PennDOT Fiddles
Monday, June 25, 2012 | Charles Marohn Tomorrow I will be in Fargo, ND, for a slate of public engagements. I'm going to be on News and Views with Joel Heitkamp, KFGO-AM, at 8:30 AM. Then at 11:30 AM I'm doing a Curbside Chat at the Fargo Theater. At 3:30 PM I'm doing a second Curbside Chat at Fargo City Commission, 200 3rd St. N. These are open to the public and it would be great to run into some of my North Dakota friends. Please introduce yourself if you can make it.
Last month I wrote about an article that appeared in PE, the official magazine of the National Society of Professional Engineers (Engineering's Echo Chamber, May 29, 2012). In the article, I took the engineering profession (of which I am a member) to task for blaming everyone but themselves for America's failing infrastructure. I indicated that engineers were becoming irrelevant because, without asking and answering some tough questions of itself, the profession will continue to lack the key insights necessary address the problems we face today.
The following day, I posed what some of those questions should be (13 Questions for the Engineering Profession, May 30, 2012). And while I did receive a generous offer from NSPE to write a column for an upcoming issue of PE, there were no engineers that responded substantively to any of this. I did receive a couple of emails and we had one commenter (who was so stereotypical I highly suspect he was a plant). Their argument to me was essentially the same: Engineers don't make land use decisions and they can't appropriate money. They just build what they are asked to build.
That's not good enough.
Last week the Pennsylvania Department of Transportations (PennDOT) received two awards for a projected called the New I-95/Commodore Barry Bridge ramps. The awards were from the American Council of Engineering Companies of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Society of Professional Engineers. PennDOT was very proud of these ramps and all that they mean for the city of Chester, PA, as well as the citizens of Pennsylvania.
“These new ramps are going to enhance access and travel within the City of Chester and compliment the city’s economic redevelopment and revitalization efforts along the waterfront,” PennDOT District Executive Lester C. Toaso said. “Motorists now will find it quicker and easier to go between the waterfront and the interstate since they no longer have to weave their way on city streets to travel between I-95 and 2nd Street.”
Let's first take a look at the project itself. I've circled the new ramps in red on the image below. As shown, the ramps provide an exit a half mile away from the existing off ramps. According to news reports, the new ramps are expected to serve 8,000 cars per day.
Image taken from Google EarthAs the PennDOT official indicated, it was felt that the burden of having an exit a half mile away -- or loop back on the highway if going in the other direction -- was stifling economic development of the shoreline so dramatically that spending $77 million on the ramps was warranted. This is reiterated in the PennDOT press release.
To enhance access to the Chester waterfront, PennDOT created a new interchange by building two ramps off the Commodore Barry Bridge under a $77.1 million construction project. One ramp takes I-95 traffic directly onto Route 291/2nd Street, while the other ramp allows Route 291/2nd Street drivers to reach I-95.Prior to the construction of these new ramps off the Commodore Barry Bridge, there was no direct access between I-95 and the Chester waterfront.
Okay, so now there is direct access to the waterfront. My assumption -- based on this huge, redundant investment -- was that this must be some shoreline. The development there must be very impressive indeed.
Well, not exactly. While there is a stadium -- the universal sign of desperation in economic development - here's what else appears to be there: a solid waste facility, numerous scrap facilities, a paper company, what looks like a sewage treatment plant, a couple of industrial sites dealing with metals and plastics, and a place that looks like this:
Pictured shared through Google Earth.If you think I exaggerate, here is a link for you to check out the area yourself.
Of course, readers to this blog won't be surprised by the fact that there is nothing in place to warrant this sizeable investment. The fact that there is nothing there is the point. This place has "potential". Utilizing the second Mechanism of Growth is the classic next step in the Growth Ponzi Scheme. Build it and they will come, right engineering profession?
That's exactly how Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (who is conveniently from Chester) sees it. According to Pileggi:
"In 36 to 60 months, we will see an explosion of economic development on Route 291."
Of course, it is an inconvenient fact that Route 291 -- which doesn't actually go along the shoreline, as intimated -- looks an awful lot like Route 13, the next off ramp to the north that was apparently too far for the scrap metal people to travel. Unfortunately, Route 13 -- despite having a glorious access already in place -- does not seem to be prospering all that much. Nobody seems to be fretting about that experiment in providing access. I guess in Pennsylvania (as with most of the country), if at first you don't succeed, ignore that and just do it again, only bigger and more expensive.
What this project feels like is simply that wish for a magic bullet solution. Read what State Representative Thaddeus Kirkland -- also of Chester and from the opposite party of Senator Pileggi -- had to say about the need for the ramp.
“We need these types of things to build economic development,” Kirkland said. “If William Penn could see us now, he’d have a nice place to park his boat, a nice stadium to go see a soccer game in, and then he could take a few of his gold coins and go down to Harrah’s.”
