Category Archives: Rochester, New York

Everywhere else, it’s 2006

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But on the NY State Thruway, it’s still circa 1950, apparently.

How do I know? Because I sat on it for two hours this afternoon, and the AM radio station (1620) that is supposed to provide Thruway traffic information was as opaque and unhelpful as if digital technology had never been.

When I first tuned in, the recorded message said there was a concert (!) and therefore the Weedsport exit was closed. Concert goers, the message said, would be detoured to their destination via the Waterloo exit.

How inane is that? “People are using our highway to attend an event, so we’ve closed an exit so they can’t get to it, which by the way is going to screw up every one else’s itinerary as well.”

Sounds like an idiotic rumor more than useful information.

Then, sometime after 3:00 p.m., the message was changed. Now it informed listeners that there had been an “incident” “off the thruway” which had required the Weedsport exit to be closed; that there were significant delays “in the Syracuse area” as a result; and that motorists were advised to consider alternate routes.

Great job, guys. Not. Because by the time that information was provided, I and thousands of other drivers were well past the last Syracuse exit. No way off, unless you count an illegal U-turn. We were trapped.

How could it possibly have taken the Thruway Authority nearly TWO HOURS to start advising people to take alternate routes? I know there were State Police out there–they were helping to clean up one multi-car fender bender that was triggered, no doubt, by the back-up.

How could the Authority not know what was going on?

Does it have anything to do, I wonder, with the risk of losing toll revenue?

And why wasn’t the radio message a bit more informative? Why didn’t it tell people which exits they should use to avoid that mess? Why not also provide the milepost numbers those exits are near, for motorists who don’t have exit information memorized?

I’m astonished that this was managed so poorly. What a crock.

On a Saturday afternoon in July. What a crock.

Ideas for Upstate

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I found this via Zinnian Democracy tonight: an excellent post on NYCO’s blog about the Upstate/Downstate dichotomy of New York, as it is both expressed and influenced by our state media.

The gist of the article is that because NYC is a huge media stronghold and Upstate NY has “no [NY] Times of our own,” our political influence is unnecessarily diluted.

Do go & read if you’re a NYS resident, it’s an amazingly insightful post.

(I gotta put this blog on my blogroll somewhere, even if it means editing my categories, lol.)

(I also hope someone sees the situation this post describes for the incredible [online] publishing opportunity that it is . . . )

I love this town

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As I wrote in my last post, one thing Rochester has going for it is that it’s family-friendly.

Case in point. I was on one of the many public soccer fields in my town of Brighton this afternoon, kicking a ball around with my daughter. Up walks a teenager with her little sister. Asking if they could play. Next thing you know, we had a pick-up game of two-on-two soccer going.

It was fun, it was great practice for the kids. It reminded me so much of the pick-up basketball games I used to have when I was growing up that the mix of joy & nostalgia almost hurt.

I love this town.

This one’s about Rochester’s Renaissance Square

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If there’s any local issue that I care enough about to blog regularly, Renaissance Square — estimated price tag, $230 million — is it. I simply don’t believe it’s a good use of taxpayer money. I don’t care how much is funded by the feds or the state. It’s too much money. It’s too much risk. It just can’t be a priority right now.

Now look at this: an article on the DLC website about the folly of municipal planning built on the single leg of attracting “creatives”:

The new mantra advocates an urban strategy that focuses on being “hip” and “cool” rather than straightforward and practical. It is eagerly promoted by the Brookings Institution, by some urban development types, and by city pols from both parties in places like Cincinnati, Denver, Tampa, and San Diego. It seeks to displace the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Economy Indexes with what might be called a “Latte Index” — the density of Starbucks — as a measure of urban success. Cities that will win the new competition, it’s asserted, will be those that pour their resources into the arts and other cultural institutions that attract young, “with-it” people who constitute, for them, the contemporary version of the anointed. Call them latte cities.

This is exactly the thinking behind Renaissance Square. Build a performing arts center, and Rochester will become hip. Young people will want to live here. Downtown will be revitalized.

That’s B.S. We would be fools to fall for it.

Here, from the article, is a round-up of the metro areas — all of which have considerably more resources at their disposal than Rochester — who have pursued this municipal strategy:

San Francisco, according to economist David Friedman, has actually lost employment at a rate comparable to that of the Great Depression. Roughly 4 percent of the population has simply left town, often to go to more affordable, if boring, places, such as Sacramento. San Francisco is increasingly a city without a real private-sector economy. It’s home to those on the government or nonprofit payroll and the idle rich — “a cross between Carmel and Calcutta,” in the painful phrase of California state librarian Kevin Starr, a San Francisco native.

. . . Seattle has also lost jobs at a far faster rate than the rest of the country and has its own litany of social problems, including a sizable homeless population; the loss of its signature corporation, Boeing; and growing racial tensions.

Although Portland is often hailed as a new urban paradise, it is in a region suffering very high unemployment. “They made a cool place, but the economy sucks,” notes Parks, who conducted a major study for the Oregon city. “They forgot all the things that matter, like economic diversification and affordability.”

