EDITORIAL: New York needs to rethink the big project
Renovations to the Whitestone Bridge started in 2004, and when they're done the span will be wider, less likely to fall and easier to reach. The only problem is, the job won't be finished until the end of 2016 - if then.
Which is remarkable, because the whole thing was built from scratch using Depression-era technology in just 22 months. Workers hurried to finish in time for the 1939 World's Fair.
In New York, the words "crumbling" and "infrastructure" go together like "scandal" and "Albany," yet the state that once dug the Erie Canal and covered Long Island with the nation's busiest commuter railroad nowadays can't seem to build a thing.
The Second Avenue subway has been on the drawing board for decades. The conversion of an old post office into a new Penn Station has been "launched" again and again, to no apparent effect. And nearly a decade after the World Trade Center attacks, redevelopment there is far from complete.
Projects in this state just seem to take forever and cost a fortune. The result is a woefully inadequate infrastructure that threatens to derail our future. On Long Island, for instance, economic growth is held back by traffic-clogged roads, insufficient tracks for better Long Island Rail Road service, and scant rail-freight capacity. All of which raises two crucial questions: Why is it so hard to build anything here? And how can we make it easier?
One reason it's hard to do big public works here is that it's hard to do them nearly everywhere in America. We take people's rights more seriously now, so the high and mighty can no longer shove unwanted projects down people's throats. The days when a Robert Moses could slam highways through a recalcitrant neighborhood are long gone. But the flip side is that a determined minority can more easily thwart large projects that would serve the common good.
Many such projects, moreover, haven't turned out well, which has undermined public faith in costly new infrastructure - and in the very idea of progress. The dams on western rivers would fail today's environmental reviews, and the interstate highways helped speed many inner cities along the path to destruction.
But as with so much else, New York has made infrastructure projects more difficult and more costly than they need to be. Various state laws all but require that public works projects use union labor, which drives up costs and shrinks how much construction we can buy at any given level of spending. One study estimated that New York's prevailing wage law for public works adds 76 percent to the cost of downstate projects.
The state's archaic Wicks Law, aimed at an earlier generation of construction fraud, now requires even picayune projects to have multiple contractors, which adds expense and dilutes responsibility. Nor can the same firm both design and build the same project, a practice that works elsewhere to streamline construction. Public works are also more complicated here because the metropolitan area straddles three states and many counties. And of course, ours is an expensive part of the country.
We can't change geography, but we can change some of the laws and practices that jack up the price of public works in New York. The construction of the Whitestone Bridge, for example, cost $234 million in today's dollars. But the MTA is spending nearly as much - $193 million - just to replace and widen the roadway and supporting structure of the Bronx approach.
New York must also make greater use of public-private partnerships, in which businesses assume the risk, do the work and raise the money in exchange for future revenue from a project. Such arrangements have already scored successes in this state. The Long Island Power Authority, for instance, has partnered with private power firms to design, build and run new power plants on Long Island, despite the great expense. A public-private partnership might be the best hope for building - at last - a much-needed tunnel connecting central Long Island to Westchester County.
Another idea worth considering is a full-scale infrastructure bank. Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo has proposed one, and President Barack Obama, among others, has suggested the same at a national level. Such a bank could take the politics out of allocating capital for infrastructure, so that instead of spreading money thinly and widely to please everyone - and accomplish very little - funds could be directed by a panel of experts(with legislative oversight) to projects with the best bang for the buck. This is roughly how money for medical research is allocated by the National Institutes of Health.
It would be much easier to fund badly needed infrastructure projects if we could find ways to charge people for the social cost of their behavior. Congestion pricing of roads, higher registration fees for the most environmentally destructive vehicles, and broad taxes on carbon-based fuels, might all change behavior in positive ways while providing money for alternatives such as mass transit and green energy.
Most of all, we have to restore faith in the very idea of building. From here on, New York's bridges, tunnels, railways and aqueducts will have to be built on a bedrock base of credibility - something scarcer nowadays than money, but possibly more important. Our future depends on it. hN
