15 ms·

Why it takes NYC nearly 10 years to install 500 feet of pipes

49 points by raybb 2y ago

eduction 2y ago
I love this sort of nitty gritty article with good details. That said it would be more convincing if the writer followed the maxim of Chesterton’s Fence: if design-build is a better process than design-bid-build, why was the latter law created in the first place? It is almost certain that something went wrong when design and build were bundled.
- xnx 2y ago
  Lots of good comments on the article with plausible explanations.
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  Public contracting rules are designed to prevent being ripped off, including via corruption. This is a laudable goal but at the level we have now the cure is worse than the disease.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bluGill 2y ago
  They are making a claim that design-build is better, but when you look at the evidence it doesn't pan out any better. Design-build means contractors design something expensive (contracts are often cost plus some profit margin so the higher they can make the costs the more profit they get - if it is a fixed price contract they will look for places where they can build to the letter of the contract but obviously fail to meet the intent, then charge a lot for the change order)
ajsnigrutin 2y ago
Someone should really do a study to compare private infrastructure works vs public ones. A local Hofer (=Aldi) here can repave a whole parking lot and the access road in basically a weekend, while the same thing (parking lot) for a local government office can take a year or more, at approximately the same size.
- jefftk 2y ago
  Is there anything under the parking lot?
  - roenxi 2y ago
    That does make a difference, but not that much of a difference. Reading between the lines, the issue here seems to be that the city doesn't keep records of what is underground that can be referred to during the planning process - the "they unexpectedly found a maze of Con Edison gas and steam lines" quote sounds expensive. Possibly they should consider engaging some sort of dial-before-you-dig program - https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ sounds promising on a quick search - or keeping better records. This situation sounds a bit weird to me, I'm not sure how they made the mistakes the article is suggesting they made.
    - deltarholamda 2y ago
      I've done some work with big hospitals on big campuses. Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers. Big construction projects also routinely did as-built drawings, and this was a cost built into the contracts. So if the physical plant people didn't have, or had lost the record drawings, they knew which architect or engineer to call. This happened all the time. I can recall pulling out a drawing from the early 80s to answer a question in the early 2000s. However, all of this was a cost center. Starting some twenty years ago or so, everybody has been rooting out these cost centers as cost-cutting measures. Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril.
      - toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Spot on. This is self inflicted debt and pain from not valuing what you enumerated. And now it will cost even more to rebuild that muscle memory.
woodruffw 2y ago
This article’s details are good, but I found the argumentative route misleading: the specific example they chose wouldn’t have been improved by bid-design, since the whole problem with NYC’s gas and steam networks is that they’re (1) undocumented, (2) critical infrastructure that can’t be disrupted, and (3) regularly responsible for mass casualty events when the city doesn’t gingerly fix them via independent projects. (1), importantly, means that the city doesn’t even know who else to bring to the table until they break ground and see what’s below the streets. The area they chose to highlight typifies this: that part of the East Side uses the steam network for hospital disinfection, and had a massive, deadly, costly stream explosion within living memory[1]. The city absolutely does need better contracting processes. But the parks, MTA, public housing, schools, etc. are all better examples than the one they chose. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explo...
- flerchin 2y ago
  Undocumented infra is the root of all my problems too.
- maxwell 2y ago
  Historically the way to deal with legacy urban design like this was to, you know, build new cities. Alas, we stopped founding new cities over a hundred years ago in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Americas_by_year_of_foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Americas...
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Huh? When has someone built a new city? Nearly all attempts fail long term. Cities are located where they are for geographical reasons first and foremost, and so nearly all attempts fail. Where a new city did work it is either because it was a suburb of an existing city; or it has a good geographical reason to exist. The only cases I'm aware of where a city has moved is when the river it was one moved and so the people who lived there followed. Note that politics will sometimes create a city for a short time, but the city rarely sticks. Eventually a new king/dictator/government will come along that doesn't see a need to support the new city and it dies (usually to a farming village since those are needed all over, but in places where there are no farms they can disappear)
kkfx 2y ago
That's just another example why we can't remain urbanized in the modern era. In the past there was no choice, now we can choose and meanwhile tech evolution have pushed the needs of so much infra that being dense instead of costing LESS than being spread it cost more. Nowadays a MODERN a big apartments complex cost more than an equivalent of single families homes per unit (HVAC, seismic, fire-safety, ... costs) and while single family homes can evolve (a single owner, a single family to relocate for rebuilding when (not if) needed, a bit of ground to actually work around without creating traffic nightmares and so on) big condos, towers etc practically can't. It's time to recalculate the narrative "being dense cost less". The reality is that cost much more and can only substantially evolve being totally rebuild, so practically can't substantially evolve. Big dense cities are needed only for finance capitalism, but we can't sustain them, nor humanly, nor technically nor environmentally.
- D13Fd 2y ago
