Historically the way to deal with legacy urban design like this was to, you know, build new cities.
Alas, we stopped founding new cities over a hundred years ago in the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Americas...
Alas, we stopped founding new cities over a hundred years ago in the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Americas...
I don't necessarily disagree about building new cities, but I don't understand how that would solve the problem here: NYC is still the financial and entertainment capital of the world, and it's not like we can just let it decay. People live and stay here for a reason.
Ancient Rome had a million people at the turn of the 1st century and was the financial and entertainment capital of the world too. People lived and stayed there too, until they didn't.
How many steam systems are left in the U.S. (outside college campuses)?
As for the steam system: it's an integral part of Manhattan's residential and commercial heating system. My understanding is that it pays for itself in charges to apartment buildings and businesses (including hospitals as mentioned), so there's no current question around its financial sustainability.
It sounds like the steam system is important because it's important?
Do you have any numbers beyond idioms and anecdotes? At what point in the maintenance curve will the steam system become unprofitable?
And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic.
No; comparing antiquity Rome (a city whose collapse is a subject of ongoing historical debate) to NYC (a city that was built 2600 years later) does not make for a serious comparison.
Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc. These cities have similar infrastructural problems that they've been able to solve in ways that NYC hasn't, sometimes for political or historical reasons (e.g. being bombed so thoroughly that building new infrastructure is the only reasonable option).
> And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic.
I don't love it, or hate it. I recognize that it's a piece of infrastructure, and that infrastructure comes with assumptions. You can either pay to maintain those assumptions, or pay to upend them. Either way, you pay. With NYC paying to maintain them is frequently optimal, since upending them requires revisiting other, even more costly assumptions.
For NYC's steam system, concretely: there's been no real public noise from ConEd about the system's unmaintainability or unsustainability. They recently agreed to a new rate/fee schedule with the state PSC[1], on which I can find no significant controversial reporting.
Edit: to make it more clear: ConEd's steam network provides heating and industrial steam to around 1500 buildings in Manhattan. That's 1500 buildings, most of which are near or over a century old, that would need to have steam boilers retrofitted into their basements (or have their entire steam plumbing ripped out and replaced with something else). That's a lot of time and money in already one of the world's most expensive labor markets.
[1]: https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pd...
Sounds like what an ancient Greek might've said if you suggested comparing contemporary Athens with ancient Thebes. I don't see why not. You can certainly compare, say, square pyramids with equal sides, be it the Great Pyramid built around the 2600s BCE, or the smaller Luxor pyramid in Vegas and that scar on the face of Paris built 4500 years later. It's only been a few thousand years, what's really changed that much?
The Romans didn't quite get to an urban steam system, it's true, but they were quite close with the hypocaust (central heating), Aeolipile (Hero's steam engine), and Cloaca Maxima (sewer system).
> Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc.
Of those it looks like only Paris has a steam system. Do any other major cities (still) have steam systems? Have there been any new recent installs outside college campuses?
I don't think so. It's a legacy technology, and legacy technologies are such mostly due to cost. Old infrastructure generally gets more expensive, until it becomes unsustainable. But people expect continuity and push back against changes that compromise the perceived identity of the place (like steam in Manhattan), hence most historical cities are no longer around at all.
Again, the point is economical: the cost of a technology is not defined solely by its age, but by the cost of replacing it with the newer thing. For Manhattan, the cost of replacing the steam network would be immense, with marginal-to-net-negative consequences (larger demands on the city's electrical grid, higher emissions, waste of steam from local cogeneration plants, additional local emissions from per-building boilers). This doesn't mean that district steam is shiny, new, or particularly good technology (and it doesn't mean the opposite, either). It just means it isn't worth replacing, and probably won't be for a while.
(By all means, if you want to run on the "kill the steam network" ticket, I'm sure someone will vote for you. But I think that money would be better spent finishing the SAS, IBX, and building some more crosstown lines in Brooklyn and Queens instead.)
Personally I care more about bringing NYC-level transit to more of the country than further optimizing one of the few pretty good systems we have.
If I ran, I'd run on a transit ticket, with a platform of mostly cutting subsidies for private passive transportation, and increasing subsidies for public and active transportation.
Let's build out a national high-speed rail network. It's been great to see the economic development along the Downeaster tracks since reopening in 2001, and exciting that it looks like a new Black Hawk line will happen in northern Illinois near where I grew up.
Automobiles have been a disaster for the country. I didn't see a noticeable improvement in safety metrics from seatbelts in the data: the only correlation I saw was reduced crashes during periods of economic decline... Pedestrian deaths keep climbing. Emission and safety (hood height) standards are a clown show. EVs don't solve for MPs in TWPs/RWPs. One more line in New York isn't where I'd focus my energy, but I'm all for those lines and improving connections with NJ and New England.
Americans have never moved less, and more and more intense hyperlocal squabbling seems a result. Historically, if you didn't like local decisions or wanted better opportunities, you moved. That's not really the case anymore. (I previously cofounded a moving and storage startup.)
