Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: A Space Age Roman Am I 34
Tearing Down, Building New Foundations
Bricks and Mortar
Look at our cities. Look into the holes torn out for every road being rebuilt.
What will you see? A slovenly tangle of pipes and wires and fragments of long-gone structures.
Like a large family of eccentric and badly raised children, we have gotten used to each company or agency or utility just barely keeping out of the way of the others, each going their one way in their own way.
Then we cover it all with mounds of rubble and toxic dirt, making and destroying accessways every time we need to get at something.
In Bangalore and Seoul and Budapest they're building coherently designed and executed systems, getting saner lives and taking our jobs with the results.
The Romans knew how to build a sane and permanent city two thousand years ago. How to make streets and ducting that could last for a thousand years with no maintenance.
But we're Americans, right? It's ALL just temporary. Why do it right now if we can just do it over later?
Who benefits from how we do things now?
Verizon, PG&E, and every other company stalling nimbler, better competitors with the excuse that access is just too hard.
Penny-ante politicians spending less now and leaving the cleanup and rebuilding for the people coming after them.
And all those parts of the world that gain from a shambling, dim-witted America, that doesn't work right now and breaks down in unpredictable ways when stressed.
I lived through damage control after one September 11th. Now it's past time to talk about how to make us less vulnerable to the next one.
Standard Disclaimer (Please read this first.) As always, please read the whole post before judging it, understand that I must simplify to reduce proposals to a size that can fit in a JE, and that my sole metric for viability is effectiveness. I do not give the concept of "sin" any weight at all.
Also, as you read the following, I suggest that you keep the following phrase firmly in mind: economies of scale. Many of the following procedures are thought of as very expensive, but with a full time, specially equipped team doing a given task tens of thousands of times, units costs will go *way* down.
Keep in mind that some staffing issues would tie into the labor pool and other resources created by The Big Dole and associated programs.
And yes, I have spoken to actual logistics, civil engineering, and policy experts to confirm all this. After all, I *did*, among other things, use to be the last-line-of-defense troubleshooter for certain issues for all of McGraw-Hill's Construction Information Group.
Further, yes, I am aware that these proposals would cause massive social upheaval. First of all, there are ways to mitigate those upheavals, and, secondly, those upheavals will do less damage then we now face from our current state of affairs.
It's not that I think these things are easy. It's that I know that they are essential.
End of Disclaimer
Have you ever looked at a cutaway view of what's under city streets? A tangled hodgepodge of sewer lines, electrical systems, abandoned pneumatic lines, and a dangerously underdocumented collection of private gas lines, accessways and other ducts and channels and rights of way.
The complexity of the physical systems required to keep a densely populated area going is well known. A dozen children's books have been been built around the subject. Probably twenty PBS and Discovery Channel documentaries.
Periodically, a water main will break or a major power line will go down in an urban area and accounts will be blithely given of the mix of two-hundred-year old water pipes, high-voltage electrical lines, and so on.
Somehow, we are expected to accept this as we do hurricane season or the Yankees and Raiders being assholes.
And, even more pathetically, we allow billions of dollars in federal money to be pumped into projects like the LA subway and Boston's Big Dig, tearing out huge hunks of city and putting them all back, without putting things back any better then they found them.
That's like starting with a random pile of books, sorting them all to find a few particular ones, and then knocking your neat piles back into chaos before leaving.
Think about that staple of horror movies and USA Network dramas (woo-eee-ooo!) underground steam tunnels. In the trade, these are called "utility galleries". Long corridors with power and communications and so on, all neatly lined up along the walls.
Need to reach the telephone lines? They're all in a row, with regularly-spaced junction boxes and labels. Power? Right beside them. And so on.
All of us who've run server rooms know how to do this. The only differences are scale and the number of people who need to be mollified along the way.
So, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna start building those under our roads and putting all of the mess into them.
And this is how we're going to do it.
All areas with a population density above ten thousand people per square mile (think suburbs and three story buildings) will be subject to The Omnibus Infrastructure Renewal Act.
This act will empower the federal government to partner with state and municipal authorities. However, in the interests of interstate commerce, defense, and environmental protection, if a municipal authority is consistently uncooperative, they *will* be overridden.
