Lifelines

Last week, the New York area was hit with a mid-summer storm that brought a deluge of rain, not to mention the first tornado to Brooklyn in over a century. In the aftermath of the event, where New Yorkers were making new friends while waiting for the next subway train, or cursing to themselves while they sat in traffic on the region's parkways (which is where I found myself), a significant backlash hit against those who are in control of these lifelines of commerce and connections. The millions of people who crowd in and around the island of Manhattan rely on these modes of transportation to conduct their daily business, and their daily lives. When everything shut down for a time on account of a bit of rain (it was actually around 1.7 inches between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. that fateful day), people turned to the holders of the puppet strings of New York's transportation system for answers.

Generally, the response was one of being unprepared for the onslaught, as the severity of the storm was not expected by the transportation hierarchy. The finger pointing merry-go-round went from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to the National Weather Service to global warming. But in the end, after the water has drained away, the realization becomes how fragile the whole system really is. Together all of us head out into the world each day, seemingly, and in reality, in a multiplicity of different directions. Every commuter for yourself, so back off! But what we often forget is that we're all in it together, and need to work with one another to keep things running smoothly. And although the system appeared to crumble on the morning of August 8, 2007, in reality, it demonstrated how resilient New York continues to prove itself time and again. Within hours, most of the transportation network had been restored, and people resumed their daily tasks -- almost as if nothing had happened.

The fragility of our lifelines is a theme that has traveled across the nation recently. The deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis was a national story. In New York, we followed it with the same attention as anywhere across the nation. The fallout from this tragedy was a renewed effort to inspect the bridges across America. The result was a staggering number of spans that require some significant attention. Where the money will come from is another story altogether. The theme of precarious lifelines spans the centuries as well. Archeologists studying the ancient city of Angkor in Cambodia, believed to have been as sprawling as Los Angeles, have learned that the crumbling of the Southeast Asian metropolis in the 1500s may have been caused by the collapse of its highly sophisticated water management system. The sheer scale of the endeavor was its ultimate downfall. The caretakers could no longer maintain the system. The connections between our own transportation issues are instructive.

No matter how great our monuments become, we must keep in mind that without the lifelines that serve them, there is no way to sustain, or support them. The Angkor Wat temple stands as a testament of Angkor's fate. As American metropolitan areas have fanned out to the far reaches of the hinterlands, it is imperative that transportation remains at the forefront of any planning for the future. It may not be the most intriguing aspect of a new project, but it may very well be the most important.