4 ms·

Part of the problem with that is you uncover all sorts of other stuff under the roads: water mains, sewer, gas, steam, electric, telephone, fiber, etc, and espe

Part of the problem with that is you uncover all sorts of other stuff under the roads: water mains, sewer, gas, steam, electric, telephone, fiber, etc, and especially in a city like NYC it's not all documented. In some cases, old abandoned pipes are used to run new wires. When you dig, you have to deal with all of this. If you break something, you have to fix it -- and in the case of fiber or multi-hundred-pair copper, you can't necessarily just "splice" it or easily reroute around your construction site.

pasbesoin 9y ago
Having watched new gas lines go into my neighborhood last summer, with non-trenching, small-scale directional drilling/boring, I can only imagine at the tangled mess some places may be or be becoming. Here, the gas company (contractor of same, really) put in detection wires so that the location of the new, plastic pipes can be sensed. However, the contractor ran them in the most convenient fashion for them, meaning often on angles from a single starting point, and also rather close to the surface in places. Their are minimum depths they are supposed to maintain at various positions from the main to the meter. I'm not sure they always did so. Some homeowners who landscape or garden more aggressively, may be in for a surprise.
bobthepanda 9y ago
You have to do this with subway construction anyways, because New York ended up boring relatively close to the surface. If you're boring twenty or thirty feet (eight to ten meters) down you're still in the danger zone of misplaced utilities. Going deeper is possible but does have drawbacks; access shafts must be deeper and it takes a longer time for people to move between platform and street level. New York's older cut-and-cover sections also do not deal with ventilation systems, because regularly installed grates to the surface essentially use the piston effect to circulate air in and out of the system.
- paublyrne 9y ago
  Going deeper is possible but does have drawbacks; access shafts must be deeper and it takes a longer time for people to move between platform and street level. Quite a few of London's lines are deep, but they generally have escalators which I don't see a lot of in Manhattan.
walshemj 9y ago
Cut and cover worked back in Sherlock homes days as there was very little buried plant at that time.

pasbesoin 9y ago

Having watched new gas lines go into my neighborhood last summer, with non-trenching, small-scale directional drilling/boring, I can only imagine at the tangled mess some places may be or be becoming. Here, the gas company (contractor of same, really) put in detection wires so that the location of the new, plastic pipes can be sensed. However, the contractor ran them in the most convenient fashion for them, meaning often on angles from a single starting point, and also rather close to the surface in places. Their are minimum depths they are supposed to maintain at various positions from the main to the meter. I'm not sure they always did so. Some homeowners who landscape or garden more aggressively, may be in for a surprise.

bobthepanda 9y ago

You have to do this with subway construction anyways, because New York ended up boring relatively close to the surface. If you're boring twenty or thirty feet (eight to ten meters) down you're still in the danger zone of misplaced utilities. Going deeper is possible but does have drawbacks; access shafts must be deeper and it takes a longer time for people to move between platform and street level. New York's older cut-and-cover sections also do not deal with ventilation systems, because regularly installed grates to the surface essentially use the piston effect to circulate air in and out of the system.

paublyrne 9y ago
Going deeper is possible but does have drawbacks; access shafts must be deeper and it takes a longer time for people to move between platform and street level. Quite a few of London's lines are deep, but they generally have escalators which I don't see a lot of in Manhattan.

walshemj 9y ago

Cut and cover worked back in Sherlock homes days as there was very little buried plant at that time.