New York City Infrastructure

The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher has been sitting on my coffee table for a while now.  I've noted these stats from Ascher's concise descriptions about how New York City functions.  These are just a few points; the book includes a great deal of the history surrounding city infrastructure.

 

Streets

• NYC streets have about 50 active red light ticketing cameras that send an electronic ticket to red light violators.  In addition to the 50, there are about 200 dummy cameras that don't actually have the electronic ticketing technology.  Anybody know which ones are real?
• Designer Karim Rashid designed a commemorative manhole cover for Con Edison in honor of the millennium.
• Cobblestone is roughly 4 times as expensive as asphalt.  With this in mind, I'm not sure why we're replacing the asphalt on Wall St with cobblestone.
• Most parking meters run a little long to avoid challenge to their accuracy.  Coins from meters are collected once every 24 hours.
• NYC residents can visit the parks department one stop tree shop to pay for a tree and its installation in their neighborhood.

Subway

• 468 stations
• 60 elevators
• 161 escalators
• 31,000 turnstiles
• 9 abandoned stations, 5 seen from train rides
• Retired subway cars are dumped in the Atlantic Ocean on artificial reef attracting large game fish.
• The Subway consumes1.8 billion kilowatt hours of power each year.

Bridges

• The George Washington Bridge acquires $1,000,000 in tolls each day.
• Othmar Ammann is the Civil Engineer who designed the Verrazano, George Washington, Triborough, Whitestone and Throgs Neck bridges.

Mail

• The city used to have an expensive pneumatic mail delivery system that sent letters in canisters through air propelled tubes. This writing explains the ridiculous culmination of this technology that led to its ultimate demise.

Water Tanks on Rooftops

Getting water to the tops of tall buildings at the turn of the century became difficult.  The solution was to fill rooftop water towers with pumps located in building's basements.  10,000 - 15,000 of these are still in use in the city.  Although modern buildings rely on pumps, the rooftop water tower is still a reliable way to provide consistent water pressure.

Sewage

• 6,600 miles of pipes.
• NYC is one of 800 U.S. cities that rely on a combined sewer system -  a system that mixes storm water and wastewater.  Both go to the same treatment plant.  This is not a problem until it rains significantly.  When this excess flow occurs, the  overflow is diverted to one of 450 (CSO's) Combined Sewage Overflows where the excess untreated sewage is dumped into the surrounding harbor water.  Overflow occurs about half the time it rains, dumping 40 billion gallons of untreated waste each year.

Garbage

• For most part garbage collection is low-tech - trucks, cans and a great deal of labor.  The exception is Roosevelt Island's Automated Vacuum Assisted Collection.