Janno Lieber Lies to New York About Costs and Regulations
After being criticized about the excessive size of subway stations designed on his watch, MTA head Janno Lieber fired back defending the agency’s costs. In a conversation with the Manhattan Institute, he said about us, “They’re not wrong that the stations are where the MTA stations add cost. But they are wrong about how they compare us – the cost per mile is misleading” (see discussion on social media here). Then he blamed labor and the fire code. Blaming labor is a small but real part of the story; this is common among the white-collar managers Eric and I have talked to, and deserves a separate explanation for why this concern is overblown. But the issue of the fire code is fraud, all the way.
I’ve previously seen some journalists and advocates who write about American construction costs talk about fire safety, which is mentioned occasionally as a reason designs cannot be changed. It’s not at all what’s going on, for two separate reasons, each of which, alone, should be grounds to dismiss Lieber and ensure he never works for the state again.
The first reason is that the fire safety regulation in the United States for train stations, NFPA 130, has been exported to a number of other countries, none of which has American costs or the specific American tradition of overbuilding stations. China uses NFPA 130. So does Turkey. Spain uses a modification. We can look at their designs and see that they do not build oversize stations. I’ve seen an environmental impact analysis in Shanghai, with the help of a Chinese student studying this issue who explained the main planning concerns there. I could write an entire blog post about China (not a 10,000-word case report, of course), but suffice is to say, if the train is projected to be 160 m long, the station dig will be that plus a few meters – and Chinese stations have mezzanines as I understand it. Spanish and Turkish stations have little overage as well; building a dig twice as long as the station’s platforms to house back-of-the-house spaces is unique to most (not all) of the Anglosphere, as design consultants copy bad ideas from one another.
Even the claim that NFPA 130 requires full-length mezzanines is suspect. It requires stations to be built so that passengers can evacuate in four minutes in emergency conditions, rising to six minutes counting stragglers (technically, the throughput needs to be enough to evacuate in four minutes, but with latency it can go up to six). The four minute requirement can be satisfied on the lettered lines of the subway in New York with no mezzanines and just an access point at each end of the platform, but it’s close and there’s a case for another access point in the middle; no full-length mezzanine is required either way. If the stations are any shorter, as on the numbered lines or in other North American cities, two escalators and a wide staircase at the end of each platform are more than enough, and yet the extensive overage is common in those smaller systems too (for example, in Vancouver, the Broadway extension is planned with 128 m long digs for 75 m trains, per p. 9 here).
“Fire safety” is used as an excuse by people with neither engineering background nor respect for anything quantitative or technical. Lieber is such a person: his background is in law and he seems incurious about technical issues (and this is also true of his successor at MTA Capital Construction, public policy grad Jamie Torres-Springer).
Perhaps due to this lazy incuriosity, Lieber didn’t notice that the MTA has extensive influence on the text of NFPA 130, bringing us to the second reason his claim is fraudulent. NFPA 130 is not to blame – again, it’s the same code as in a number of low- and medium-cost countries – but Nilo Cobau explains that the NFPA process is such that big agencies have considerable input, since there aren’t many places in the US that build subways. Nolan Hicks pointed out in the same thread, all linked in the lede paragraph, that the MTA has a voting member and two alternates on the board that determines NFPA 130 and hasn’t requested changes – and that Montreal, subject to the same codes, built a station with little overage (he says 160 m digs for 150 m platforms).
The handwaving of a fire code that isn’t even different from that of cheaper places is there for one purpose only: to deflect blame. It was a struggle to get Lieber and other New York leaders to even admit they have high costs, so now they try to make it the fault of anyone but themselves: fire safety regulations, organized labor, what have you.
Labor is a real issue, unlike fire safety, but it’s overblown by managers who look down on line workers and have generally never been line workers. Lieber graduated law school, was hired by USDOT at either junior-appointed or mid-level civil servant role, I can’t tell which, and then did managerial jobs; his successor as head of MTA Construction and Development, Jamie Torres-Springer, graduated public policy. These aren’t people who worked themselves up from doing engineering, architecture, planning, or ethnographic work; add the general hostility American white-collar workers have toward blue-collar workers, and soon people in that milieu come to believe that just because their top 5%er wages are much higher than they could earn anywhere else in the world, the sandhogs also earn much more than they could anywhere else in the world, when in truth New York sandhog and Stockholm miner wages and benefits are very close.