  Density is far more efficient on a per-person basis though, in terms of energy and land usage.
  - kkfx 2y ago
    Try to elaborate: land use, as long as the soil is not sealed (so humus remain alive) it's not a "cost" nor an issue except for some hyper-dense countries. The Nederland and Belgium are very dense as a nation, yet most live in single-family homes, Spain or Italy are LESS dense and most live in condos, France and Ireland are far less dense and most live in single family homes so well, there is room for homes in most of the countries. In efficiency terms I was living in a big dense city, now I'm living on mountains, you can state "hey just to buy bread you grab the car and made a ~10km trip instead of going by feet for 1km round trip", true. But the 1km round trip was a daily one, the ~10km one is a weekly one because hey, the freezer works beautifully well for bread. Similarly I buy in much bigger quantity now, so with much less packaging and stock at home. I spend less, eat better (much less ready-made and ultra-processed foods/carbonated beverage) and produce less waste. Oh, and the trips are in a BEV recharged mostly from my p.v. thanks to remote works. I simply discovered I need to move FAR LESS here than in a big city, yes individual trips are much longer, but the overall distance is not much bigger. Also modern life works better, online retail having room for delivery van works better here than in a big city downtown. They run more, but with much less stop and go and parking issues not counting the fact that a new fully electric home is easy (technically) to be made while converting an old building is next to impossible or at least cost MUCH more for much less results. Try to compute the TCO not of a new city entirely designed today vs a new spread area entirely designed today but over 50 and 100 years with all the evolution we have. If you just look at the past, yes in the past being spread means wasting much oil to move, we need the office for anything, so we have to move, homes was far simpler so a condo was cheap than a set of single family homes, but things changes. We do not need the office anymore, we can centrally schedule a vast efficient spread logistic and so on. Now being spread meaning consuming far less, while in cities we still consume much more. We can't evolve cities without rebuilding them and that's why they keep consuming more and wasting immense amount of resources trying to evolve just a bit.
ixtli 2y ago
If con ed wasn’t a private org this wouldn’t be an issue. The people who live here gain absolutely nothing from their acting as a profit seeking middleman: indeed all we get is a totally unaccountable actor who can hide surprises all over one of the most densely populated places on earth.
- bmmayer1 2y ago
  Doesn't the MTA pay $2.95 billion per mile of new track?
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    $2.5 billion per mile of tunnel, not track, on the SAS project[1]. (This is an outrageous number, but it's not a "true" benchmark for what a mile of subway construction costs in the city: similar crosstown construction in Brooklyn or Queens, which badly need new lines, would be significantly cheaper due to both lower density and the possibility of cut-and-cover instead of tunneling. Plus, no steam pipes in the way.) Edit: for comparison, the IBX is expected to cost around $400M per mile[2]. Which is also obscenely expensive given how much of the right-of-way exists, but demonstrates that there's no clean apples-to-apples comparison here. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/in-nyc-subway-a-case-study-in-runaway-transit-construction-costs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/in-nyc-su... [2]: https://www.etany.org/interborough-express https://www.etany.org/interborough-express
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  NYC's government is entirely comprised of profit-seeking middlemen. Every mid- to high-level politician gets rich in office. That happens for a reason.
  - jerf 2y ago
    This is one of the things I find so blatent that it almost passes through being blatent into degrees of blatentness that need some new word to describe because our brains can't even process how blatently obvious it is. Our "public servants" routinely retire with public net worth that is multiples of all the money they were ever supposedly paid, 10x, 20x easily. It is prima facie true that they must have been corrupt in order to do that.
arctics 2y ago
https://www.nycgovparks.org/planning-and-building/capital-project-tracker/project/10500 https://www.nycgovparks.org/planning-and-building/capital-pr... Why this box costs $4 million? Can someone explain?
- op00to 2y ago
  Disingenuous question. It's not a single box. It's not a single park. There's more work involved than simply plopping a "box" in a park.
- alephxyz 2y ago
  There are five "boxes" costing 185k each. The rest of the cost is to install sewage water and power lines. https://abc7ny.com/public-restroom-nyc-bathroom-subway/12892891/ https://abc7ny.com/public-restroom-nyc-bathroom-subway/12892...
bluGill 2y ago
The https://transitcosts.com/ https://transitcosts.com/ project is appropriate to link here - while the projects are different, the conclusions seem to apply. Here is one place where the author wrote a summary https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/04/26/more-on-consultants/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/04/26/more-on-consul... IMHO, all governments create a map of their infrasructure and require utilities to update it with as built information within 1 week of the work (if the work takes more than a week they must update weekly!). They should also be putting "as-planed" information in to this. When someone calls the "one call" they need to update existing infrastructure as found. And within 15 years they need to update the entire database. Once the database is created (that is you call the one-call number a week in advance for your proposed project) contractors who encounter anything else are justified in cutting the pipes/wires since they are not used. When two projects are planned in the same area the designers are required to contact each other and make plans - they are encouraged to work together to save money (dig one hole...) I realize finding something in the ground is hard. There needs to be a reasonable amount of tolerance for measurement errors and the earth moving (half a meter?). However that the above is hard isn't an excuse to not do it.