New York City has also suffered heavy job losses. Gotham’s population outflows, which slowed in the late 1990s, have accelerated, including in Manhattan, the city’s cool core. In contrast, New York’s relatively unhip suburbs, particularly those in New Jersey, quietly weathered the Bush recession in fairly fine fettle.

So where are people going — and why?

Today, economic growth is shifting to less fashionable but more livable locales such as San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, Calif.; Rockland County, N.Y.; Des Moines, Iowa; Bismarck, N.D.; and Sioux Falls, S.D.

In many cases, this shift also encompasses technology-oriented and professional service firms, whose ranks ostensibly dominate the so-called “creative class.” This trend actually predates the 2000 crash, but it has since accelerated. Since the 1990s, the growth in financial and other business services has taken place not in New York, San Francisco, or Seattle, but in lower-cost places like Phoenix; Charlotte, N.C.; Minneapolis; and Des Moines.

Perhaps more important, the outflow from decidedly un-hip places like the Midwest has slowed, and even reversed. Employers report that workers are seeking more affordable housing, and, in many cases, less family-hostile environments.

To be sure, such cities are not without their share of Starbucks outlets, and they have put great stress on quality-of-life issues — like recreation and green space — that appeal to families and relocating firms. But the watchword is livability, not coolness.

Affordable housing. Family-friendly communities. “Livability.”

Sounds dull as dirt, doesn’t it? But it’s the foundation our community needs if we’re going to reverse the exodus of young people.

The politicians who back Renaissance Square will gladly drive Rochester off a cliff, if they can look all flashy while they steer. We have to stop them.

Upstate, downtimes

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For an interesting conversation on the flight of young, educated people from Upstate New York, hop over to Vodkapundit and check out the comments on a post that looks at a NY Times article on the subject.

Here’s one that jumped out at me:

Work for a software security company. We just closed our Toronto, Long Island, Albany and Waltham, MA offices and moved them all to Virginia due to the high costs in taxes and wages (from the high cost of living).

For what we were paying approximately 200 employees in those locations we can employee nearly 300 in Virginia. For the same amount of money I can hire 100 more people, produce more product and make more profit. I still have 2 programmer and one tester position open.

These are not low wage jobs. These are professional software development jobs of people making well into 5 figures (none under 50K) and some into 6 figures.

The region is being run into the ground, and our politicians are either too stupid or too corrupt to care.

But don’t worry. They’re going to get us our $230 million Renaissance Square. It’ll be such a nice place for the last seniors living here to hang out & listen to the crickets chirp.

Whither the weather data

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This has happened to me more than once. Finding weather forecasts on the ‘net is easy. But whenever I’ve tried finding how much rainfall accumulation Rochester has had over a specific period in the past, I’ve always come up dry. ha ha ha.

Closest I ever got was a NOAA site [update: link now defunct] where the last two days’ worth of data is kept online.

It’s funny how most of the time a search engine will spit back what you want, but once in awhile you hit a combo of too much clutter plus not enough specificity in available search terms. And then you’re sunk.

So I gave up using google’s neurons and turned to the old fashioned kind: I emailed Dr. Scott M. Rochette, Assistant Professor of Meteorology at SUNY Brockport.

And Dr. Rochette came through for me. He knew of a resource — happened to be on the same National Weather Service site I linked above — which lets you request past monthly data. Thanks, Dr. Rochette.

Here’s the page. Why I didn’t find it through their site map, I don’t know, but I sure missed it.

And why do I need this, you ask?

No reason, really, except that I’ve started keeping a rain gauge (nothing special, just an old fashioned clear plastic gauge) (now watch, my dad will be blogging about his electronic gauge next) and I was curious how my readings matched up to the official ones.

For the month of April: official rainfall was 2.18 inches. My reading was 2.4. (Probably the airport is dryer because of all those plane wings flapping. ha ha ha kidding again)

Joking aside we could use more rain — the ground is awfully dry for spring.

And now, I’m going to tag this so the one other person in the Greater Rochester Area who someday looks for this information can find it, once this post is crawled a few times.

Just doing my part.

“We identified deteriorating conditions”

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Rochester’s local media is busy interpreting — make that, trying to interpret — documents relating to past engineering evaluations of the South Avenue Parking Garage. One of the garage’s ramps collapsed on April 21. It was shortly after 5 on a Friday. It’s a miracle nobody was hurt or worse.

Well, here’s something to think about: I don’t see how anyone makes heads or tails out of this until we sort out what’s meant by “helix” and “cantilevered slab.” Oh, and “helix joints.”

The ramp itself was a corkscrew shape. A helix.

But as I puzzled over the media reports from the last 48 hours, it struck me that at least some of the engineering documents may be calling the garage itself a “helix.”

So I did a little googling, and apparently when you’re talking about parking garages, “helix” can refer to the design within the garage proper. When you’re twisting back & forth to find a parking place — or to get back to the street, on your way out — you’re negotiating a helix.