All applicable areas will be provided with a federally funded and staffed team empowered and equipped to carry out the following:
One linear mile per year of road will be selected. In the first few years this will consist of numerous short stretches of street along small areas of high density, such as a cluster of high rises in an area of less density or the roads adjoining a set of office parks.
Tear It All Out, Examine What's There
After a period of investigation and service provider liason, each selected stretch of road will be utterly torn out, down to between fifteen and thirty feet, deep enough to expose all utility lines of all sorts, including private lines belonging to cable companies and the like. If something man-made is down there, we will expose it.
The channel will be cut to the width of the road, right up to the edges of the sidewalk, if there is one, or until the building foundation is exposed, should that foundation butt up against the edge of the owner's property.
A team will make their way along as the digging progresses, documenting the current situation, including not only placement, condition, and nature of current systems, but also the state of facing foundations and other systems abutting the roadway.
All entities owning property along the road will be offered, for a nominal fee, a basic evaluation of the state of their foundations and the opportunity to have their needs incorporated into the final system.
Now comes the scary stuff.
ALL existing lines will be torn out or otherwise made capable of being put in their final placement.
Where possible, temporary utility replacements will be put in place, such as mobile electrical generators, limited waste water processing and provision of clean water, communications, and so on. The opportunity will also be taken, where viable, to cut connections at existing junctions or at good locations for the creation of new ones.
The Tunnel Is Laid
A twelve foot wide by ten foot high corridor will be built along the roadbed, as far down as is practical, creating a tunnel the length of the roadway. This tunnel will be built of heavy cast concrete, cast iron, layered brick, or other wall types proven to be able to survive for at least two hundred years without any structural maintenance.
(Please note that should superior results be possible with a tubular cross-section, by using arches, or otherwise changing the profile while maintaining the same general interior cross-section, that is fine.)
Overall, think Roman results built with modern techniques.
Sewer lines will be run beside or below this tunnel. All other lines will be relocated to within it, placed in orderly and standardized channels along the walls of the new utility gallery. All communications lines will run in one group, all electrical lines in another, gas in another, and so on. Clean water and stormwater will also, when possible, run in piping within the confines of this gallery.
Soil and other similar matter displaced during digging will be tested for levels of contaminants, and, if suitable, will be used as raw material to create gardens and other "green" areas, with a minimum depth of soil in resulting areas of forty-eight inches and compost or other "waste matter" as required used as soil amendments.
"Waste" concrete, brick, stone and other such materials will either be broken up for use on-site as aggregate or, if suitable, be transferred to the WPA-type projects from the previous JE for use in creating stone walls.
New Systems Put In
Floors will be of standardized dimensions, maximum degrees of curvature and slope, and condition to allow the eventual use of automated systems to deliver materials to repair workers, robotic (and telepresence) examination of lines, gallery travel in Cushman-type vehicles, and, if merited, a microgauge (approx. three feet) rail line to carry workers and materials.
Once the gallery is in place, it will then be covered up with an engineered new road, including drainage, sidewalks (where appropriate), accessways, and so on. Designs will be chosen to minimize future cost of maintenance.
A central authority will make licences available to any organization needing access to the galleries. Each organization will be given a certain number of licences proportional to their number of miles of lines, capacity, line type, etc.
You want to start a telcom company? Maybe one selling gas or steam from a cogeneration system? Think you can provide broadband cheaper and better? Get a licence for your repair folks, install your lines in the appropriate rows of ducting, and you're now (comparatively) on peer terms with the big boys.
Competing Gallery Systems
It is worth noting an implication of the dimensions of the gallery. The system I describe should end up with an external width of fifteen to eighteen feet. Far narrower then many roads.
If a private company should wish to build their own gallery system, I say (heh) more power to them. As long as they offer equivalent or better access to their systems and a reasonable (there are legal definitions of this) level of safety, they're welcome to step in.
The point of this whole mandate is to ensure a baseline, not force a federal monopoly.
Now let's look at what this would accomplish.
Open source Utilities
With the deregulation of the past decades, many claims have been made that power companies, telcos, and the like would become far more efficient, charge lower prices, and generally become far better as they would have to compete with newcomers.
Well, the reality has been far different, with existing companies using the complexity of their existing systems as a way to prevent competition and manipulate the market.
You want to feed power into the grid? Be prepared to face a series of illegal but common obstructions as the power companies claim that they would need to install new transformers, can't reach the lines near your house, etc.
