid, we'd be better off. Unions can fck right off. Miserable communist cnts.
- tdburn 10y agoThis machine seems brilliant. Those super tower cranes are legit massacre machines. Seeing one of those cranes go down was disturbing
- eric_h 10y agoI definitely feel a bit nervous whenever I walk under one of those on a windy day on NYC. This article did little to assuage my fears.
- libdong 10y ago> Mooney was told his crane didn’t have to go through the long approval process required for newly designed large cranes and that it could be approved as a mobile crane. There has to be some kind of miscommunication going on here. By what definition is his crane mobile? Because it's easier to disassemble and load on to a truck than a tower crane? While the DoB's classifications for cranes seems arbitrary, I can't say I blame them for not considering it mobile.
- rsync 10y ago"In April 2014, City Councilman Ben Kallos, who received $2,500 over two elections from Local 14, introduced new legislation to prohibit climber cranes like the Skypicker from being classified as mobile cranes. The rule would treat the Skypicker like a tower crane, requiring it to carry more insurance and have a Class A operator." Wow. So, for the price of a laptop I could influence NYC politics and have a councilman of my very own ? I don't even live in New York and it's still tempting, if only for the lulz. Do you think Mr. Kallos would pull me in a rickshaw when I visit ? Or would I need an extra fifty bucks ?
- vonmoltke 10y agoPeople pay too much attention to the money. He wasn't "bought" with the $2500, he was "bought" with the guaranteed votes from union members for supporting it.
- MaysonL 10y agoAnd the volunteers working for him rather than his opponent.
- Whitestrake 10y agoThe monetary incentive aside - on principle, it's a good thing that a group of people can arrange with a politician to specify the policy they want to see and then vote for that politician to enact it, right?
- TillE 10y agoIt is amazing what cheap dates politicians generally are, even at the national level. The largest numbers you see (eg, pharma industry) are in the low millions.
- gervase 10y agoHonestly, I don't think most people realize just how cheaply politicians can be "influenced" compared to the effect they can have. I mean, $2,500 for a local politician seems cheap to us, but to a corporation making billions a year, $250,000 per year for a congressperson is a similar bargain. In this case, that small $2,500 donation was enough of a foot in the door to (allegedly) create hundreds of thousands or millions of extra dollars per year in revenue; where else can you get that kind of ROI?
- cerved 10y agoDoes this little crane also construct the paywall ?
- valuearb 10y agoThis is why it's so important to have government regulation, so that an interested party can use their political connections to guarantee themselves monopoly profits.
- floatrock 10y agoIt can go the other way too. Sometimes interested parties use their political connections to guarantee themselves, you know, clean air and clean drinking water.
- paddy_m 10y agoI found a video https://youtu.be/5_PjCwMEdSY https://youtu.be/5_PjCwMEdSY. It looks like the crane elevates itself before a new concrete floor has forms built and is poured.
- Jgrubb 10y agoI'm sorry, but I steadfastly refuse to complain about the unions. All you NYC based software developers probably have no idea to what extent the overall high standard of living in the NE is largely due to so many laborers being able to make a good living doing something that isn't tech.
- mcguire 10y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong (the article is now behind a paywall for me), but the skypicker was fast-track approved under a Bloomberg program, then unapproved under a new administration, perhaps because it hadn't been tested properly and was miscategorized. Given that it is a boom crane, normally mounted on a truck, with a custom mounting and lifting system (the kind of thing that has peeled off of buildings before), I'm not seeing the big deal. http://www.jomacltd.com/mobile_cranes/telescoping_boom/ http://www.jomacltd.com/mobile_cranes/telescoping_boom/
- a_c 10y agoMany cities need his cranes. Why not relocating the business?
- jrochkind1 10y agoWhy not just hire a "Class A operator" to operate it? It'll still be huge cost savings, right? And the union will stop stonewalling them, and they can go into business.
- wilwade 10y agoWhy is this little construction crane not being used in other cities? This is what is the oddest piece of the story to me. There are lots of cities where these buildings are built. Mid-size cities. If the cost of the tower crane is so much more than this one, then the cost of transport should be minimal.
- akeck 10y agoJudging from a recent Nova I watched on current advancements in nuclear technology, he should pack up his cranes and move shop to China. China seems more willing to try industry changing tech these days.
- cyphunk 10y agoUnions are great. It's also great the whole world isn't run by unions. Meaning, I don't understand why a less union friendly city in the US, china, UAE, anywhere, doesn't pick up his equipment and run with it. After years of drug testing perhaps other cities like NYC will be ready for human trials.