Abstract
Infrastructure—airports, roads, bridges, parks, and railroads—has been described as a “magnificent legacy” of planning 1 gifted to the present by previous generations, yet remains among the most overlooked of human edifices. It is among the means through which cities extend their fingers into the countryside, or as Henri Lefebvre 2 put it, by which “the urban fabric grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life” (p. 3). Perhaps most importantly, infrastructure is a kind of physical language which civilizations pass down to their descendants that even when ruined provides “an occasional clue to the institutions and the institutional life that accompanied them.” 3 From a “general uniformity” 4 emerging in the process of city building during the nineteenth century, spurred by the introduction of both reinforced concrete and the modern public bureaucracy, infrastructure systems have proliferated. Projects have become monuments to the egos of politicians, statements of national aspiration, indicators of economic stability, and massive blunders. 5 They are critical ties that can bind communities together and tear them apart.
As the literal concrete and steel that holds much of the contemporary built environment together, the value of detailed infrastructure studies cannot be overstated. Over the years, US scholars have documented the design and building of a number of important national infrastructure projects. We have good studies of the interstate highway system, for instance. Likewise, the railroads have been explicated thoroughly, as have several dam and canal systems. Although often seen by political elites as testaments to their power and vision, the production of modern infrastructure remains resolutely bureaucratic. Emerging out of a laborious, fractious, and complex process, most infrastructure decisions are made outside of public view. Scholarly studies have brought such decisions to light and informed a public debate about the value of such investments.
The two books reviewed here contribute to a better understanding of the processes by which infrastructure projects are planned, debated, designed, and built. Each focuses on a single project in a single place (though the projects are multifaceted in terms of their goals). The two books, focusing on the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Los Angeles Metro Rail system, address projects on both sides of the continent in the country’s largest metropolitan regions, the Northeast Corridor and Southern California.
Ethan Elkind’s Railtown tells the hidden story of the Los Angeles Metro Rail system, a key piece of the nation’s second largest urban mass transit system. In many stories, Los Angeles (LA) is the birthplace of sprawl, a sacred space of American car culture. Yet, the basic physical structure of the urban Southland, as planning historians know, was established by the tracks of the Pacific Electric Railway. But as Elkind notes, “Angelenos adopted the car en masse in the 1920s,” and the red and yellow railcars quickly lost favor (p. 6). Recent efforts to return urban rail service to Los Angeles have been nothing short of a struggle, which Elkind admirably describes.
Beginning in the early 1970s with Tom Bradley’s first campaign for mayor and ending with the passage of the Measure R referendum in 2008, the book reveals the hurdles Metro Rail had to jump to first exist and then to expand. Elkind begins in 1973, when Bradley made an “unrealistic promise” (p. 13) to return rail transit to LA if he won the election. Although he won, gathering enough support to actually build a train was a different matter. Nonetheless, Bradley’s support for rail cracked a door that others would push open. Elkind traces the efforts of Kenneth Hahn, an influential LA County Supervisor, to usher through the region’s first voter-approved sales tax dedicated to supporting rail transit. The map that accompanied Hahn’s Proposition A showed a decentralized county-wide rail system that would connect the far corners of the region, an echo of the old Red Car lines that many voters undoubtedly remembered.
Flush with money from the sales tax and supplemental funding from the Urban Mass Transit Administration, the county transportation commission set about mapping routes for the region’s new rail system. In a county with so many jurisdictions and an uneven “geography of power” (p. 50), where the trains would go became a battle of high stakes. Focusing intensely on where the first line would go, Hahn pushed for a route from downtown to Long Beach (following an old Red Car line) while Bradley supported a subway beneath densely populated Wilshire Boulevard. Hahn prevailed, and the Long Beach train would be the first. The subway would prove far more controversial. In chapter 4, Elkind charts the outsized role of Congressman Henry Waxman in shaping the route the subway would take. After underground methane caused an explosion on Fairfax Avenue in 1985, Waxman worked to make sure that “a subway he never cared much for” (p. 80) would not bring gentrification or other disruptions to the people in his district. By the time he had finished his thrashing of Metro Rail on Capitol Hill, the Wilshire subway had to be set aside for a much less desirable route from downtown to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. Although the idea of the subway survived and construction had broken ground on a short segment, its path “meant that Metro Rail would barely serve the Wilshire corridor—the one route in Los Angeles County that merited rail over all others” (p. 100).