Occasionally the point that it’s not wages but labor productivity seeps in. There, at last, we see a real problem with labor. Eric and I found that about a third of the sandhogs on Second Avenue Subway didn’t really need to be there. Further cuts could be achieved through the use of more labor-efficient techniques, which the MTA is uninterested in implementing. The rest of the American labor premium comes from excessive staffing of white-collar supervisors, including representatives from each utility, which insists that the MTA pay for the privilege of having such representatives tell them what they can and cannot do in lieu of mapping the utilities and sending over the blueprints. All included, labor was around 50% of the cost of Second Avenue Subway, where the norm in Italy, Turkey, and Sweden is around 25% (note how higher-wage Sweden is the same as lower-wage Italy and much lower-wage Turkey); excessive labor costs contributed a factor of 1.5 premium to the project, but the other factor of 6 came from excessive station size, deep mining of stations (which thankfully will not happen at 106th and 116th Street; it will at 125th but that’s unavoidable), lack of system standardization, and a litany of project delivery problems that are generally getting worse with every iteration. Lieber personally takes credit for some of the privatization of planning to design-build consultancies, though to be fair to him, the project delivery problems predate him, he just made things slightly worse.
A New York that wants to build will not have incompetent political appointees in charge. It will instead hire professionals with a track record of success; as no such people exist within the American infrastructure construction milieu, it should use its own size and prestige to find someone from a low-cost city to hire, who will speak English with an accent and know more engineering than American legal hermeneutics. And it will not reward people who defraud the public about the state of regulations just because they’re too lazy to know better.
Pedestrian Observations 
Is it true that the station boxes have been reduced in size since the 2004 EIS, per the MTA spokesperson’s claim? I know the MTA is such a bunkered agency that there probably aren’t any public-facing documents to prove it, but regardless….
A bit of a random question but im curious, when andy byford was the head of the MTA, did he ever try to reduce construction costs?
And man, it is so frustrating to see incompetent people like Lieber in charge of institutions responsible for tens of billions of dollars in massive construction projects that they cannot spend with any care. Its the exact same thing with metrolinx with verster here in ontario. A mostly above ground lrt is still under construction for 12 years and no one knows when it will be ready.
The lack of curiosity about how other countries build these things so quickly and cost effectively from these “professionals” and politicians not hiring the right people is so infuriating to watch. Especially from someone that strongly believes in public transit.
Byford was head of NYCT, not MTA. NYCT operates the trains and buses, but they don’t build anything – MTA Capital Construction does that.
Andy Byford was ‘only’ ever the head of NYC Transit, not all of the MTA. Although, he did empower the workers of Transit to solve issues inhouse. The Save Safe Seconds campaign was a collaborative effort of Transit employees.
Basically he didn’t get a chance to sink his claws into Capital Construction directly.
He was never head of the MTA, as noted by others. When he was head of TTC, he slightly reduced the construction cost of the extension of Line 1 to Vaughan, but this was swamped by much larger cost increases caused by politicization of construction.
“Eric and I found that about a third of the sandhogs on Second Avenue Subway didn’t really need to be there.”
I thought the Rosenthal’s NYT expose found that TBMs on Second Avenue Subway were staffed at three times the international level.
“New York sandhog and Stockholm miner wages and benefits are very close.”
The LA Times had an article from 2006 saying that NY sandhogs averaged $100k salary and were the highest paid construction workers in the country. Has it not gone up much since then? Is it really that high in Sweden?
Yeah, it’s about that high in Sweden. The sandhogs cost around $200,000 a year including benefits, which is slightly more than the fully-laden cost of a miner in Stockholm.
And yeah, the TBMs are 3x staffed, but a lot of that is not sandhogs but the supervisors from each department and agency. The white-collar overhead rate on American public-sector construction is really high.
What supervisors? On ESA ithere was one dedicated inspector on each TBM shift to verify ground conditions, TBM performance, ground support installation, staffing levels etc. Your comment on staffing levels being impacted by white-collar supervision and being 3 x the norm is simply not true. But feel free to tell me who all these white-collar supervisors were.
One from each of multiple utilities. That happened on SAS.
GLX was of course not a tunnel, but we got white-collar overhead rates for it, and they were much higher than the norm in the private sector in New England. Just way more people watching each line worker work.
On the TBM, I doubt it. Certainly did not happen on ESA or 7 Line and why would the utilities have people watching the TBM work. I think you may have misunderstood what you have been told. We mined under every utility that exists in NY and never had a single rep from any of them in the tunnel, nor on any other tunnel project I ever worked on.
And your comment about people watching people, 9 years on ESA and I don’t recognize that statement either. There was a CM team with inspectors, and there was never a dedicated inspector for each work place, there was code compliance as necessary together with independent lab testing on materials and safety from MTA, that was it for the underground work. I have no idea where you are getting your info but it is not all correct.