Want phone service from a competitor to your regional telco? Watch as they only schedule access to their trunk lines as rarely as possible, adding costs, conditions, and delays for anybody else offering dialtone or using non-spec gear.
The cryptic, inefficient, and mutable nature of our utility lines is one of the biggest and most effective tools of the MegaCorps in their struggle to force us to do things their way or not at all. AOL/Time Warner, PacBell, Con Edison, MCI, and all their buddies have shown that access is control.
With lines accessable to anybody with a reason to use them, this delaying game gets cut down to size and the way opens for smaller players to compete on a more even playing field.
Do It Right; Then You Don't have to Keep Doing It Over
Think about how we do things now. We take systems we've spent TRILLIONS of dollars to develop, put them in cables to protect them from rain, animals, and a host of other hazards, and then drop them into dirt.
Then, when things need to be changed or fixed, we dig up all that dirt, set up a set of walls around them, pull them up, do the work, drop them back down, disassemble and remove the temporary walls, and cover them with dirt all over again.
Does this really make sense to you?
Even a conventional cast concrete tunnel would cut the stresses from temperature changes and moisture *way* down. A supplementary layer of low-density terra cotta or concrete would make it even less stressful.
Our current approach is an outgrowth of several phenomena:
Firstly, we, as a society, would far rather keep spending smaller amounts of money over and over then invest up front, even if total cost would be less.
Secondly, the benefits of such a system must be matched against costs and with each utility bearing their own costs, it is far harder to justify. But if the job is done once and everybody benefits, then the cost/benefit ratio is far more favorable.
Water Usage Will Decrease
With the creation of a proper network of water management means, the additional costs of any number of desirable systems goes way down.
With stormwater (and perhaps other "greywater") in accessable and generously built channels, the viability of systems like localized cisterns (as peoples from the Romans to the modern Chinese have done) increases greatly.
Why lose our greywater? Especially in places like Arizona and Colorado, where sprinkler runoff could, with minimal processing, be reused right there instead of traveling miles to evaporate on the way or get mixed with more toxic wastestreams?
One possible option would be the incorporation (in appropriate locales) of small (say forty-foot deep by eight foot wide) tanks within and below the gallery, into which greywater would run.
By building in any number of passive systems (such as layers of horizontal tilted baffles and offset holes to allow water to fall further down) much of the muck would be drawn off mechanically. The remaining water would then be fed through a pipe at the bottom to a fifty foot vertical tube containing a solar-powered (or equivalent) heating element. This heater would evaporate the water, which would then be collected at the top, distilled and reusable.
(Yes, I have a *much* longer version of this proposal)
In short, as many of us have learned in our professional lives, put in good infrastructure with room to grow and a standardized layout, and many things become easy that were previously unthinkably difficult.
Disaster Prevention and Management
From now on, line inspections can be done properly, internal *and* external. Line breaks will be more trackable, and repairs will start as soon as the repair teams arrive and start dropping down the manhole cover.
Btw, didja' catch my placement of water lines? Water runs below power. Sewer runs below the floor. Ideally, considerably below the floor.
Do the job right and most shutdowns from water main breaks become a quaint bit of lore spoken of by old-timers.
Further Regulatory Details
Many of you will have noted that the proposal I explain above covers only one mile of road per year, far from enough to result in a full, swift conversion.
Well, first of all, I have no problem with this program taking fifty years to complete. Some places are too poor, too complex, or too politically messed up to make swift conversion viable, let alone smart. Also, if any program will benefit from eight or ten years of working out the kinks, this is it.
So I say, start with the low-hanging fruit, and meanwhile learn how to do it right.
Our culture tends to focus on the false dichotomy of grand or not at all. We debate and hassle and nitpick for years about the just right approach, and all the while the only people gaining are the consultants.
Let's learn by doing.
We can scale up (doing more roads per year) once we've gotten past our growing pains and know how to best do this sort of thing.
Also, keep in mind the examples of federally subsidized projects I gave at the very beginning. The Big Dig. The Second Avenue Subway. The rebuilding of our container ports.
From now on, if a project involves tearing out streets, let alone cut and cover transit construction, that project must incorporate partial or total implementation of utility galleries. The dirt doesn't go back 'til *everything* is in place.