Chapter 5 documents the challenges of actually building the new subway, as it confronted the difficult terrain of the “seismically active mountains of Los Angeles” (p. 103), construction accidents, contractor malfeasance, and sinkholes. While the subway was mired in conflict, the Long Beach line finally opened in 1990, “on the same path as the last Pacific Electric train” (p. 103) had run decades earlier. A smashing success, the line helped propel construction of the first segment of the subway (which opened in 1993). Despite initial setbacks, rail transit in Los Angeles was steadily moving forward. Construction on a light rail link east from downtown to Pasadena was underway by late 1993, though more obvious routes, to connect downtown to LAX, the San Fernando Valley, or Santa Monica, were again forced to the backburner by the region’s political geography. Yet, just as the new trains were beginning to run, the administrative infrastructure that controlled transit in the region was crumbling. The two agencies overseeing transit in Los Angeles, the Southern California Rapid Transit District (RTD) and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (LACTC), found themselves in a turf battle that ended with both being merged into a new agency, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), in 1993. Then, only a few years into MTA’s life, the long-simmering problem of transit equity finally bubbled over. With the massive per-mile cost of rail, the “perception among bus advocates that rail expansion for the rich came at the expense of poor, often minority bus riders” was no longer contained (p. 159). After a protracted legal battle, MTA was forced “to make tangible improvements to the bus system” in a bid to help the region’s many low-income bus riders. As Elkind notes, “the bus rider’s union (BRU’s) greatest success was forcing policy makers to be more conscious of how their decisions affected bus riders” (p. 175).
By the middle 1990s, the Wilshire subway seemed to have gone as far as it could. MTA’s attention shifted back to light rail, as county supervisors pursued new lines into areas of LA County that were underserved. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, funding was secured for an eastside extension, construction of the exposition line to the Westside, and the completion of the San Fernando Valley bus rapid transit line. But as Elkind reminds us, “the desire to continue funding heavy rail was not dead” (p. 200). In 2005, Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Angeles, and the “subway to the sea” (p. 201) had finally found its champion. The new mayor managed to move aside Congressman Waxman’s long-standing blockade on federal funding for a Wilshire subway, and rally enough support for the subway among county residents to get a new sales tax referendum (Measure R) passed in 2008. The infusion of money would allow Metro Rail to plow ahead, including construction of the Wilshire subway. Elkind concludes by noting that transit ridership in Los Angeles still lags other cities in cost-effectiveness but now that rail “is…a permanent part of the Los Angeles landscape” (p. 227) ridership will only grow as the demographics of the city and county continue to shift. Ironically, the future LA has planned looks more like the transit metropolis of old than the dystopian world some popular accounts have imagined. 6
Among the building blocks of urban infrastructure, bridges are the most easily overlooked (despite their imposing stature). They serve a single discrete purpose and blend into the road or railroad networks of which they are part. Yet bridges are critical to the function of those systems, creating links that make unimpeded movement across the landscape possible. Philip Mark Plotch’s Politics Across the Hudson (2015) highlights the significance of the Tappan Zee Bridge, one of the major links in the metropolitan New York highway network. A product of the postwar highway boom, the Tappan Zee crosses the Hudson River ten miles north of the Bronx, carrying traffic on the New York State Thruway (I-287) into and out of the city. It is the longest span bridge in New York.
Plotch unfolds not so much the history of the original bridge but subsequent efforts to maintain and replace it, and how much difficulty the state’s planners and politicians faced in trying to do so. Plotch (2015) characterizes their struggles as “the culmination of a failure-ridden process” (p. 2). Part of the problem was that the project was about more than just replacing a bridge. It was “a congestion problem that could not be solved” (p. 2) by something as simple as rebuilding a river crossing. After briefly covering the building of the original bridge in the 1950s, Plotch devotes eleven chapters to detailing political blunders, false promises, internecine fights, and failed leadership.
He begins by explaining how the completion of the bridge in the 1950s helped fuel a suburban development boom that ultimately created the congestion problem that necessitated rebuilding the Tappan Zee. Gridlock had become bad enough that by the early 1980s, officials in the New York suburbs began searching for solutions. They zeroed in on the I-287 corridor, and the Tappan Zee particularly. Studies of congestion reduction strategies found a cheap solution in the form of simply adding a high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane, converting the “six-lane bridge into one with seven lanes” (p. 24). This proposal set off a decade-long struggle between the state transportation department, suburban officials, and the Metro-North Railroad, the three major stakeholders that would need to come to agreement on any effort to rebuild the bridge. The conflict finally ended when Governor Pataki stepped in, canceling the HOV lane and pushing for a full bridge replacement.