Rosenthal was contrasting with the very comparable, engineering-wise, Paris M14 and wrote:
And where did this army of consultants come from? Rosenthal:
As to Janno Lieber, attacking him may be a distraction. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it but it hardly matters who is in this position. It is who is above him, or in the sidelines, that approves such appointments. When an outsider is brought in, like Andy Byford (in a position that answers to the MTA chief), who tries to bring real change then the system simply expels him. Only someone like Byford can even attempt change because he doesn’t have a career invested in NYC and has other good career options like the TfL he jumped to. But people like Lieber don’t have any real options because their life is NYC and if they didn’t play ball their career would be dead and they would simply be replaced by someone who is compliant. The only way to change this is to disrupt the connection between political patronage (ie. the power of the giant construction companies and consultancies) and appointments that serve those interests and not the city or its citizens. At one level it would require banning MTA employees working for any company getting contracts from the city, for at least 3 years after leaving the MTA. At the political level, as we saw with the rare case of an outsider (Cynthia Nixon) challenging the Democrat machine, it is close to hopeless. Incidentally I think this kind of thing is a consequence of two-party winner-takes-all politics and is much more less common with multi-party politics.
Interesting comment about Paris M14. SYSTRA was heavily involved in developing that line, now SYSTRA is a design consultant that was spun out of SNCF and RATP who remain shareholders in it, even though it operates as a consultant around the world and in fact is a company we have joint ventured with on some projects. IN fact SYstra was involved in East Side Access in NY. How the relationship between RATP and SYSTRA actually works, no idea but to say that there were no design costs outside of RATP is probably not correct. Also, French contractors like Bouygues and Vinci have significant in-house design centers that they typically use to design both temporary and permanent works so the design costs could well have been absorbed in the construction costs????
@Tunnelvision
Not sure what you are trying to say.
No one implied that. The concept is that between them RATP and Bouygues have enough experience and expertise for the job.
That is to say that Bouygues has in-house design capacity and that was included in the contract awarded by RATP. Until the proliferation of “independent” consultants, isn’t that the way things were done? SYSTRA is co-owned by RATP and SNCF (each with a 43.4% share) and appears a bit like Keolia does for SNCF, ie. can act as a profit centre, particularly in overseas projects, in a way that the state entities cannot. If SYSTRA was involved in M14 then clearly it didn’t negatively impact the cost. Does RATP using SYSTRA count as using outside consultants?
Knowing the precise details of who did the design work (RATP, Bouygues, other contractors like SYSTRA?) would be interesting but still doesn’t explain the basic observation (of Rosenthal):
NYC-Second Avenue Subway phase 1: $1.68bn/km
Paris-M14 northern extension: $281m/km
New York construction was 6x more expensive per km.
It is indeed incorrect to say there are no design costs outside RATP. It’s routine to rely on the assistance of engineering consultants here. However, they charge around 7% of the hard costs, and not 20% as in the US. This is for the following reasons:
1. Here (and I think also in the UK), the consultants are managed by in-house engineers, not by other consultants.
2. Here, the client knows enough about the project to be able to tell the consultants what to study, rather than giving vague “study everything” instructions of the kind people who contract with the US government have to deal with.
3. I suspect the existence of the public option so to speak disciplines the consultants, but I’m less certain of this than of the first two.
Gotcha, I thought you were comparing the soft costs of design, rather than the outcome cost. Im not defending the 2nd Ave Cost, I’ve reviewed the Transit Project report on the costs with one of the Arups guys who was the EoR for portions of it and now works for the same company as me and there are some truths in there. Unfortunately, there’s no single silver bullet to resolve NY costs. Procurement method and contracts adds probably 10% to every bid due to MTA’s history of how long it takes to process a claim/change order. The blanket change to Design Build is not going to solve that. But this idea that its all the fault of an over engineered gold plated design (concepts stated usually by non engineers) is also wide of the mark.
We literally drew this cube (in this link) – yeah, the engineering is not everything, but it is part of it. (Nor do we use the expression “gold-plated” in the report; we do talk about lack of system standardization, about excessive station footprint, and about deep-mining the 72nd and 86th Street stations where cut-and-cover would have been cheaper.)
Local 147 usually requires 22 people to staff a TBM, it’s not necessarily stated in the Collective Bargaining Agreement but that’s generally what is required. Now they are not all on the TBM, some may be bottom landers and top landers at the shaft but its around that number. Some projects in Scandinavia have as few as 5 or 6 per shift, but that’s very much at the low end of staffing. For segmentally lined tunnels the recent advances that Herrenknecht and others have made in Machine learning to run the TBM’s and the automated handling of segments in the tunnel will likely reduce further the number of staff needed in the tunnel. At some point the Hogs will have to accept that, on ESA because TBMs were being used rather than drill and blast there was a specific payment made to 147 to allow them to retrain their labor in the use of TBM’s…….. dont even ask.
