Forever

I have a mixed review of “NYC’s bridges can last ‘forever,’ if we take care of them” by Clayton Guse on Gothamist.

The main point of the article, that maintenance and capital repairs are flip sides of the same coin, is absolutely true. You can pay regularly – annually is best – to maintain infrastructure (Guse is writing about bridges, but things are little different with buildings) or you can pay once in a while for major repairs and/or replacement. Unless you are willing to live without the piece of infrastructure in question, you can’t not pay to keep in functional and safe. I recommend reading the piece for his discussion of the East River bridges.

That’s the good part of the review. Here’s the bad part of the review: duh. This has been known for centuries, probably millennia, probably since the first time humans built something meant to last more than a few weeks. If you build something and leave it out in the weather, it deteriorates, and you have to decide how to address that fact. Maybe I’m being too harsh: this fact is well-known to me and to everyone I encounter at work, but maybe isn’t to everyone, so it needs to be said again once in a while.