If only New York officials had heeded the warnings by building levees and other storm barriers, they could have avoided much of the damage caused by Sandy–at least, according to the New York Times. Hindsight is 20-20 vision, but those warnings were about the sea-level rise that is supposed to accompany global warming, not the recent storm that, in fact, probably had nothing to do with climate change.
All over the country, self-appointed experts argue that the government should retrofit infrastructure and/or require private owners to retrofit structures to guard against earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornados, volcanos, and other natural disasters. No doubt many of them expect to cash in on their expertise in consulting contracts advising officials on what needs to be done.
The problem with this is that such retrofits tend to be very costly and may only be needed for a tiny fraction of the structures that could be worked upon. California earthquakes, for example, may seem to have done a lot of damage, but in fact they only harmed a small percentage of developments in the Golden State. While it might make sense to insure that new publicly built structures can withstand natural disasters, what happens to new or existing private structures should be between the owners and their insurance companies.
It is always advised that people who are facing certain kind of heart disease or a stroke, the penile arteries can also become sclerosed or hardened cost levitra low due to plaque formation. If impotence is due to buy cialis line atherosclerosis, it can be cured with Sildenafil Kamagra. Probably the main reason couples become dysfunctional is generic levitra canada because stop interacting. Yes, by buying buy generic levitra men can now treat the malady without coming up short with the assistance of the doctor prior using this pill. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg has issued a rule that all cars entering Manhattan have at least three people in them. While this may appear to make sense at first glance, it won’t take long for bureaucrats to think of reasons why some people (such as other bureaucrats) should be able to enter the city in cars with fewer than three occupants.
It would make more sense to increase the tolls required to enter the city to be high enough to keep the streets from becoming clogged and then let people decide for themselves how many should be in each car. Of course, this is very similar to a previous Bloomberg proposal that the Antiplanner opposed four-and-a-half years ago.
The difference is that Bloomberg then was proposing a permanent fixed charge mainly to pluck money from auto drivers to help fund the city’s failing transit system. The Antiplanner today is proposing a temporary variable charge solely to relieve congestion.
Most of the bridges into Manhattan are already set up for electronic tolls. All the city needs to do is raise those tolls to whatever is needed to keep incoming traffic down. The funds should be used to rebuild the highways and streets damaged by the storm.
Your suggestion makes too much sense, and is too simple, Randal. I expect it will be roundly criticized and flailed by the usual suspects, and ignored by the likes of Bloomberg, who I might add has a hint of dictatorial power and doesn’t mind using it, like previous New York mayors.
Randal – would it have killed you to do a few Google searches before you write something? Not a single one of the bridges from Manhattan to Brooklyn or Queens is set up to collect tolls, and obviously the streets between midtown and uptown and the many small Harlem River bridges connecting the island to the Bronx and Westchester aren’t tolled either. The crossings into Manhattan that are tolled are the three bridges and tunnels to New Jersey, the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge, and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. And of those tolled crossings, the Holland and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels are still closed due to the storm.
200 transit employees with garbage cans to collect the money, a few police to guard them, a fleet of armored trucks to haul the swag to the bank.
A friend of mine some years ago convinced our local politicos to lease him 2 square blocks of vacant land near our local arena for peanuts. He turned moose pasture into a lucrative parking business, given his essentially 0 costs, using collection methods not much more sophisticated than guys with garbage cans. The politicos thought as you did, purely linear, emphasizing difficulties, most of them imaginary, and so saw no value in the land.
If NY decreed tolls and gave me a 5% commission, I’d have the whole thing running in 2 days. Excepting of course the two trillion other regulatory idiocies they would foist on me.
While I do support pricing in most situations there is something to making sure the that everyone, wealthy, politicians included, have to follow the same rules and suffer the same fate as everyone else. I feel politicians and the wealthy will appreciate the problem of the commute far more is they have to pick up a couple of people on the way into work rather than just be able to pay what is to them an insignificant fee and avoid the problems of the masses. This is against the backdrop of the USA seeing a big shift in income to the top few percent in the last 35 years. It makes great sense to make sure politicians and the wealthy appreciate the problems facing the bulk of the population.
