Social resiliency

As society becomes more complex, with people increasingly emote from the means of production, the more we ought to be concerned with having infrastructure of resiliency. That's what I think about when I read stories about Flooding in the New York City Transit System.

Powerful thunderstorms swept through the New York metropolitan area this morning, tearing up trees and damaging cars and homes, and creating havoc during the morning commute....Subway stations were flooded, forcing commuters out onto the streets and into taxis and buses, and bringing traffic in many areas to a standstill.

We have floods in Seattle, too. Just one more argument in favor of above-grade mass transit such as... monorails.

Comments

[clew]

But not necessarily an argument for monorails *exclusively* -- as some NYers point out, in the winter they love the subway because it runs when everything aboveground is iced up.

Also, a lot more of Seattle is above the water-table than Manhattan (and the adjacent Plains) are, so our tunnels could be less pump-dependent (the Third Street one, but not a waterfront Viaduct-replacement, I assume).

There's a book out recently about what would happen if humans all vanished; it said Manhattan would fall down because the foundations would all flood. Perhaps bookkeepers and ecologists together should rate new building projects for their maintenance costs as a predictor of durability.

[Benjamin Hemric]

While I am pro-mass transit, I also believe in complexity, redundancy and resiliency [which is what I think of as being one of Jane Jacobs's main points, by the way], and this was driven home to me during the black out in New York City a few summers ago.

RAIL mass transit, both subways and commuter trains were disabled, so people had to walk, buses or use autos. PLUS automobiles helped light-up the streets at night and some drivers parked their cars and played their radios loud enough to create impromptu street corner communication centers.

It is interesting to note that the city's mass transit systems may have had more redundancy and resiliency built into them whent they were first built, as I believe the original subways had their own power generating stations (they have since, I believe, been plugged into the general electrical grid), and the same may have been true of the commuter trains. (I think the Waldorf-Astoria was built, for instance, on the site of one of the New York Central Railroad's power generating plants.)

Also one aspect of the blackout that hasn't seemed to be commented upon much is the fact that people were actually chased out and forced out of many Manhattan skyscrapers -- even hotels! -- in part, so the the explantion went, because the buildings were now so dependent on electricity (e.g., electronic door keys, instead of mechanical ones; mechanical ventilation, instead of operable windows; electronic toilet flushers, instead of mechanical ones; etc.) that it wasn't safe for people to wait out the black out in them. This hadn't been the case in the previous two blacks outs. (Some of the difference may also have been due to the more litigatious nature of modern day society, or at least to a combination of the more litigatious nature of modern day society and an overdependence on one source of power.)