Look at the cross-sections of the Chunnel. That ain't one tunnel; it's a right of way with every need handled in an appropriate way, from rail to communications.
Lastly, I am absolutely convinced that once this program is in place, our citizens, who have far more sense of the costs of daily life then the yahoos behind the podiums, will start to demand more of this, not less.
When we build it, they will come.
Rustin
Bricks and Mortar
Look at our cities. Look into the holes torn out for every road being rebuilt.
What will you see? A slovenly tangle of pipes and wires and fragments of long-gone structures.
Like a large family of eccentric and badly raised children, we have gotten used to each company or agency or utility just barely keeping out of the way of the others, each going their one way in their own way.
Then we cover it all with mounds of rubble and toxic dirt, making and destroying accessways every time we need to get at something.
In Bangalore and Seoul and Budapest they're building coherently designed and executed systems, getting saner lives and taking our jobs with the results.
The Romans knew how to build a sane and permanent city two thousand years ago. How to make streets and ducting that could last for a thousand years with no maintenance.
But we're Americans, right? It's ALL just temporary. Why do it right now if we can just do it over later?
Who benefits from how we do things now?
Verizon, PG&E, and every other company stalling nimbler, better competitors with the excuse that access is just too hard.
Penny-ante politicians spending less now and leaving the cleanup and rebuilding for the people coming after them.
And all those parts of the world that gain from a shambling, dim-witted America, that doesn't work right now and breaks down in unpredictable ways when stressed.
I lived through damage control after one September 11th. Now it's past time to talk about how to make us less vulnerable to the next one.
Standard Disclaimer (Please read this first.) As always, please read the whole post before judging it, understand that I must simplify to reduce proposals to a size that can fit in a JE, and that my sole metric for viability is effectiveness. I do not give the concept of "sin" any weight at all.
Also, as you read the following, I suggest that you keep the following phrase firmly in mind: economies of scale. Many of the following procedures are thought of as very expensive, but with a full time, specially equipped team doing a given task tens of thousands of times, units costs will go *way* down.
Keep in mind that some staffing issues would tie into the labor pool and other resources created by The Big Dole and associated programs.
And yes, I have spoken to actual logistics, civil engineering, and policy experts to confirm all this. After all, I *did*, among other things, use to be the last-line-of-defense troubleshooter for certain issues for all of McGraw-Hill's Construction Information Group.
Further, yes, I am aware that these proposals would cause massive social upheaval. First of all, there are ways to mitigate those upheavals, and, secondly, those upheavals will do less damage then we now face from our current state of affairs.
It's not that I think these things are easy. It's that I know that they are essential.
End of Disclaimer
Have you ever looked at a cutaway view of what's under city streets? A tangled hodgepodge of sewer lines, electrical systems, abandoned pneumatic lines, and a dangerously underdocumented collection of private gas lines, accessways and other ducts and channels and rights of way.
The complexity of the physical systems required to keep a densely populated area going is well known. A dozen children's books have been been built around the subject. Probably twenty PBS and Discovery Channel documentaries.
Periodically, a water main will break or a major power line will go down in an urban area and accounts will be blithely given of the mix of two-hundred-year old water pipes, high-voltage electrical lines, and so on.
Somehow, we are expected to accept this as we do hurricane season or the Yankees and Raiders being assholes.
And, even more pathetically, we allow billions of dollars in federal money to be pumped into projects like the LA subway and Boston's Big Dig, tearing out huge hunks of city and putting them all back, without putting things back any better then they found them.
That's like starting with a random pile of books, sorting them all to find a few particular ones, and then knocking your neat piles back into chaos before leaving.
Think about that staple of horror movies and USA Network dramas (woo-eee-ooo!) underground steam tunnels. In the trade, these are called "utility galleries". Long corridors with power and communications and so on, all neatly lined up along the walls.
Need to reach the telephone lines? They're all in a row, with regularly-spaced junction boxes and labels. Power? Right beside them. And so on.
All of us who've run server rooms know how to do this. The only differences are scale and the number of people who need to be mollified along the way.
So, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna start building those under our roads and putting all of the mess into them.
And this is how we're going to do it.
All areas with a population density above ten thousand people per square mile (think suburbs and three story buildings) will be subject to The Omnibus Infrastructure Renewal Act.