I have taken informal car pools several times and found them a very useful tool for increasing road capacity at low cost.
Links to blogs negating statements with loaded phrases and sane people noting otherwise notwithstanding, Randal tries to tell you that an ounce of prevention is not worth a pound of cure. Comical subway assertions yesterday, neo-comedy today. Pushing the envelope are we?
As I type this, I’m listening to a report of gridlock on Manhattan because transit is still affected. That’s no joke.
DS
Uh, Manhattan is typically gridlocked even when when transit is running and no major storms are expected. Your point?
My point is very clear and quite simple: there is a ton of reportage out in the world now that everyone has heard, and we all know by now that the traffic is a nightmare now without the subway.
DS
Another plan might be to allow drivers to charge passengers to drive them across the bridge. In an ideal world we would be able to license them so they have no criminal record, have insurance, ect. Then the number of passenger carrying vehicles would increase with demand. It won’t happen because the first rule of transit agencies and taxicab monopolies is to protect their monopoly and prevent individuals from being licensed and using their cars to pick up passengers.
“The difference is that Bloomberg then was proposing a permanent fixed charge mainly to pluck money from auto drivers to help fund the city’s failing transit system. The Antiplanner today is proposing a temporary variable charge solely to relieve congestion.”
My feeling is that the people coming to NYC on a daily basis aren’t doing it for shits and giggles. In a city like NYC, wouldn’t an increase in the cost of driving just result in a mode shift? Are you suggesting that the tolls will just keep people from coming to the city? Are you sure they won’t just hop on a train/bus?
Bloomberg’s plan was for a fixed toll on all bridges. I would have a variable toll that might be lower on some bridges than others. Bloomberg’s plan would lead to a one-time reduction in traffic but no long-term solution to congestion. Variable tolls could relieve congestion at all times,
The Antiplanner wrote:
All over the country, self-appointed experts argue that the government should retrofit infrastructure and/or require private owners to retrofit structures to guard against earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tornados, volcanos, and other natural disasters. No doubt many of them expect to cash in on their expertise in consulting contracts advising officials on what needs to be done.
The problem with this is that such retrofits tend to be very costly and may only be needed for a tiny fraction of the structures that could be worked upon. California earthquakes, for example, may seem to have done a lot of damage, but in fact they only harmed a small percentage of developments in the Golden State. While it might make sense to insure that new publicly built structures can withstand natural disasters, what happens to new or existing private structures should be between the owners and their insurance companies.
I agree and disagree with the above.
On the one hand, I do believe that some infrastructure needs to be protected against flooding. Three categories that come to mind are: hospitals; public safety facilities (police and fire and rescue stations and emergency communications centers); and tunnels used for transportation.
All of these should be hardened against loss of power and flooding. In the case of hospitals, that means not having electrical systems (including high-voltage breakers and backup generators) in the basements. In the case of tunnels (rail and highway) that means having gates or doors that can be put in place to block floodwaters.
Here is an example of such a flood gate from the Green Line of the Stockholm, Sweden subway system.
Compared to a flood protection system to prevent storm surges of New York Harbor, these protections are relatively inexpensive and simple to implement.
The Antiplanner also wrote:
The difference is that Bloomberg then was proposing a permanent fixed charge mainly to pluck money from auto drivers to help fund the city’s failing transit system. The Antiplanner today is proposing a temporary variable charge solely to relieve congestion.
You do know that one of the reasons that the N.Y. MTA Bridge and Tunnel tolls are so high is because a very large chunk of the revenue is diverted to various transit subsidies, and has been ever since 1968, when then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller fired the longtime head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA), Robert Moses, and merged the TBTA into the MTA with the express intention of having the TBTA’s surpluses “offset” (as the biographer of Moses, Robert Caro put it) the transit operating deficits.