This is fantasy. A very expensive gimmick that is not only wasting a lot of money, but is diverting the energies, hopes and dreams of a city of 34,000 -- a city that lost 8% of its population over the last decade -- from things that could actually help them become a strong town. The median household income in Chester is $25,294, half the state average $49,520. The median house value is just over $66,000 compared to $165,000 statewide. It is insulting to even suggest that this city needs a soccer stadium, a casino and a place to park their boat. How many gold coins do the people of Chester posess among them? Heck, how many of them can even afford to drive?
These ramps represent an investment of $9,060 for a Chester family of four. For a city with a 12% reported rate of unemployment, how many real jobs could be created if $77 million were put into an economic gardening program? This is an unconscionable expenditure.
But it gets worse. While PennDOT is gloating over their two awards for these ramps, they rank #1 in the country for having bridges that are structurally deficient. That is not #1 as in the best but #1 as in the worst. THE WORST. Pennsylvania's DOT, which just spent $77 million on two new ramps half a mile from two existing ramps, has 5,906 structurally deficient bridges that together carry nearly 23 million cars per day. More than one out of every four bridges in Pennsylvania is structurally deficient.
How can any spokesman for an organization with that track record tout these new ramps as a benefit for motorists? How can any engineer, knowing the backlog of critical maintenance that exists, suggest that travels will now be "quicker and easier" thanks to this project? It is scary to think that they may actually believe what they are saying.
And while it might be gratuitous, I need to again point out for those of you waiting breathlessly for the federal government to authorize a transportation spending bill, one that will fund transit, build trails and do all kinds of "great" things (with borrowed money), just how projects like these are funded:
The $77,196,759 project was financed with 80 percent federal and 20 percent state funds.
Note that only a few "radicals" are suggesting there be a change in this approach. The great Ponzi scheme rolls on, spending someone else's money on another local gimmick. Get yours while you can.
And sitting back and benefiting from it all: the engineering profession. Is that too harsh for you? Well, go check out the organization that gave PennDOT their award for these ramps, the American Council of Engineering Companies of Pennsylvania. They are so brazen they don't even try to hide behind report cards, bogus reports and other propaganda. The first line on their web site says exactly what they are "exclusively" about:
The American Council of Engineering Companies of Pennsylvania (ACEC/PA) is devoted exclusively to the promotion and enhancement of the business interests and profitability of the consulting engineering industry in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Congratulations PennDOT. An award well deserved.
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Engineering Profession 
Reader Comments (12)
I agree with you that everything about this project is wrong, but your attacking it based on the ramps 1/2 mile away is also wrong. Those ramps don't allow access onto 322 west, or off of 322 east, so I-95 can't be reached from them.
You have lots of great arguments in your arsenal: the Ponzi scheme, keep making your project bigger until the Feds will pay for part of it, developing infrastructure on spec to spur development instead of using development to justify infrastructure.
With so many quality weapons in your arsenal, using a faulty one unnecessarily gives your adversaries a built-in line of attack. I don't know if you can update posts, but you should probably address this before the entire engineering profession comes at you with it.
Let them make that argument. I would love to hear it.
Love the article, as a fellow engineer I couldn't agree with your main thesis more, our profession needs to pull its own weight when it comes to providing proper metrics to policy makers or else you get projects that are underused, over priced, and counter productive to the main goal of spurring economic activity and resident happiness.
You do have some good points, Charles. But your are obsessed with engineers as a profession. Although engineers may not accept as much blame as we shouild for urban designs you want to blame us for everything that's wrong with America.
Why not build bridges (oh no, that's an engineering thing!) and try to form coalitions with your criticisms instead of your approach of throwing mud at a profession as a whole?
A nitpick: the casino mentioned, Harrah's, is actually on that waterfront.
Pretty much as soon as those ramps were proposed, there were complaints that they were built to serve suburban motorists coming to the (shiny! new!) soccer stadium and casino rather than, you know, actually developing the city of Chester.
Camden, by the way, has a similar waterfront: suburban destinations surrounded by ample (excessive) parking, hiding the poverty of the city beyond.
If you are an engineer who only reads this site when you are the subject of the posts, you probably feel a little under assault. It's okay, you should just know that the world is not all about you -- we talk about a lot of other things here. In the meantime, stop worrying about some blogger insulting you and do something to actually reform the profession. Engineers have a ton of authority and resources to do good. Show me where that is happening and I'll "build a bridge" to them and be part of their "coalition".
When we don't like what someone says but can't argue with the substance, we attack the motives. I'm obsessed and am hurling mud when I should be building bridges. Okay. Where am I wrong? I challenge you to do what I've done -- start with the substance and then get to the motive. Where am I substantively missing the mark?