Pataki’s intervention marked the beginning of a broader rethinking, “a vision for the future of New York’s transportation system” (p. 67). To help develop his vision, Pataki directed a task force to examine the entire I-287 corridor. One of the key pieces of the task force’s charge was to find a way to incorporate a new commuter rail line into the corridor. The report of the task force ultimately “recommended replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge and building a new commuter rail line,” though this recommendation “turned out to be wishful thinking” (p. 90). The problem was, as Plotch reports, that building a new bridge would require coordination between the Metro-North Railroad, the agency that would operate the proposed commuter rail line, and the New York Thruway Authority, institutions with “difficult personalities and clashing institutional interests” (p. 90). As federal money would be needed to construct such a massive new bridge, these agencies would be required to collaborate on an environmental impact assessment. This proved to be too much. By the time the dust settled, the agencies were reduced to simply talking “about choosing between various multibillion-dollar projects without discussing how they could pay for them” (p. 109). With virtually no chance of the project being funded, Pataki turned his attention elsewhere during his last year in office.
The arrival of new governor Eliot Spitzer in 2007 did not imperil the fate of the corridor project but it did not do much to help it, either. Although Spitzer clearly “recognized the importance of expanding the New York metropolitan area’s rail network” (p. 112), his brief turn in office (barely 15 months) upended any progress. David Paterson, who stepped in to serve the remaining half-term left after Spitzer resigned, lacked the political capital to move the project. When he left office in 2010, Plotch writes that the “I-287/Tappan Zee Bridge megaproject ha[d] essentially the same status as when both Pataki’s and Spitzer’s terms had ended: false expectations were making it nearly impossible to generate consensus on a feasible transit component and move the initiative forward” (p. 141).
When Andrew Cuomo was sworn in in early 2011, the I-287 corridor problem was there, waiting, though a consensus that “the state should replace the Tappan Zee Bridge and establish a new mass transit system” (p. 143) had seemingly emerged among state agencies. Plotch argues that Cuomo’s style also helped finally push the project forward, though not until he jettisoned Pataki’s public transit component, turning the project from a multimodal congestion solution back into a bridge. With assistance from the Obama Administration, Cuomo was able to move the new bridge into the design/build phase. In late 2011, the Obama Administration announced “that fourteen infrastructure projects, including the Tappan Zee Bridge, would be given expedited [environmental] review” (p. 154). While the decision meant the bridge would be built, the loss of transit outraged many of the planners, local officials, and residents who had been living with the project for so many years. Their protests fell on deaf ears. In March 2012, “NYS DOT and Thruway Authority issued a request for proposals to four qualified bidders” (p. 172). Design and construction was underway by mid-2013 with the new bridge finally on its way up.
As these books demonstrate, infrastructure stories are rich and rewarding. Although the product of bureaucracy, the lives that flow through infrastructure systems make them complicated terrains of economic and social geography worthy of examination. Although visible, infrastructure merges into experience in such a way that it drifts below consciousness. Although planned as large systems, infrastructure is fractured by the latent power of political boundaries.
Even with thoroughly researched and well-written case studies appearing, the scope of the newer infrastructure scholarship remains limited in several ways. Like the great bulk of urban studies literature, we learn quite a lot about projects in a few places: the cities of the Northeast corridor, Chicago, and California. With some exceptions, we haven’t seen as much published that details infrastructure projects in other parts of the country. We need, for example, scholarly case studies of the Houston Ship Channel, the Port of Savannah, and the Okeechobee Waterway. Beyond big, singular projects, we have limited writing about the buried infrastructure systems that have worked collectively to shape so much land use in the country, and by an extension of the city. Here, we need histories of drain tile systems in the Corn Belt, center pivot irrigation systems in the Wheat Belt, and the steel truss bridge network in the upper Mississippi and Missouri river valleys. And moving beyond physical systems, the policy infrastructures that coordinate, advocate, and design these projects across regions need scholarly updates of their own. Examples here include the Delta Regional Authority, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and the Great Lakes Commission.
Perhaps most importantly, we need new infrastructure scholarship that confronts the biggest challenge going forward: the study of how infrastructure has been maintained. To be clear, the planning and building of new infrastructure systems has been of most interest to researchers. This has been the focus of almost every major study to date. But as Plotch’s Politics Across the Hudson makes abundantly clear, understanding how infrastructure declines and deteriorates is enormously important. The struggle to garner political support and deploy funding mechanisms for upgrades and replacements often proves more difficult than building from scratch. As so much of US infrastructure was built during the long postwar boom, these structures and networks are now deteriorating, and the problem of how to maintain and upgrade these systems will move to center stage in the coming years. Building on earlier studies but shifting the focus from the initial construction of projects and agencies to how they have been maintained and managed, infrastructure scholarship should also address these critical challenges.