Of course, the bridge and tunnel tolls have gone up enormously since TBTA became part of the MTA, and still there is not enough money to “offset” the operating and capital deficits that are run up by transit in New York City.
Sorry, I fail to see the issue here. So recovery may cost $60 billion – in other words, considerably less than Obama has blown on failed “green energy” companies during his term – so what? Not only do economists say that rebuilding will be a huge shot for the moribund construction industry, but as one wag noted, the storm has already created more jobs than Obama has.
It was especially amusing that 16 Obama-subsidized Fisker Karmas (were they appropriately named, or what?) costing in excess of $100,000 per electric car, were submerged at Port Newark. Then, when the waters receded, they all caught fire and burned to the ground. Safe. Reliable. “Green”.
http://updates.jalopnik.com/post/34669789863/more-than-a-dozen-fisker-karma-hybrids-caught-fire-and
Great photos of what a bunch of expensive rides look like after catching fire.
Lying for Jesus!
Or gullibly parroting talking points for jesus.
Either way.
DS
You, apparently (like so many Leftists) are both humor-impaired and at an abject loss for words, so you resort to all you got: drool.
Pretty pathetic display there, Dan – though the best that can be expected from the developmentally disabled.
eye roll
Are you claiming you are not parroting RNC-Rove-Koch-Rmoney lies about so many green energy companies failing? Are you also trying to distract away from that false claim by making shhh…tuff up about me?
Do help us understand why you are sad and lashing out after I point out th’ lies fer jeebus.
DS
Sorry, Danny – roll your eyes all you want. You make up stuff to insult others, then get all upset when they stuff it right back at you. Gee, too bad. Grow up, then.
I’m not “parroting” anything: I read a lot of news. Ever heard of Solyndra or Vestas or at least 50 other similar failures? Did you bother to check the Jalopnik link on the Fiskers? No? Why does that not surprise anyone? You’d rather just make stuff up and hope that something sticks.
And you exhibit humorous levels of suckage at even that.
“Not only do economists say that rebuilding will be a huge shot for the moribund construction industry”
At the opportunity cost of what could have been produced absent destruction. This is the broken window fallacy.
Go talk to the economists, then.
What I find curious is that Mayor Doomberg and his fellow citizens took few, if any, preventive measures, such as blockading entrances to the transit tunnels. Apparently, they preferred to sit on their hands.
One of the few achievements associated with the reign of Vera Katz in Portland involved her order, in the days prior to arrival of the 1996 flood, for reinforcement and extension of the seawall at Portland’s waterfront. Hundreds of volunteers showed up to assist city crews in making it happen. It brought a diverse range of citizens together (and the seawall was not breached).
By contrast, mayor Doomberg invited large-scale infrastructure damage simply by taking no such steps to secure the tunnels. The barriers don’t have to be pretty – just relatively effective – but he CHOSE to ignore the issues. Now, he wants billions in bail-out money; much of which would be unneeded if not for his incompetence. But, as noted, it’s a huge shot in the arm for the construction industry. Besides, Doomberg was likely preoccupied with preparations for the NYC marathon.
N.Y. Times panel discussion on this subject:
Should New York Build Sea Gates?
These discussions will be much more frequent in the near future. Most of the high-income cities on the planet are near water, not to mention what are we going to do with the Indian subcontinent-Bangladesh and their rice production, and what just happened in SE Asia this year? Big problems, complicated solutions.
DS
There is no technical reason that a flood barrier could not be built, though it would be expensive (and probably extra-expensive in New York state and especially New York City, given the reality of union power there).
Great Britain built such a barrier across the Thames Estuary to protect London (details here), and not so far away in the Netherlands, the Oosterscheldekering was built to protect the country from the waters of the North Sea.
Agreed CPZ. There is a burgeoning flood defense industry in other places. Venice might be the most famous in countries that realize seas are rising and will continue to rise.
DS