49 points by raybb 2y ago

I love this sort of nitty gritty article with good details. That said it would be more convincing if the writer followed the maxim of Chesterton’s Fence: if design-build is a better process than design-bid-build, why was the latter law created in the first place? It is almost certain that something went wrong when design and build were bundled.

xnx 2y ago
Lots of good comments on the article with plausible explanations.
bradleyjg 2y ago
Public contracting rules are designed to prevent being ripped off, including via corruption. This is a laudable goal but at the level we have now the cure is worse than the disease.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bluGill 2y ago
They are making a claim that design-build is better, but when you look at the evidence it doesn't pan out any better. Design-build means contractors design something expensive (contracts are often cost plus some profit margin so the higher they can make the costs the more profit they get - if it is a fixed price contract they will look for places where they can build to the letter of the contract but obviously fail to meet the intent, then charge a lot for the change order)

ajsnigrutin 2y ago

Someone should really do a study to compare private infrastructure works vs public ones. A local Hofer (=Aldi) here can repave a whole parking lot and the access road in basically a weekend, while the same thing (parking lot) for a local government office can take a year or more, at approximately the same size.

jefftk 2y ago
Is there anything under the parking lot?
- roenxi 2y ago
  That does make a difference, but not that much of a difference. Reading between the lines, the issue here seems to be that the city doesn't keep records of what is underground that can be referred to during the planning process - the "they unexpectedly found a maze of Con Edison gas and steam lines" quote sounds expensive. Possibly they should consider engaging some sort of dial-before-you-dig program - https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ https://newyork-811.com/homeowners/ sounds promising on a quick search - or keeping better records. This situation sounds a bit weird to me, I'm not sure how they made the mistakes the article is suggesting they made.
  - deltarholamda 2y ago
    I've done some work with big hospitals on big campuses. Back in the day, the physical plant people were lifelong employees and they knew where all the bones were buried. They worked closely with design and engineering teams, and they had long term relationships with architects and engineers. Big construction projects also routinely did as-built drawings, and this was a cost built into the contracts. So if the physical plant people didn't have, or had lost the record drawings, they knew which architect or engineer to call. This happened all the time. I can recall pulling out a drawing from the early 80s to answer a question in the early 2000s. However, all of this was a cost center. Starting some twenty years ago or so, everybody has been rooting out these cost centers as cost-cutting measures. Institutional knowledge is an unquantifiable asset, but it's far, far, far from zero. You lose it at your peril.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Spot on. This is self inflicted debt and pain from not valuing what you enumerated. And now it will cost even more to rebuild that muscle memory.