This act will empower the federal government to partner with state and municipal authorities. However, in the interests of interstate commerce, defense, and environmental protection, if a municipal authority is consistently uncooperative, they *will* be overridden.
All applicable areas will be provided with a federally funded and staffed team empowered and equipped to carry out the following:
One linear mile per year of road will be selected. In the first few years this will consist of numerous short stretches of street along small areas of high density, such as a cluster of high rises in an area of less density or the roads adjoining a set of office parks.
Tear It All Out, Examine What's There
After a period of investigation and service provider liason, each selected stretch of road will be utterly torn out, down to between fifteen and thirty feet, deep enough to expose all utility lines of all sorts, including private lines belonging to cable companies and the like. If something man-made is down there, we will expose it.
The channel will be cut to the width of the road, right up to the edges of the sidewalk, if there is one, or until the building foundation is exposed, should that foundation butt up against the edge of the owner's property.
A team will make their way along as the digging progresses, documenting the current situation, including not only placement, condition, and nature of current systems, but also the state of facing foundations and other systems abutting the roadway.
All entities owning property along the road will be offered, for a nominal fee, a basic evaluation of the state of their foundations and the opportunity to have their needs incorporated into the final system.
Now comes the scary stuff.
ALL existing lines will be torn out or otherwise made capable of being put in their final placement.
Where possible, temporary utility replacements will be put in place, such as mobile electrical generators, limited waste water processing and provision of clean water, communications, and so on. The opportunity will also be taken, where viable, to cut connections at existing junctions or at good locations for the creation of new ones.
The Tunnel Is Laid
A twelve foot wide by ten foot high corridor will be built along the roadbed, as far down as is practical, creating a tunnel the length of the roadway. This tunnel will be built of heavy cast concrete, cast iron, layered brick, or other wall types proven to be able to survive for at least two hundred years without any structural maintenance.
(Please note that should superior results be possible with a tubular cross-section, by using arches, or otherwise changing the profile while maintaining the same general interior cross-section, that is fine.)
Overall, think Roman results built with modern techniques.
Sewer lines will be run beside or below this tunnel. All other lines will be relocated to within it, placed in orderly and standardized channels along the walls of the new utility gallery. All communications lines will run in one group, all electrical lines in another, gas in another, and so on. Clean water and stormwater will also, when possible, run in piping within the confines of this gallery.
Soil and other similar matter displaced during digging will be tested for levels of contaminants, and, if suitable, will be used as raw material to create gardens and other "green" areas, with a minimum depth of soil in resulting areas of forty-eight inches and compost or other "waste matter" as required used as soil amendments.
"Waste" concrete, brick, stone and other such materials will either be broken up for use on-site as aggregate or, if suitable, be transferred to the WPA-type projects from the previous JE for use in creating stone walls.
New Systems Put In
Floors will be of standardized dimensions, maximum degrees of curvature and slope, and condition to allow the eventual use of automated systems to deliver materials to repair workers, robotic (and telepresence) examination of lines, gallery travel in Cushman-type vehicles, and, if merited, a microgauge (approx. three feet) rail line to carry workers and materials.
Once the gallery is in place, it will then be covered up with an engineered new road, including drainage, sidewalks (where appropriate), accessways, and so on. Designs will be chosen to minimize future cost of maintenance.
A central authority will make licences available to any organization needing access to the galleries. Each organization will be given a certain number of licences proportional to their number of miles of lines, capacity, line type, etc.
You want to start a telcom company? Maybe one selling gas or steam from a cogeneration system? Think you can provide broadband cheaper and better? Get a licence for your repair folks, install your lines in the appropriate rows of ducting, and you're now (comparatively) on peer terms with the big boys.
Competing Gallery Systems
It is worth noting an implication of the dimensions of the gallery. The system I describe should end up with an external width of fifteen to eighteen feet. Far narrower then many roads.
If a private company should wish to build their own gallery system, I say (heh) more power to them. As long as they offer equivalent or better access to their systems and a reasonable (there are legal definitions of this) level of safety, they're welcome to step in.
The point of this whole mandate is to ensure a baseline, not force a federal monopoly.
Now let's look at what this would accomplish.
Open source Utilities
With the deregulation of the past decades, many claims have been made that power companies, telcos, and the like would become far more efficient, charge lower prices, and generally become far better as they would have to compete with newcomers.