If you referring to Brian Rosenthal’s piece from a few years ago, I helped him out with some of the staffing numbers.
If TBMs are staffed at 22 in NY vs 5-6 elsewhere, that is an over staffing ratio of 3.6-4.4, not 1.5 like Alon said. This alone will not cause subway costs of $1B+ per km (if the Local 147 rate is $111/hr, double late nights or weekends, then over a year that’s ~$25M extra cost per TBM) but if repeated with other labor costs it will add up. I believe the Rosenthal article identified archaic useless Union dictated jobs like full time “oilers” for modern sealed hydraulic equipment that isn’t oiled in use, before getting to the 200 people on payroll who didn’t even have a line item job to begin with. Overuse of consultants is certainly a problem, but this also doesn’t cause $1B/km subways, same for over large stations and bowing down to local interests (we’ll mine the stations to avoid cut and cover disruptions). All of these issues are a problem; contra Alon you cannot say labor costs are not part of the issue.
Side note: the 22 people on the TBM, did any of them have job titles like “utility locator” or “drainage manager” left over from days when tunnels were dug by hand? Could Alon be seeing these and thinking they are white collar supervisors from utilities/consultants instead of union featherbedding?
(It’s actually a lot more than 22 counted properly with all the supervisors, but then the comparison number is higher too.)
The superfluous job titles are less about when tunnels were dug by hand and more about sinecures for older workers – things like elevator operator and such. There genuinely is a lot of blue-collar overstaffing, it’s just being magnified by clueless management to be a much bigger problem than it actually is – it’s not the entirety (or even most) of the factor-of-3 premium on labor costs (the one that drives labor costs from 25% of the hard costs to 50%), let alone the entire premium on the project, and management doesn’t act optimally even based on the erroneous assumption that the labor costs are driven by sandhog overstaffing. For example, the sandhogs claim mined and tunneled projects but not cut-and-cover ones, so management that wanted to reduce reliance on the sandhogs would use more cut-and-cover, instead of only doing it when the preexisting tunnels force the issue at 106th and 116th.
You do understand that many of the Local 147 guys are also in the drill runners Local 29 who would be doing the drilling and blasting work if cut and cover encountered rock. Also under the Local; 147 CBA if the cut and cover connects to a tunnel where 147 is working they get to staff certain positions on the cut and cover…… maddening isn’t it.
Again please elaborate on the excessive supervision. The utility thing is nonsense, or at least it was on ESA and other projects Ive worked on in the US. Utility companies will typically send someone out when your working around their utilities, for example, Buckeye Pipeline in NY supplies Aviation Fual in Queens always had an Inspector with any crew that was excavating or drilling near one of their pipelines, was to identify where the pipeline was so it could be avoided, a sensible precaution I would say. And one MTA did not pay for. But we never saw a single utility rep when the TBM’s were mining beneath their utilties.
So again, please explain who all these supervisors are?
First of all 5-6 staff on a TBM is as much as an outlier as the NY numbers. And its not just the SandHogs, its every Union that overstaffs the projects. And yes you’re correct, if you have a crawler crane you need an operator and an oiler….. not many other places in the world that employ someone to oil the crane these days and you can go on with many such examples and as you say it all adds up to the point where labor can be anywhere from 40 to 60% in NY compared to 25/30% elsewhere.. But the CBA’s are negotiated with the General Contractors Association and while MTA and NYDEP have some influence it’s mostly in the hands of the GCA and the Unions. And 147 gets to negotiate a fresh agreement for every tunnel project….
Not sure what you mean by the overuse of consultants, the MTA and NYC DEP these days are simply not equipped to undertake design work. They struggle to even keep their various design criteria and standards up to date. And full-time MTA people are expensive with all the benefits they get during their working life and in retirement. And these days working for the MTA as a designer is an accounting nightmare with the way they structure their contracts and the payment terms so it’s not like anyone is making huge profits, on recent projects with them we have a base profit of 4%, this can increase when we get audited for our performance against a set of KPI’s up to 7% but its more typical that we get uprated to 6%. Thats not exactly a huge profit.
@Tunnelvision
Murphy’s law, I was writing my last bit while this was posted.
The relevant bit is:
Isn’t this exactly what I and others have been saying? ie. that it is ridiculous to expect a well-managed and correctly costed project without the MTA and NYC DEP being competent to either contribute or at the very least properly oversee the consultants and their decisions/recommendations. Look at the structure of how Paris runs this: no mystery. The President of the Île-de-France is where the buck stops; they represent the 12 million people of Île-de-France, and they would cop shit and have their political career imploded if anything like the NYC debacle happened on their watch.