You can accuse me of being obsessed with engineers -- I suspect most people have some level of obsession with their own chosen career -- but I certainly have never said that "everything" wrong with America is the engineering profession's fault. There were no engineers that made the Minnesota Twins sign Matt Capps to a two year extension, for example.
Besides being the profession in which I work, there are some important things about engineers that make this conversation important. First, there is a near universal belief in this country that infrastructure spending is (a) a good investment that (b) creates jobs and (c) drives economic development. This belief is wrong and is actually bankrupting our nation, but because the belief is so widely held, engineers are given an extraordinary amount of resources and authority to shape the entire world we live in.
Second, the engineering profession likes to look at itself as a "service" profession -- we are serving humanity and looking out for the betterment of society -- and that is a part of why people are attracted to it.
Third, most engineers know that this stuff is ridiculous, that the programs we have in place are stupid, that the systems we are building are wasteful, that this is all just a bunch of silliness. They would like to be doing something more in line with their actual values.
Which brings me to fourth, someone needs to stand up and say that the emperor has no clothes. I realize that organizations like the ACEC can't do it -- their exclusive mission is to enhance the business interests and profitability of engineers (tell me that doesn't disgust you) -- but I believe that most of the engineering profession would rather maintain the structurally deficient bridges we have than build new ones. Yes, the heads of the DOT's and the large firms have been captured by the current paradigm, but you don't have to go too far down into these organizations to find a large amount of dissent over this approach.
Engineers that want change maybe can't quit their job or call their boss out in a blog, but they can quit supporting organizations like ASCE and ACEC, push for a financial accounting of the second life cycle for their projects and demand a higher level of accountability among their peers. I proposed thirteen questions we should all be discussing. Where are those conversations, or anything like it, taking place?
Charles,
I am 'just' a network engineer, so my projects are moving electrons and, occasionally, wires. But in my time doing this I have noticed a trend in this 'service industry' to always say "yes". If the customer/business unit/whatever asks for it, you do it. It used to be bad manners, now it is simply bad to say "no". If the request shows a profound ignorance of the system, will cause instability, drive up the cost of the project, could be done with software already on hand, you say "yes" and do what was asked. I see this cost businesses money and time, but we are rewarded for "saying Yes".
A long intro to the question- perhaps the engineering profession of road and bridge builders is experiencing this as well? What would happen to your career in PennDOT if you said, "This is redundant and a waste of money. Let's fix the bridges we already have."? What would happen if you pressed this, and pointed out that you have education, experience, and that this is your field of expertise, not the Senator's or Council member's?
That's a mighty strong current you are asking your fellow engineers to swim against.
-Chris
As a civil engineer who moved out of engineering after one year at a transportation firm because of the significant disconnect between the large amount of money and time spent on projects and the small amount of benefit they were having for the public, I agree very much with your post. It's a shame that so many are just calling for more money instead of responsible and accountable investments.
OK so I don't visit the casino, don't like soccer and don't have a boat to launch. But as a truck driver i must tell you that these 2 new ramps are a godsend! And the author is incorrect about the ramp a 1/2 mile away being redundant. They are going in a different direction completely. Trying to get out of Chester City where there are many industries (hence truck traffic) used to involve heading south into Marcus Hook and turning onto Market St. and then to Interstate 95. But since the town of Marcus Hook decided to forbid big trucks making right turns onto Market St., we would have to go into the state of Delaware to access 95. Now that particular ramp is closed for construction! These "super ramps" couldn't have come at a better time. And if your response to this essay is "theres too many damn trucks on the road" than do me a favor and stop buying so much crap!
As a commuter through the area (I live in north Wilmington, DE and commute to Philadelphia daily), I often take 291 as an alternate route for when traffic on I-95 is backed up. Are these ramps a convenience that didn't used to be there? Yes. But, I have to tell you, the city of Chester is as economically depressed as any city you'll run across. Lots of unemployment and folks not making much money, as your statistics pointed out, and also the "urban blight" that comes along with that. The casino and the soccer stadium are basically the only things happening "on the waterfront". My first thought when I figured out what all that construction was building? Oh, great, they want people to be able to literally drop out of the sky to get to the soccer game in Chester, then literally fly back up onto the bridge after the game is over ... So they won't spend any more time there than is absolutely necessary. Besides what they spend at the game and whatever they spend for parking, these ramps help people to NOT spend money in Chester. And what was the reason they put the soccer stadium in Chester again? Oh, yeah, so people would spend money there. Wait a minute....
Roads, highways, bridges and automobile parking has a negative rate of return on the investment if the external costs of the automobile were considered (sedentary lifestyle, air and noise pollution, congestion, collisions, stress, opportunity cost of property-tax generating purposes of land currently used for the car and opportunity cost of doing something more productive than driving).
Okay. We're uploading the podcast this week which focuses on this post. In researching audio, I came across this video which, given the information we've shared in this post, is quite remarkable in it's shallowness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUGzq7TZntE