woodruffw 2y ago

This article’s details are good, but I found the argumentative route misleading: the specific example they chose wouldn’t have been improved by bid-design, since the whole problem with NYC’s gas and steam networks is that they’re (1) undocumented, (2) critical infrastructure that can’t be disrupted, and (3) regularly responsible for mass casualty events when the city doesn’t gingerly fix them via independent projects. (1), importantly, means that the city doesn’t even know who else to bring to the table until they break ground and see what’s below the streets. The area they chose to highlight typifies this: that part of the East Side uses the steam network for hospital disinfection, and had a massive, deadly, costly stream explosion within living memory[1]. The city absolutely does need better contracting processes. But the parks, MTA, public housing, schools, etc. are all better examples than the one they chose. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explo...

flerchin 2y ago
Undocumented infra is the root of all my problems too.
maxwell 2y ago
Historically the way to deal with legacy urban design like this was to, you know, build new cities. Alas, we stopped founding new cities over a hundred years ago in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Americas_by_year_of_foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Americas...
- bluGill 2y ago
  Huh? When has someone built a new city? Nearly all attempts fail long term. Cities are located where they are for geographical reasons first and foremost, and so nearly all attempts fail. Where a new city did work it is either because it was a suburb of an existing city; or it has a good geographical reason to exist. The only cases I'm aware of where a city has moved is when the river it was one moved and so the people who lived there followed. Note that politics will sometimes create a city for a short time, but the city rarely sticks. Eventually a new king/dictator/government will come along that doesn't see a need to support the new city and it dies (usually to a farming village since those are needed all over, but in places where there are no farms they can disappear)

kkfx 2y ago

That's just another example why we can't remain urbanized in the modern era. In the past there was no choice, now we can choose and meanwhile tech evolution have pushed the needs of so much infra that being dense instead of costing LESS than being spread it cost more. Nowadays a MODERN a big apartments complex cost more than an equivalent of single families homes per unit (HVAC, seismic, fire-safety, ... costs) and while single family homes can evolve (a single owner, a single family to relocate for rebuilding when (not if) needed, a bit of ground to actually work around without creating traffic nightmares and so on) big condos, towers etc practically can't. It's time to recalculate the narrative "being dense cost less". The reality is that cost much more and can only substantially evolve being totally rebuild, so practically can't substantially evolve. Big dense cities are needed only for finance capitalism, but we can't sustain them, nor humanly, nor technically nor environmentally.

D13Fd 2y ago
Density is far more efficient on a per-person basis though, in terms of energy and land usage.
- kkfx 2y ago
  Try to elaborate: land use, as long as the soil is not sealed (so humus remain alive) it's not a "cost" nor an issue except for some hyper-dense countries. The Nederland and Belgium are very dense as a nation, yet most live in single-family homes, Spain or Italy are LESS dense and most live in condos, France and Ireland are far less dense and most live in single family homes so well, there is room for homes in most of the countries. In efficiency terms I was living in a big dense city, now I'm living on mountains, you can state "hey just to buy bread you grab the car and made a ~10km trip instead of going by feet for 1km round trip", true. But the 1km round trip was a daily one, the ~10km one is a weekly one because hey, the freezer works beautifully well for bread. Similarly I buy in much bigger quantity now, so with much less packaging and stock at home. I spend less, eat better (much less ready-made and ultra-processed foods/carbonated beverage) and produce less waste. Oh, and the trips are in a BEV recharged mostly from my p.v. thanks to remote works. I simply discovered I need to move FAR LESS here than in a big city, yes individual trips are much longer, but the overall distance is not much bigger. Also modern life works better, online retail having room for delivery van works better here than in a big city downtown. They run more, but with much less stop and go and parking issues not counting the fact that a new fully electric home is easy (technically) to be made while converting an old building is next to impossible or at least cost MUCH more for much less results. Try to compute the TCO not of a new city entirely designed today vs a new spread area entirely designed today but over 50 and 100 years with all the evolution we have. If you just look at the past, yes in the past being spread means wasting much oil to move, we need the office for anything, so we have to move, homes was far simpler so a condo was cheap than a set of single family homes, but things changes. We do not need the office anymore, we can centrally schedule a vast efficient spread logistic and so on. Now being spread meaning consuming far less, while in cities we still consume much more. We can't evolve cities without rebuilding them and that's why they keep consuming more and wasting immense amount of resources trying to evolve just a bit.