We are long past the false argument that employing relevant people is too costly for the state. Not employing them is clearly vastly more expensive; and (again) it is not just cost but the quality and nature of the final project. [Broadly it looks to me that about half the cost explosion is due to consultants-gone-wild and half due to the gold-plating or otherwise unnecessary engineering; actual labour cost overrun looks like a rounding error amongst this but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored, just put in context and these other inputs given higher priority.]
Of course trying to rebuild that expertise into MTA is not easy but there is absolutely no doubt that it is the priority. Without it, nothing will change. You cannot outsource it. From that citation I reproduced from Rosenthal, Janno Lieber knows this. Whether he is (politically) able to initiate such change is a big question that I suspect the answer is “no, not without support at the highest political level”.
@michael, the question is of the people at the highest level politically is who is good and just doesn’t know – and who is incompetent.
There will be people in both camps for sure.
“ First of all 5-6 staff on a TBM is as much as an outlier as the NY numbers.”
What is normal TBM staffing worldwide?
@Onux
Good to have some rough figures on costs of labour but then you say:
Consultants are not a labour cost but a soft cost and (to repeat maybe the tenth time on PO) Rosenthal wrote: “Soft costs for East Side Access are expected to exceed $2 billion. The project plan called for the hiring of 500 consultants from a dozen different companies, according to a 2009 federal oversight report.” So you really should make some kind of rough estimate of what those 500+ consultants cost the project. I think we can already see that it is log orders more than the excess labour costs.
I note that Tunnelvision hasn’t (and typically never does) respond to my earlier post on this issue. What the heck are all these very expensive consultants doing in New York that is not required in Paris (whatever expertise is required, whether a mix of in-house RATP and in-house Bouygues plus out-sourced possibly Sastra, it all has to be reflected in the final cost of the project; but see at end re Systra’s role).
Then there is probably the more important issue of the impact of having so many private consultants, ie. what they recommend for the project. For example, double length station boxes which is going to have a much bigger impact on costs than triple the labor on the TBMs. I pointed this out in 2017 (extract of comment):
Again Rosenthal wrote about meetings of 20 people, from labour unions, constructors, consultants, making significant decisions but not a single person around the table looking out for the interest of the people paying the bill. Is there any mystery as to why costs explode, especially as many of those people around the table either get the additional cost or a set fraction of the cost, that feeds their bottom line.
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@Alon.
Please don’t repeat that thing that Tunnelvision wrote, because no one said it except Tunnelvision. What Rosenthal wrote was “In Paris, which has famously powerful unions, the review found the lower costs were the result of efficient staffing, fierce vendor competition and scant use of consultants.”.
I have just skim-read his original article from 2017 and found this (emphasis is mine):
Let us remind ourselves that the management contractor is owned by–and therefore accountable to–RATP and SNCF. Also note the involvement of people representing the state/funder/customer/enduser at multiple levels from Systra, RATP and the top-level public transit authority, Île-de-France Mobilités (Probst is DG, its president is also the President of the Île-de-France region, currently Valérie Pécresse who some may remember was a candidate for President of France in the last election).
…………………………
Also, to be fair to Janno Lieber I found this (Rosenthal):
Okay, but they do actually use consultants in the low- and medium-cost world. There are French consulting firms, which get work in provincial France; Spain uses consultants to assist in design; Turkey uses consultants a lot. They’re just more efficient because they’re used as an add-on to the in-house team rather than as a replacement.
To repeat myself
And yet the same standards/codes don’t prevent Turkey or Spain from building very cheaply.
Yes, because the codes are not the problem (and if they were, the MTA would be able to ask for changes). The interpretation is. There’s no requirement for a full-length mezzanine – in fact, as Josh Barro pointed out yesterday, when there were drug addicts in the mezzanine of the 2nd Avenue station on the F, the MTA recently just closed the mezzanine to get rid of them, so evidently it’s not necessary for fire safety. It’s just tradition.
Let’s say your bought a spanky new fleet of EMUs that can and do climb 4.5% grades. Oh, and you pay 60% more than the going price, because, you know, Special Local Consultants, and the Owner’s Representative consultants who supervise the Special Local Consultants, and the deliberate decision to federalize funding and voluntarily get fucked raw by resulting Buy American and that extra layer of consultants and an extra layer of potemkin factory with its extra layer of American management. Remember that at every single level everybody is skimming a percentage of the bottom line contract costs. Paying 60% too much is a Very Good Thing.
So, far, so good.