Here’s an exterior photo of a “six-level double helix” parking garage. Here’s a photo of another parking garage, the text description of which notes

Internally, the garage features a “double helix” ramp design that prevents cars from going in opposite directions on the same ramp.

So keep that in mind as we tour what the local media is saying, now, about the collapse. ABC affiliate Channel 13, for example, has a piece up that states

A January 1, 2005 letter to the city from the project’s engineering consultants, Stantec Consulting Group raised concerns about the part of the helix that connects to the garage. The firm had been working with the city since the late 1990s on a plan to rehabilitate the garage . . .

The consultants’ letter said, “we identified deteriorating conditions at the cantilevered slab extending from the garage to the double helix structure to the south. We feel that conditions have progressed to a state where vertical shoring for the edge of the cantilevered slab is required.”

Okay. So there was a problem between a cantilevered slab and a double helix. But does the “double helix structure to the south” refer to the ramp? It seems to, given the context.

Second question: what’s the “cantilevered slab”? A cantilever is a beam that has one end projecting into space. So look at this photo of the garage in happier days. To my amateur eye, the only thing I can see that I’d describe as “cantilevered” on that building is the ramp.

Now here is NBC affiliate Channel 10’s version:

On Wednesday city hall made hundreds of pages of documents available to the media. Those papers shed light on serious structural problems at the garage . . .

The spiral exit ramp on Broad Street is what engineers call a helix [yeah, sure, but I think we have to be careful, since “helix” has another common usage in discussing the design of parking garages — Ed.] but none of the documents provided to the media showed any serious concern for the helix. [But which “helix”?]

. . . The documents are filled with complex, detailed engineering language. The earliest ones date to 1998 when the garage was 27 years old. The report showed there was a serious problem with deterioration of the cantilevered slab that extends from the garage itself to the helix exit ramp.

Okay. This makes it sound like the “cantilevered slab” is a structure that connects the garage and the ramp . . .

One document recommended shoring up the cantilever slab. A notation written in the margin said urgent. The slab had sagged over time and was creating depressions at the expansion joints. The report said the slab was flexing more under wheel traffic at the joint and there was a series of hairline to one-eighth inch wide cracks. Exploratory holes drilled revealed corroded reinforcing steel and poor quality concrete at the joint and the underside of the helix ramp exhibited cracks.

So somebody did notice that the “cantilever slab” was sagging. And then this happened. (Note, however, that according to Channel 13, the city claims to have implemented the recommendations made by Stantec in January 2005.)

Now let’s look at how the Democrat and Chronicle is reporting this. It also references the “hundreds of pages of documents” that the city released this week and then says

The reports did highlight some structural issues, including deteriorating joints between the garage and the adjacent, yet structurally separate, ramp.

But most of those issues were largely addressed, according to city officials and Daniel Hogan, president of Crane-Hogan Structural Systems Inc., which is now renovating the 32-year-old garage.

City officials say the greater concern was the structural integrity of the garage itself, and that’s why city officials had approved a major $6 million renovation project. Engineers are currently studying the soundness of the garage as well as trying to determine what caused the ramp collapse.

The next paragraph in the article refers to a “cantilevered section” (?):

Officials say that warnings from a 2004 report from the Rochester engineering company Stantec Consulting Group Inc. focused largely on a cantilevered section of the garage, and those problem areas would not have caused the collapse. Those warnings of structural deterioration were highlighted Thursday in a Democrat and Chronicle story that incorrectly related the deterioration to the ramp itself, rather than the cantilevered section. Steps had been taken to shore up the weak areas in the cantilevered area, officials and contractors said.

Well if the “cantilevered section” is a concrete structure that connects the ramp to the garage, then saying its problems were “related to the deterioration of the ramp” seems pretty accurate to me. The ramp can’t just suspend itself in midair.

Back to the Channel 13 article.

Documents also show the city knew in 1998 the helix [again, which helix?] would need repairs. The same engineering firm [i.e. Stantec], then known as Sear-Brown, recommended repairing the helix joints by 2003, at a cost of $1.06 million. That work had not happened by the time of last month’s collapse . . .

It’s not known if the structural weaknesses pointed out by the consultants in 2005 led to the collapse. It’s also not known if the joint replacement work recommended to be completed by 2003 would have prevented the collapse.

Confused?

Me, too.

The D&C also quotes city Corporation Counsel Thomas Richards as saying:

“Somehow, somewhere the severity of the problem with the helix ramp was missed.”

No kidding.

You have to wonder if the city officials responsible for interpreting the engineers’ reports were able to do so.

Please leave a comment if you spot any inaccuracies in how I’ve sorted this all out, so far.

UPDATE: I edited my comments after my first quote from the Channel 13 story. At first my (late-night!) working theory was that the “double helix” referred to in Stantec’s January ’05 letter couldn’t be the ramp. Now I’ve reread it again and changed my mind.