Well, the reality has been far different, with existing companies using the complexity of their existing systems as a way to prevent competition and manipulate the market.
You want to feed power into the grid? Be prepared to face a series of illegal but common obstructions as the power companies claim that they would need to install new transformers, can't reach the lines near your house, etc.
Want phone service from a competitor to your regional telco? Watch as they only schedule access to their trunk lines as rarely as possible, adding costs, conditions, and delays for anybody else offering dialtone or using non-spec gear.
The cryptic, inefficient, and mutable nature of our utility lines is one of the biggest and most effective tools of the MegaCorps in their struggle to force us to do things their way or not at all. AOL/Time Warner, PacBell, Con Edison, MCI, and all their buddies have shown that access is control.
With lines accessable to anybody with a reason to use them, this delaying game gets cut down to size and the way opens for smaller players to compete on a more even playing field.
Do It Right; Then You Don't have to Keep Doing It Over
Think about how we do things now. We take systems we've spent TRILLIONS of dollars to develop, put them in cables to protect them from rain, animals, and a host of other hazards, and then drop them into dirt.
Then, when things need to be changed or fixed, we dig up all that dirt, set up a set of walls around them, pull them up, do the work, drop them back down, disassemble and remove the temporary walls, and cover them with dirt all over again.
Does this really make sense to you?
Even a conventional cast concrete tunnel would cut the stresses from temperature changes and moisture *way* down. A supplementary layer of low-density terra cotta or concrete would make it even less stressful.
Our current approach is an outgrowth of several phenomena:
Firstly, we, as a society, would far rather keep spending smaller amounts of money over and over then invest up front, even if total cost would be less.
Secondly, the benefits of such a system must be matched against costs and with each utility bearing their own costs, it is far harder to justify. But if the job is done once and everybody benefits, then the cost/benefit ratio is far more favorable.
Water Usage Will Decrease
With the creation of a proper network of water management means, the additional costs of any number of desirable systems goes way down.
With stormwater (and perhaps other "greywater") in accessable and generously built channels, the viability of systems like localized cisterns (as peoples from the Romans to the modern Chinese have done) increases greatly.
Why lose our greywater? Especially in places like Arizona and Colorado, where sprinkler runoff could, with minimal processing, be reused right there instead of traveling miles to evaporate on the way or get mixed with more toxic wastestreams?
One possible option would be the incorporation (in appropriate locales) of small (say forty-foot deep by eight foot wide) tanks within and below the gallery, into which greywater would run.
By building in any number of passive systems (such as layers of horizontal tilted baffles and offset holes to allow water to fall further down) much of the muck would be drawn off mechanically. The remaining water would then be fed through a pipe at the bottom to a fifty foot vertical tube containing a solar-powered (or equivalent) heating element. This heater would evaporate the water, which would then be collected at the top, distilled and reusable.
(Yes, I have a *much* longer version of this proposal)
In short, as many of us have learned in our professional lives, put in good infrastructure with room to grow and a standardized layout, and many things become easy that were previously unthinkably difficult.
Disaster Prevention and Management
From now on, line inspections can be done properly, internal *and* external. Line breaks will be more trackable, and repairs will start as soon as the repair teams arrive and start dropping down the manhole cover.
Btw, didja' catch my placement of water lines? Water runs below power. Sewer runs below the floor. Ideally, considerably below the floor.
Do the job right and most shutdowns from water main breaks become a quaint bit of lore spoken of by old-timers.
Further Regulatory Details
Many of you will have noted that the proposal I explain above covers only one mile of road per year, far from enough to result in a full, swift conversion.
Well, first of all, I have no problem with this program taking fifty years to complete. Some places are too poor, too complex, or too politically messed up to make swift conversion viable, let alone smart. Also, if any program will benefit from eight or ten years of working out the kinks, this is it.
So I say, start with the low-hanging fruit, and meanwhile learn how to do it right.
Our culture tends to focus on the false dichotomy of grand or not at all. We debate and hassle and nitpick for years about the just right approach, and all the while the only people gaining are the consultants.
Let's learn by doing.
We can scale up (doing more roads per year) once we've gotten past our growing pains and know how to best do this sort of thing.
Also, keep in mind the examples of federally subsidized projects I gave at the very beginning. The Big Dig. The Second Avenue Subway. The rebuilding of our container ports.
