Infrastructure Neglect Imperils Commuters

This past weekend, a partial roof collapse of the 181st Street station in Manhattan collapsed, causing a shutdown of the busy 1 line through uptown Manhattan. Shuttle service was being provided, but it highlights the problems with maintaining mass transit.

Another partial collapse of the roof occurred in 2007, and yet no work was undertaken to make repairs. In fact, this current roof collapse occurred adjacent to the original roof collapse from 2007.

This photo from the New York Times shows the location of both, and while we're lucky that no one was injured, it shows the fragility of a mass transit system that in many places is 100 years old.

“There had been a failure of the brick at that location,” said Judith M. Kunoff, the chief architect for New York City Transit. “So you knew that at that specific location, it had been compromised.”

Scaffolding was put up, but it does not appear that any repairs were made. Why had part of the ceiling collapsed in 2007?

Ms. Kunoff said it had happened before she was hired, and Charles Seaton, a spokesman for the transit system, said on Tuesday that he couldn’t get an explanation from other officials who were busy with fresher calamities.

“It was identified as a localized failure in 2007,” Mr. Seaton said. “Certainly, that prompted our interest in further inspecting and repairing that ceiling.”

A master repair plan was drawn up, but the funds for it and other capital projects were not approved by the State Legislature until Friday, Mr. Seaton said. Two days later, the ceiling fell in again at 181st Street — possibly because underground water had seeped behind the brick, he said.

It is a multi-billion dollar system and it requires significant capital to maintain the system in good repair. That means that after a period of time, critical elements must be replaced because they simply wear out or become unable to handle the stresses of daily operation.

In this case, we've got the MTA failing to prioritize repairs so that further problems could be mitigated before they caused a closure.

Now, remember that there are hundreds of miles of tracks and more than 200 stations that must require constant attention to prevent problems. Routine maintenance can minimize problems from getting out of hand, but major renovations are needed as well.

Instead of making sure that the MTA dedicated existing funds to maintaining the operation, Mayor Bloomberg has pushed ahead with both the 7 line expansion and the often-delayed 2d Avenue Line. The money might be there to get them built, but what about maintenance for those new subway lines? That goes unanswered, and it's a failure of political will for generations of politicians in the City. It's far more exciting to unveil a new rail line than to undertake the mundane rehabilitation of a subway system.

Even now, the capital budget for the MTA skimps on maintenance and periodic upgrades and rehabilitation of decrepit infrastructure, and that's with an infusion of federal funds, much of which is tasked to the expansion of the subway system - not its maintenance, which raises the question of where the money will come from to maintain the newly expanded system.