Let’s say you also really like doing grade separations projects. Like really really really like doing them. Well, you really spending money on road projects that have infinitesimal, and often hugely negative (deliberate incompatibly with quadruple tracking is a given!) But you don’t want to do too many grade separations at once, because well, there are only a handful of contractors who are allowed to “win”. So the answer is to make every grade separation as mind-meltingly expensive as possible, and to make it involve as much roadwork as possible, and chuck in every single insane non-transporation add-on possible. That way everybody wins!
The place to start with this, of course, is to revise your “design standards”.
You see, while in the past diesel-hauled passenger trains and diesel-hauled freight trains (one a day those) could climb 2% grades, it’s all of a sudden the case that 1% grades are the maximum “allowed” by revised “criteria” that come from … somewhere. But 1% is less that 4.5%, so that’s just fine, right? This “standard” must be adhered to! Also, there’s a fresh requirement that the vertical curves be engineered for unmaintained American freight trains operating at 60mph — up from 45mph or 50mph —, the those curves obeying to American freight railroad standards. Those vertical curves translate into what anybody else would require for 200kmh. Both together make the extent of track relocation longer and longer and longer, ideally long enough that they bump into other roads, or bump up against fixed infrastructure constraints. These criteria apply even when, say, horizontal curves would limit freight trains to 40mph. Because, well, standards.
And wow! With these “standards” and “requirements” all of a sudden all sorts of “alternatives” are all of a sudden “infeasible”!
Simple things like leaving local streets and roads completely alone, because they’re not part of a passenger rail line and nothing to do with transit budgets, building a simple railway bridge over the road, and building simple embankments that raise the tracks up to and down from the railway bridge, are “eliminated” because of “geometric incompatibility” with the “design standards”. Your “rail grade separation project” now involves both fucking with the tracks (but not so much 60mph mile-long coal trains are inconvenienced!) and excavating tens surrounding blocks of streets, paying for easements from multiple property owners along the streets, redoing “streetscapes”, endless and eye-wateringly expensive utility relocations, brand new drainage, pumping stations to remove storm water from the sunken roads, a Community Children’s Art Component, and a Statement Gateway that Suggests Arrival and a Feeling of Place.
Your simple railway bridge over one road now costs $350 million. Score! Anything in any way cheaper isn’t in accordance with Design Criteria.
Having consultants pick your “standards” just right sure pays off! For everybody!
Not a single line in this comment has anything to do with the topic at hand (safety regulations).
Thank you for your service, Captain Obvious.
Meanwhile, cost-inflating infrastructure overheads “required” by safety “standards” are as readily gamed as any other “design requirement”; they are cultural/historical/economic constructs readily subject to manipulation by bad actors.
(Your next move: “Safety standards are written in blood!” You’ll think you’re saying something profound or novel. Because nobody else in the world believes that human lives have value. Just your people. I’ve seen this movie, many times, and it’s tiresome.)
Interesting comment, as someone who works for a consultant an extremely offensive comment also. I mean what standards are you supposed to design to in the US? Swedish ones?
If the standards in the US—or the interpretations of them—are so out of whack that they make most railway construction projects infeasible, then yes.
Why on Earth would you think there ought to be some alternative scenario, when those “alternatives” have been a major factor in the death of the domestic American rail industry, is frankly just annoying.
But they don’t.
That’s adorable.
The big people who rig the bids and game the game salute the little people for their water-carrying service.
And you continue to spout utter garbage. What on earth are you talking about, rigging bids, water carriers, you don’t even make sense. I’m guessing no consultant will hire you given your bitterness. As for Agency staff in the US, most of them are unemployable elsewhere and many are hired to meet diversity quotas……
Dude, all I ever wanted was tenure and a Fields Medal. Not so keen on working for WSP on project management TBH.
Anyway, good for you that you feel that the system is working for you. Enjoy! (But if you have any children, or know or care about anybody under the age of 40 or so, well, what a world of unmitigated relentless endless horrors they’ll inherit. But with any luck we may both be dead. With luck.)
In any community in the US will find a significant (small, but significant) group of people who speak Spanish as a first language. Just hire them into management, and they will look for consultants who speak Spanish. Enough will speak English as well to get by, but you only need English skills at all in marketing type positions. Sure there are a lot more English speakers, but you will find enough Spanish speakers, and they will in turn look to where things are cheap.