From now on, if a project involves tearing out streets, let alone cut and cover transit construction, that project must incorporate partial or total implementation of utility galleries. The dirt doesn't go back 'til *everything* is in place.
Look at the cross-sections of the Chunnel. That ain't one tunnel; it's a right of way with every need handled in an appropriate way, from rail to communications.
Lastly, I am absolutely convinced that once this program is in place, our citizens, who have far more sense of the costs of daily life then the yahoos behind the podiums, will start to demand more of this, not less.
When we build it, they will come.
Rustin
Right (Score:2)
But still, why that random one-mile-at-a-time? Wouldn't you just get semi-coordinated islands in a sea of chaos? What about lines that cross that mile of road? How about starting at a given point of concentration for a major utility (power, water, sewage and/or telephone) and work from there? You can still do it one mile at a time, but it seems to me it'd be easier while acheiving the same results.
What gets installed first (Score:2)
Wouldn't you just get semi-coordinated islands in a sea of chaos?
Yes, which was my grudging concession to the fact that for the first few years the process would be ungodly expensive and make some massive mistakes. After all, this is literally playing with, well, fire, high voltage power, water, and worse then all of the above, several dozen feuding bureaucracies.
So it seemed to me that the best compromise would be
Hail, Sulla Multigeekus! (Score:2)
Re:Hail, Sulla Multigeekus! (Score:2)
Sounds like a plan.
Now I just need to shift my tastes to quieter forms of debauchery.
Should I ask your father for advice?
Rustin
Re:Hail, Sulla Multigeekus! (Score:2)
Sadly, his advancing years (he's 65 this year) mean that he's not really up to anything more exerting than sitting on the couch and calling for feasts to be prepared in his honour...
Disclaimer Nitpick. (Score:1)
There are two ways to look at sin: either it's something that an infinitly wise supreme being things is a bad thing for us to do, or it's something that a body of relativly apolitical men (note: RELATIVE) concerned at least topically with the good of their society think is a bad thing to do.
In nearly every anecdotal case I am awhere of where traditional "sin" has been allowed to flourish, painful consequences have resulted that in many cases would be d
Do I care about "sin" (Score:2)
If somebody wants to make a case that something should be prevented because "painful consequences have resulted that in many cases would be dire and fatal..." then the point should be made by documenting the reasons that the one follows from the other.
After all, in much of the world, women's faces being visible (let alone women and men freely associating) is considered a horrible sin, with gru
Re:Do I care about "sin" (Score:1)
I'm just concerned that people will get the exact opposite impression of you. The WebTV story is very convincing in a positive way.
Re:Do I care about "sin" (Score:2)
Good point. I should do a more coherent write up of that and the other disclaimer stuff as a JE and just link to that in all my future ones.
Criminy. Another item for the agenda.
*sigh*
Rustin
Well, cool. (Score:1)
I would like to offer another explanation for our rotgut mess of utilities: urbanization.
Two hundred years ago, Manhattan had farms on the north three-quarters of the island. The population grew, the city grew, and the mayoral government had to scramble to get utilities and services to everyone. Similar circumstances no doubt happened in other major cities.
In smaller cities,
Urbanization (Score:2)
But keep in mind the density test I set. The centers of Albany, Rome, and a thousand other cities and towns would also be subject to reconstruction as would parts of Silicon Valley, the central spine of Long Island, th
Re:Urbanization (Score:1)
As always (Score:2)
How would you implement such a proposal, however? I've been reading your JEs for quite some time now, and they seem to be continously filled with good ideas and the means to execute them, but you seem to have thus far failed to address "how to get the ball rolling."
Inertia is a difficult thing to overcome, perhaps you could start with utility corridors being built whenever road work or other utility work i
How, where first, what from here (Score:2)
Thank you.
and this time formatted quite nicely. (I assume for Bethaney's sake?)
Partially it's in response to Sentry21 and EugeneTSWong and Bethanie and a few of the folks I talked to over the phone all discomfitted about readability, but the trump card was that Some Woman [slashdot.org] nailed me (inadvertently?) by referring to my own JE [slashdot.org] on proper
How would you implement such a proposal, however? I've been
Re:How, where first, what from here (Score:2)
Re:How, where first, what from here (Score:2)
Start with a city, any city, pick one (preferably smaller than most that come to mind in the Northeast Corridor). Do the tearup replacement plan, use it as a testbed. Once you've proven the advantages, switch to doing it the best way possible. I'm su
Re:How, where first, what from here (Score:2)
Alternatively, you could implement all of your ideas in a new location...