ixtli 2y ago

If con ed wasn’t a private org this wouldn’t be an issue. The people who live here gain absolutely nothing from their acting as a profit seeking middleman: indeed all we get is a totally unaccountable actor who can hide surprises all over one of the most densely populated places on earth.

bmmayer1 2y ago
Doesn't the MTA pay $2.95 billion per mile of new track?
- woodruffw 2y ago
  $2.5 billion per mile of tunnel, not track, on the SAS project[1]. (This is an outrageous number, but it's not a "true" benchmark for what a mile of subway construction costs in the city: similar crosstown construction in Brooklyn or Queens, which badly need new lines, would be significantly cheaper due to both lower density and the possibility of cut-and-cover instead of tunneling. Plus, no steam pipes in the way.) Edit: for comparison, the IBX is expected to cost around $400M per mile[2]. Which is also obscenely expensive given how much of the right-of-way exists, but demonstrates that there's no clean apples-to-apples comparison here. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/in-nyc-subway-a-case-study-in-runaway-transit-construction-costs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-23/in-nyc-su... [2]: https://www.etany.org/interborough-express https://www.etany.org/interborough-express
pclmulqdq 2y ago
NYC's government is entirely comprised of profit-seeking middlemen. Every mid- to high-level politician gets rich in office. That happens for a reason.
- jerf 2y ago
  This is one of the things I find so blatent that it almost passes through being blatent into degrees of blatentness that need some new word to describe because our brains can't even process how blatently obvious it is. Our "public servants" routinely retire with public net worth that is multiples of all the money they were ever supposedly paid, 10x, 20x easily. It is prima facie true that they must have been corrupt in order to do that.

arctics 2y ago

https://www.nycgovparks.org/planning-and-building/capital-project-tracker/project/10500 https://www.nycgovparks.org/planning-and-building/capital-pr... Why this box costs $4 million? Can someone explain?

op00to 2y ago
Disingenuous question. It's not a single box. It's not a single park. There's more work involved than simply plopping a "box" in a park.
alephxyz 2y ago
There are five "boxes" costing 185k each. The rest of the cost is to install sewage water and power lines. https://abc7ny.com/public-restroom-nyc-bathroom-subway/12892891/ https://abc7ny.com/public-restroom-nyc-bathroom-subway/12892...

bluGill 2y ago

The https://transitcosts.com/ https://transitcosts.com/ project is appropriate to link here - while the projects are different, the conclusions seem to apply. Here is one place where the author wrote a summary https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/04/26/more-on-consultants/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/04/26/more-on-consul... IMHO, all governments create a map of their infrasructure and require utilities to update it with as built information within 1 week of the work (if the work takes more than a week they must update weekly!). They should also be putting "as-planed" information in to this. When someone calls the "one call" they need to update existing infrastructure as found. And within 15 years they need to update the entire database. Once the database is created (that is you call the one-call number a week in advance for your proposed project) contractors who encounter anything else are justified in cutting the pipes/wires since they are not used. When two projects are planned in the same area the designers are required to contact each other and make plans - they are encouraged to work together to save money (dig one hole...) I realize finding something in the ground is hard. There needs to be a reasonable amount of tolerance for measurement errors and the earth moving (half a meter?). However that the above is hard isn't an excuse to not do it.