Creating the Disruption Impact Index and Disruption Free Corridors (Part 2 of 3)

Construction crews have been working to install new water pipes and sewers along York Avenue between East 61st and 63rd streets on the Upper East Side for more than eight years. The project, which stretches over two blocks, is relatively small for a public work in New York City and was originally scheduled to take a year to complete. But it’s now seven years past that deadline, and officials say it won’t be finished until June 2025. That’s nearly a decade of construction to build about 500 feet of sewer and water lines.

-Why it takes NYC nearly 10 years to install 500 feet of pipes - Gothamist

Roads are closed hundreds of times per day in all major cities, and even multiple times per day in quiet suburbs, to facilitate the repair, replacement, and maintenance of our buried infrastructure. Most road closures do not have specific service impacts due to network redundancy (e.g., work on replacing a water main rarely means a water service outage). However, all road closures will disrupt our daily commutes and access to local businesses. In the above example, while the sewer service was not interrupted, it seems more than intuitive that there is a quantifiable impact to the surrounding community from 10 years of restricted access. But why study this single example when there are hundreds per day in a city? 

There is a need for a methodology to filter through the hundreds of disruptions per day to provide key metrics for urban planners to discern community impact, while creating a foundation for engineers to evaluate the total infrastructure costs [1] of the most significant disruptions. The term “impact” is used in this Insight as a unifying term that could apply to metrics that urban planners, engineers, and citizens find to be relevant. The key is to have a common foundation of data and a methodology that helps to integrate the unique perspectives of these disruptions. This is Part 2 of 2 Insight (Part 1 of 2).

Definitions: 

• “Utilidor” (aka Multi-Utility Tunnel, utility tunnel, or utility corridor) is an accessible passage built underground to carry utility lines such as electricity, steam, water supply pipes, sewer pipes, fiber optics, and other communications.

• “Buried Infrastructure” are the assets that require digging through soil to examine the exterior, repair, or replace the infrastructure asset.

Introduction - Business-as-Usual to the Disruption Free Corridor

Although the definition of “buried infrastructure” may seem obvious, consider that in order to access buried infrastructure, an excavation area is required. In urban areas, these excavation areas are in our roads and sidewalks and create an impediment that restricts access to local businesses, work, health clinics, grocery stores, and education. The point of including the utilidor definition in this Insight centers on the word “accessible” and to provide an aspirational goal for engineers and planners. Utilidors allow for proactive inspection and maintenance without the need for an excavation area, thus increasing the intended service life of the assets. This short Insight does not focus on the benefits, or costs, of utilidors, but rather on the first steps towards developing the language and metrics that create a foundation for engineers and planners to answer - Where should we have “disruption free corridors” in our city?  

Although a few global cities have some utilidor systems, and even a plan for them (e.g. Helsinki), there is not a common methodology for integrating utilidors into an urban master plan. The reasons for this begin with the perception that road closures belong to the engineering realm and surrounding communities just have to accept any resulting hardships during the duration. Urban planners stay removed from the impacts of road closures due to; siloed scopes, budgets, language, and skills/knowledge gaps. Yet engineers, planners, and citizens know that there are obvious negative costs, pollution, noise, and hazards imparted to the community that are never tallied. The utility provider’s perspective is even more myopic. The concern is solely focused on their specific service (e.g., water, energy…etc.), not disruptions to access for the community. Even though coordination of utilities in a utilidor would provide significant life-cycle cost benefits [2] and being a part of the utilidor discussion from the beginning would be beneficial. 

In short, the business-as-usual paradigm offers no hope for urban planners to engage in a meaningful discussion regarding the future of our aging and buried infrastructure.  

Quantifying the economic, environmental, and social impacts from the hundreds of disruptions per day is a first step for urban planners to take the second step and refine the metrics for their city. In turn, this provides a framework for engineers to better quantify the total costs of infrastructure. This sets the argument for the aspirational benefits that “Disruption Free Corridors” would provide. Not only in reducing disruptions, but the benefits of changing the business-as-usual paradigm as utilidors would allow for ‘forever pavement’ to greatly reduce potholes. Water main breaks would not impact the street above. Smart city advocates would see the return-on-investment of embedding IoT sensors that would be excavated in the next road cut. 

Why Another Index? - The Citizen perspective

In Part 1 of this Insight, we discussed the concept of the Disruption Occurrence Index (DOI) as a composite value that provides a simple, standardized way to represent the magnitude, the location, the frequency, extent, and the duration that our roads are disrupted. This allows for the past, present, and even predictive view of disruptions. The DOI, however, does not address the impact of these disruptions to our communities. To engage planners and utilities, we need the KPIs of a Disruption Impact Index (DII).

Although there are nationally vetted community vulnerability indexes available, none include the concept that road closures (disruptions) can impact community vulnerability. Also, we believe that more densely populated communities exacerbate the impact of disruptions. The CDC SVI, as an example, includes a metric of “Crowded”, but it relates to the number of people per bedroom in a household, not the number of households per unit area. In addition to these deficiencies, creating the DII as a tool for urban planners to engage as stakeholders must quantify disruptions over time, and across the city. The key is to also provide the following considerations: 

• Frequency: What communities are impacted most by recurring disruptions? Are they increasing or decreasing in frequency? 

• Political Boundary: Who can people complain to? What metrics would explain the impact? 

• Impact Themes: Hundreds of disruptions per day have to be sorted into metrics that address multiple themes of vulnerability, as well as access to buildings and transportation.

• Magnitude: Some disruptions are single lanes and lasting only a few hours. Others cover blocks and last for years.  

The DII is the first step towards filtering out hundreds of disruptions per day and providing a way of historically viewing the trends in specific communities in a city, providing magnitudes and impacts to transport, inaccessible buildings, and community vulnerability.  More importantly, it starts the connection between an engineering event and applying planning metrics for longer-term planning solutions. 

Conclusion

Currently, there is no methodology to systematically quantify the multi variable impact that the cumulative road closures have on disrupting our cities. The DOI/DII is just step 1 of sorting and contributing towards the development of relevant planning metrics. The next step would be for urban planners to customize where disruptions would be most detrimental; city/local economics, disadvantaged communities, historic/tourism/sports, evacuation/main commute routes,..etc.  

The key for DII, and really any index, is to provide a value that is understandable and relevant to begin this discussion of impact. And, with any social/professional interaction, “discussion” is a two-way street. Engineering metrics and Planning metrics have to be understandable to fill in the skill/knowledge gaps. The frequency of disruptions will only increase as our infrastructure continues to increase in age. There will be more Total Cost and community impacts for engineers and planners to study, respectively. By providing a goal of utilidors and disruption free corridors, an aspirational paradigm could unite roads and infrastructure with the community that is dependent on them. Donella Meadows stated: “…the places to intervene in a system begin with understanding the goals of the system and the paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise”. [3] 

Footnotes

[1] many of the previous insights (blogs) on acuitas3d.com have essentially provided a thorough literature review of topics including: Total costs = indirect + direct + social; Sustainability and Environmental Costs…etc. The point of this insight is to create a foundation and methodology for these type of detailed analyses to add to the discussion. 

[2] Again, a blog and not intended to be a literature review. This is based on work with the NYC DDC research arm “Utilidor Working Group” and if you scroll down, one of the links is to a Columbia University LCBA Utilidor Study. 

[3] Meadows, Thinking in Systems, a Primer, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-1603580557