Also good ideas and both closer to what I had in mind in my youth then what I am suggesting in the JE.
To give some perspective on this, in high school a bunch of us were BSing, but BSing
Re:How, where first, what from here (Score:1)
I'm really favourable to this kind of thing. I'm surprised that I never thought of it.
I guess 1 reason that I'm quite favourable is that @ the college that I went to, there were steam tunnels with several pipes going throughout the town.
Maybe 1 way to get the ball rolling faster is to have a bunch of people who really believe in this, to move to a small town @ their own expense. After that, they would join the project to build that 1st mile. Preferably, they would move to a
POTUS Campaign 2004 Slowguns (Score:2)
Doin' it Wright in 2004
Rustin, just in time to do it Wright
'04 all the Wright reasons
Let the groaning commence. :-)
Re:POTUS Campaign 2004 Slowguns (Score:2)
*bows*
*groans*
Well, if you'e gonna do it, then you might as well do it (heh) right. My middle name is Hart. Have fun with that one.
Oh, you're now proclaimed by me as campaign and marketing advisor.
The world deserves such a sense of humor. Let 'em all hide now.
Rustin
Re:POTUS Campaign 2004 Slowguns (Score:2)
Argh, that's been done before. The best (worst?) of that bunch was probably this one, attributed to Donna Rice [tvrundown.com]:
"In my heart I want Bush, but in my bush I want Hart"
Relevant /. story (Score:2)
Worth skimming with high minimum length thresholds as a number of civil engineers and former road crew folks weighed in with some useful data and insights.
For them as are curious, another study I was on the edge of at ENR checked out construction crew practice and found that most crews had no sch
Re:Relevant /. story (Score:2)
BTW as an aside around here the cities use a scraper type machine to remove old asphalt when they do street resurfacing. Much faster and quieter than jackhammers, the machine is still loud, but nothing compared to a jackhammer.
I will agree though that much common practice within the US construction industry is just dumb. Even competitive bidding hasn't caused much in the way of productivity increases or cost-reduction.
Re:Relevant /. story (Score:1)
Or something. When the process is proscribed, it's difficult to be creative.
Re:Relevant /. story (Score:2)
The biggest step forward I've seen on major government capital projects are design-build or design-build-operate-maintain. These seem to be the hottest thing out there especially in transit projects. Instead of having in-house people or an engineering firm come up with a design then using the resulting design to solicit bids for individual parts of a project. Design-build issues a general RFP for the whole project to solicit bids
Re:Relevant /. story (Score:1)
Design-Build approach (Score:2)
Rustin
Re:Design-Build approach (Score:2)
This is in contrast to the much delayed, overbudget, and much smaller than originally proposed Sound Transit light rail line [soundtransit.org]. They seem to be following a traditional contracting approach.
Don't get me started on the very nasty fights between the light rail and monorail people. Or the fact that both are trying to prevent any large-scale Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects from getting off the ground ar
Re:bid procedures (Score:2)
This is why I'm so obssessed with rebuilding our government across the board, from zoning to replacing drug testing to bid protocols, to specify results, not means of getting them.
As it is we get micromanaging by a bunch of politicians who simultaneously don't know what is needed or how to best get it AND write things up to favor their contributors.
It's no way to run a country, my friends.
Rustin
Re:bid procedures (Score:1)
When I wired the offices I work for, we ran twice as much cable as we predicted needing at the time. Turns out to have been a good thing. We've since used about 50% of it:) But, it only cost a couple hundred extra bucks for the ext
Interesting (Score:2)
Perhaps it is because they are concerned with the long-term costs of maintenance and changes and usually have to bear the costs of these themselves that they find the investment worthwhile.
Typically on a city street each utility owner bears the cost of relocation and maintnance themselves so there is no real incentive to provide space for oth
At least 10% (Score:1)
Room for expansion (Score:2)
As all of us who've run and/or wired server rooms know, the difference between well placed and used raceways and cabling and a cob job is HUGE, but even assuming a considerable amount of municipal fuggheadedness, twelve feet should give ample expansion room, especially with most water being run underneath.
Of course