Things fall apart as NYC skimps on infrastructure

It was 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 16 when the ceiling finally collapsed at the 181st Street subway station on New York’s 1 line. Bricks fell 35 feet onto the tracks, hitting and severely damaging a train that was in the station. Fortunately, nobody was injured.

While the human drama of being in a subway while tons of bricks crashed down on it is clear, none of the New York press interviewed any passengers or the train’s crew. They followed the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s approach of treating this Sunday evening near-tragedy as a mere interruption of service.

It is indeed a significant service interruption. About 600,000 people use the 1 line every workday—more than use the entire transit system in Boston. About 75,000 people use the stations directly affected above the collapse.

The MTA is running shuttle buses for some service, but it needs about 30 buses to replace one subway train. During commuter rush periods 10 to 12 trains are scheduled every hour.

New York City’s population is so dense, with more than 1 million people using the subways every workday, that there is no reasonable alternative to mass transit.

A week after the collapse, the MTA still hadn’t announced when it will resume normal service. It is obvious the 181st St. station will be closed for a long time. The MTA is also going to inspect the 168th St. station, which has the same type of construction as 181st St. and was also built in the 1930s.

There had been a collapse at 181st St. in 2007. The MTA obviously knew about the problem at 181st St., since it had already planned to start repairs in December 2009 and complete them in 2010. (www.mta.info)

According to a report by the New York City Transit Riders Council, which is a state-funded group designed to represent the interests of riders, fewer than 25 percent of New York’s subway stations are in acceptable condition. In central Manhattan, almost all the stations are “acceptable,” but outside this narrow area, conditions range from dilapidated, dirty and dingy to downright dangerous like 181st St., which is in the middle of busy Washington Heights, a community whose population is mostly from the

Dominican Republic.

The subway system is not the only section of New York’s infrastructure that is crumbling. Two days after the ceiling collapse, the city had to close the FDR Drive, the major highway that hugs the East River and runs most of the length of Manhattan.

A chunk of the road had collapsed, and the city needed to shore up the ground, loose fill and pilings that hold up the north-bound lanes between East Houston St. and 23rd St. in downtown Manhattan.

One of the bloggers commenting on the subway collapse in the Aug. 18 Daily News wrote, “This work needed to be done ages ago. I have a family member who works as an engineer and he has consistently warned the Department of Transportation that the roadway is a hazard for drivers.”

Others mentioned the bridge collapse in Minneapolis on Aug. 1, 2007, which they blamed on needed maintenance that had been put off.

It is clear that the MTA and the city of New York are focusing on “multi-billion dollar projects that will expand the nation’s largest regional transportation network,” according to an MTA press release. These projects include the so-called East Side Access that will bring the Long Island Railroad, primarily serving mostly white commuters from Long Island, into Grand Central station, and extending subway service to the Far West Side, which will benefit the Javits Convention Center.

These new big projects will mean big profits for the construction firms and real estate interests that dominate New York City, along with Wall Street and the big banks, which will provide the financing. Fixing the infrastructure, both in mass transit and the city’s highways and streets, would mean smaller projects that require far more labor-intensive work. Replacing bricks in an old ceiling, for example, needs more individual workers, rather than big machines that eliminate much of the human labor but can lead to big profits.

The U.S. government has spent trillions bailing out the big banks and the automobile industry. It has shown a greater reluctance to paying for repairs to the crumbling infrastructure in the country. Such repairs, as is clear from New York, could produce millions of necessary jobs, which would be well-paid if done by union labor.