First of all NFPA 130, STANDARD FOR FIXED GUIDEWAY TRANSIT AND PASSENGER RAIL SYSTEMS is as it says a standard, and like all good standards includes many workarounds to enable the designer to use an engineered solution that may not strictly comply with the standard but provides equivalent performance. For an underground station the main issue to be dealt with is the provision of a tenable environment for a specific period of time that enables the projected passenger load to exit the station. This is fairly straightforward to demonstrate and requires some 3D Computational Fluid Dynamic models to be run to demonstrate the spread of the smoke from the fire and the impact that the ventilation system will have on it. Combine that with a program such as STEPS that models human behavior in the event of a fire in a station or tunnel and you can quite easily demonstrate that a tenable environment can be maintained. And this is what most designers of such systems use to do so wherever they are in the world. The biggest variable though and what causes the most argument is the size of fire to be modeled and the fiore growth curve. Obviously the bigger the fire and faster the assumed growth rate the more ventilation you need to control it, and various research facilities have burnt railcars to determine the fire load and fire growth so there is some empirical data that can be used. Its rare that subway systems unlike road tunnels have deluge systems in them with all of the electrical stuff so you are primarily relying on the ventilation to manage the smoke. SO the bigger the assumed fire the more vent that is needed leading to increased power capacity etc. etc. which all requires more space to be housed, in a vent shaft, in the BoH or on the surface, matters not it still needs to be housed.
Now NFPA 130 like NFPA 502 the equivalent standard for HIghway tunnels gets updated on I think a 3 year cycle. There are various committees formed of industry folk, from the operators, the designers etc. that routinely meet to determine whether the constituent parts of the current version are still relevant. So to say that the MTA could simply demand a change in the NFPPA 130 is wide of the mark. For any designer who is signing and sealing designs in NY, and remember it is a personal liability that a Professional Engineer is taking, there is no corporate liability for designs, producing a design that varies from NFPA 130 even if there is an equivalent engineered solution may be a risk that the PE does not want to take. I’m sure you are aware of a recent court case in NY where a 92 year old Engineer was hauled out from the Alzheimers care facility he was in to stand trial for a design he signed and sealed after a building collapsed during renovations. He was deemed personally liable some 60 years after signing and sealing the design. And you wonder why US designers are more conservative than their non-US counterparts.
Having said all that there is another set of Codes that have to be complied with for transit stations in NY. This is collectively known as the New York State Building Code, as the MTA is a State agency the State Code applies not the City Building Code which is slightly different from the State Code. The NYSBC contains various parts one of which is the New York State Fire Code. The Fire Code was significantly updated after 9/11 and for example, requires dedicated access pathways for first responders so that the folks dealing with the event do not have to fight their way through the passengers escaping from the event. These codes are based on the International Building and Fire Code but these kinds of codes are typically much more based on local building and construction regulations than NFPA 130 is, so the Building Codes in NY, Istanbul, Seoul etc. may be considerably different leading to different floor plans. The NYSBC is administered by the State and if your design fails to meet the code, it does not get built until it does, waivers and variances are hard to come by. Now you might ask why a building code applies to an underground station, well it’s a publically occupied structure and in reality, an underground station is simply a 70-storey office block lying on its side.
So Janno was not necessarily lying when he was talking about the Code leading to certain design elements that are different in NY than in other places, it all depends on whether he was referring to NFPA 130 or the NYSBC and the NYSFireCode.
1. The US is not unique in dragging people into court after accidents.
2. The MTA literally has a voting representative on the NFPA 130 board (a member of the LIRR, not NYCT). But it doesn’t matter because NFPA 130 is the same as in a bunch of countries that don’t have full-length mezzanines, and NYCT itself closes mezzanines when it sees fit.
3. Turkey uses NFPA 107 where it is more restrictive than NFPA 130, so no, the “horizontal building” issue is not unique to the US either.
1. But very few other countries have the PE and personal liability that exists in the US. Its a very different professional liability regime in the US than in other places and definitely plays into conservatism in design.
2. Yes, but they can’t just change NFPA 130 on a whim and you also completely missed my point, which is that you have a lot of leeway when applying any NFPA standard as they are not design codes, they are standards, and have a very different standing compared to the NYS Building Code for example which you must comply with. I never said that the full-length mezzanine was driven by NFPA 130, but it may be a way to comply with the egress requirements in the NYS Fire Code. I’ll ask the Engineer of Record tomorrow when I talk to him.
3. Never said it was unique to the US, that was a general statement. By the way what is NFPA 107, I checked the NFPA Publications page and there is no 107.
But you completely miss the impacts of having to design an underground transit station to the NYS Building Code and the NYS Fire Code. These and NFPA 70, the NAtional Electrical Code have more impact than NFPA 130.
1. Yes they do? See for example in Italy, re earthquake standards.
2. Okay, but they don’t need to change NFPA 130. (Nor is it a whim – they could ask for changes, and haven’t.)
3. I meant the NFPA for buildings, which I keep thinking is 107; looking at the list, I think it’s 101?
The number of deaths in the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake (308) with a magnitude of 6.3 isn’t much lower than the 2010 Chile one (525) with a magnitude of 8.8. And according to the Wikipedia article on the former, if it happened in California no one would die.