Imagine if the Chinese had spent the last twenty years keeping the 19th century alive like veritable steampunks in Shanghai [1] instead of building out the world's best high-speed rail system.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2013/08/26-years-of-growth...
Articles mentioning the plain incompetence of America's civil engineering projects always hit me hard. It's so bad. You'd think with the number of MBAs we graduate or time we'd get our act together. But no.
The Gothamist article runs the same old story trajectory here: a bad example, then drilling a bit closer to root cause, then pointing people know the current situation sucks and why, ending with a time will tell or variation on same. It's underwhelming.
Another example: 108th street in queens has been ripped up, some plumbing or electrical work done, then repaved about once every 1-3 months for the last 10 years.
I also fairly familiar with nyc subways and how it's run day to day. It's embarrassing ... it's 10 parallel universes from European standards.
Escalators are slow, and down a lot. More money is spent I feel sure telling you what isn't working, and what all the schedule changes are, than what the normal schedule is. This is a 6 train running on the 4 line ... this is a F train running on the E line ... is often heard.
Then there's moms -- what I call them -- ladies usually on bullhorns telling you how to get off the subway and which escalator to use. That's their job: yack into a bull horn and tell you the stunning obvious.
Another unsightly subway aspect: temporary closures of platforms. Some moron uses plastic tape in the most unsightly way to cordon off access ... it's straight out of a slum. A temporary gate, or better yet, using electronic signage to redirect people would be better and a damn sight look better.
I don't think we disagree materially about the city's general lack of coordination (or demonstrated incompetence) with respect to construction. But the example in the article is a pretty bad example, all things considered.
(I'll note, however, that the comparison between NYC and European metro areas is typically faulty, for reasons that you probably already know: the Subway runs 24/7, is pathetically underfunded relative to its size, and hasn't benefited - perversely - from a reconstruction period following a global war. European metros tend to have all of these things going for them, in addition to better and less incompetent governance.)
As I was writing orig comment I knew euro spends way more on trains; maybe Europeans think their stuff darn well be better. So point taken.
I think we're pretty much on the same page as you write.
Note that politics will sometimes create a city for a short time, but the city rarely sticks. Eventually a new king/dictator/government will come along that doesn't see a need to support the new city and it dies (usually to a farming village since those are needed all over, but in places where there are no farms they can disappear)
Lots of cities were founded in the Americas over the past 10k years.
No major cities have been incorporated in the U.S. since Anchorage in 1914 and Vegas in 1911.
On the other hand, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, the Bahamas, Paraguay, Brazil, and Belize have founded major cities since then.
Why not in the U.S.?
Cancun was founded in 1970!
Same with San Francisco. No longer any cargo ports. They're all in Oakland now.
And what's even the advantage of living near a cargo port in the 21st century anyway?
I don't know if the average resident on NYC benefits much from living near a cargo port. But there are significant benefits to living in coastal areas: water has a moderating effect on climate, provides either natural sewage outfall (or fresh water, depending), and brings in tourists. It's not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of cities exist on sea or lake coasts, followed by navigable rivers, and that there aren't all that many choice locations left.
That seems true for most cities that made it through the Age of Sail, but less true before and unclear going forward. It seems trade routes by land were generally more important, and conquest and shipping were more carried out on land than sea until the technical developments of the 15th century. Most large ancient cities seem to have lied along the Silk Road, and many large (and late) ancient cities that still exist (Rome, Paris, London) aren't right on the sea as in the Americas.
Going forward the bigger issue seems to be insurability. Who's going to hold the bag on all those high rises in Miami...
(Closer to MENA and the Levant, and you'll find that antiquity cities almost entirely exist on the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, etc. You can find inland Silk Road ksour in countries like Morocco, but these too exist along seasonal rivers, and have correspondingly lower and nomadic populations.)
I don't particularly disagree about climate change, and I think a lot of the coastal Southern US is in for a rough awakening in the next 15 to 30 years. But things haven't been so peachy inland either (the Midwest has had both more numerous and more severe floods, tornadoes, etc.). NYC's weather is also certainly going to become more extreme, and the city's response so far has been unimpressive.
Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore, and DC all have direct sea access.
Agreed. To me New England and the Great Lakes seem the best positioned U.S. regions for the 22nd century.
There are already settlements in every place it makes sense to live. Any new city would have to be developed on the strength of some newly-discovered resource; what would that be, and why would you not simply expand whichever town already happens to exist nearby, instead of going to all the expense of starting from scratch?
Our highway system has enriched incumbent cities and created a nation of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and billboards.
Let's build Hyperdrive City, Nebraska, where you can rent an apartment on the 93rd floor of the mall for $200 a month:
https://br.ifunny.co/picture/derek-eedrk-can-we-build-one-of...
Or one of these:
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/chengdu-future-city-design...
What is the motivation for a developer to build a 100 story (or at least 93 I guess) skyscraper in some empty field in Nebraska?
https://therealdeal.com/national/2024/01/28/who-is-real-esta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_Tower
Or let's give Washington back to Maryland (like Alexandria to Virginia), move the federal district to Lincoln, and build a new Capitol to accommodate a House with representation more like 70k:1 than the current (abhorrent) 700k:1.