Deck The Lots

I may have said so before on this blog, and I probably did, but Americans love to take pride in their engineering feats. And in many examples, we have built and accomplished great things involving engineering, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Apollo space program. But more and more often, as Paul Fussell once noted, these seem like aberrations from the norm. Innovations like bullet trains and the Concorde originated elsewhere (I'm citing Paul Fussell again), while Americans have become famous for building bridges and levees that collapse as well as building skyscrapers with window panels that pop out - ask the builders of the John Hancock Center in Boston how that worked out.

I bring this up because the borough of Caldwell, New Jersey committed the latest indignity in American engineering. A couple of months ago, at a two-level parking deck built in the year 2000, a chunk of concrete fell from the underside of the upper level and landed on a car parked in the lower level, prompting the town to close both levels and work on strengthening the deck that serves as the upper level. (The lower level is a standard blacktop parking lot.) The cost? $325,000, plus an extra $5000 allotted by the town for valet parking for people who use the local community center adjacent to the parking deck can still use it, as there is no other place nearby where they can park themeselves.

You know, this $330,000 could have been saved - or spent on something worthier - if the contractors who built this thing had designed and engineered it right in the first place. And this parking deck is only ten years old. Alas, this story out of New Jersey is a minor example of greater engineering disasters that have taken place in these United States.

Which begs the obvious question. Many Americans want big infrastructure projects. They want this country to build things. They want bullet trains for Amtrak. Maybe they want something like a state-of-the-art crossing to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York State. But if we can't even get something as small as a municipal parking deck right, how can we competently build something bigger?