So yeah people in Italy are being prosecuted for this stuff, but the standards can also be pretty damn low there.
3. Understood I assume they use that as there is nothing like the NYS Building Code or similar in Istanbul. When I worked there I was designing and building water tunnels so none of these issues were that relevant.
The thing about New York City that makes it different from other places is that the electoral turnout for the local city council elections is super low. It looks to be about 7% city wide and perhaps double that in the richest areas – e.g. district 4 has a turnout of 13%.
In contrast in Britain a poor ward might have a turnout of 20-25% in a local election and a rich ward might have a turnout of up to 50%.
That means that on the one hand in New York City the people who go to community meetings to object to change and their friends are a much larger share of the electorate than they would be for example in the UK. Of course on the other hand the fact that the turnout is so low also means that any incompetent city councillors can much more easily be primaried or beaten by a third party.
Ultimately you can campaign on a competence platform the old fashioned way by talking to the voters door-to-door and printing leaflets – both of which have very low costs. And ultimately if you don’t trust the Democratic Party digital systems you can store the canvassing results on paper also the old fashioned way.
It is clear that that campaigning approach still works – especially when you do it continuously for many years. Look at how much better Anneliese Dodds does in Oxford East – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_East_(UK_Parliament_constituency) – compared to Labours performance in surrounding towns and cities such as Aylesbury/Milton Keynes/Reading/Wycombe/Swindon.
New York voters, statewide as near as I can tell, use paper ballots. If there is any question about the machine tallies, people can count the paper ballots by hand. And do.
I’m talking campaigning not voting. Campaigning is still all about knocking on people’s doors and gathering voter preferences and political issues. Probably you also do some digital as well, but still mostly offline stuff.
Obviously in the UK the establishment political figures are all pretty decent in my experience so all that data goes into the computer system – but of course if you are doing a primary challenge then maybe you don’t want to share which voters you have spoken to. So record the data on paper instead the old fashioned way – then you don’t have to share it immediately.
You could of course also do TV ads, but as we saw in Kentucky in 2020 they don’t really move the needle, plus they are super expensive. Oxford Labour might have spend $10/voter adjusted for inflation over 50 years (plus a shit tonne of volunteer time) on classic campaigning and have moved their voting share by 20 points in every election. McGrath spent $100/voter in one election with TV ads and did fuck all on vote share.
Someone did campaign on competence in the 2021 mayoral election in New York. The entire city political machine went out of its way to endorse the person she was running against.
Karthyn Garcia right? Frankly losing to Adams 49.5 to 50.5 isn’t a bad result by any means.
Time to pick up and have another go next time – shows what can be done.
And yes the political establishment will be against you to start with when you are running against them, that is to be expected. Of course when the turnout is 7% for the council elections a lot of voters are pretty damn upset with the choices to vote for.
Only registered members of the party can vote in the primary election. 30 percent of the Democrats showed up for the primary.
So really you have to get an extra 1% of the 2/3rds of Democratic voters who don’t vote in primaries to vote in the primary and to do so for a more competent candidate.
Frankly feels very very doable – hardly the toughest political battle ever fought.
As an Australian I am appalled at that voter participation rate. But yes, it does explain that, a bit contrary to what I wrote earlier, an outsider can break through by having a motivated set of voters that doesn’t have to be huge. Looking at the governor primary election, Cynthia Nixon actually got 36% of the vote versus 62% for Cuomo, so that is pretty good for a newbie non-politician. Probably requires a combination of name-recognition (ie. celebrity), big money (most likely personal fortune) and some policy competence (possibly optional). Maybe Bloomberg would have won the governorship instead of reaching for the top (and spending a billion on that futile task) but I don’t know if he would have supported Byford and a genuine transformation of MTA etc. Didn’t he make a show (photo-op) of riding the subway once a week?
Rich people in Manhattan use the subway. It’s faster.
I hardly watched it but am pretty sure that Miranda and the whole SATC glitterati took yellow cabs everywhere, even just to cross the street (nah, I made that up, NYC is not Dallas …).
I am not necessarily saying you want to run a celebrity as they might well not be any more competent than Cuomo.
I think to a large extent backing the most competent candidate who is already running at mayoral and governor level isn’t an awful approach that avoids creating too many enemies. I do think Bloomberg would have been good though, probably would have been less likely to get jealous of Byford than Cuomo was – but who knows.
I am more suggesting to do things from the ground up – i.e. starting at community board or city council level. Plus you need to work with people in the wider community who care about cycling/the homeless/other issues/generic competence – if only to make the effort required feasible.
Replacing the 5-10 least competent city councillors would I am sure start things moving in the right direction.