Former RIOC Board Member Says Tram Modernization Program Is Unnecessary

Image of Roosevelt Island Tram from Wired New York

The August 2 issue of the Main Street WIRE has an interview with former RIOC Board Member Mark Ponton who says that the $25 million Roosevelt Island Tramway Modernization Program, which will take the tram out of service for at least six months next year, is unnecessary.

For more detailed background into the decision to take the Tram out of service next year for modernization see the 2007 Tramway Modernization Cost Benefit Analysis, and the Main Street WIRE links to 2007 Tram Report. Also, Re- Connecting America has a comprehensive study on aerial tramways, gondolas and ropeways and Portland Oregon provides an annual report on their Aerial Tramway operations. Below is the full text of the interview conducted by WIRE Editor Dick Lutz.

Mark Ponton, Late of the RIOC Board, Says the Planned Tramway Update Is Simply Unnecessary, Based on Test Results

The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation will hold a public hearing Tuesday (August 5, 10:00 a.m.) on the planned upgrade of the Tramway, in the community room at 4 River Road. Former RIOC Board member Mark Ponton was among those who considered the upgrade, but he objected to the plan.
The WIRE interviewed him last week to find out why.

WIRE: You object to the replacement of the Tramway. Tell me why.

Mark Ponton: My major objection is taking the Tram out of service to replace it when quantitative analysis has shown that there's absolutely no reason to do so. We're spending $15 million of the state's money, assuming it's still around when we need it, and $10 million of the Island's money, which we certainly could use for other things, and we're disrupting the daily lives of thousands of people - all in spite of totally objective analytical data, provided by three of the world's finest engineering firms, showing that nothing major is wrong with the Tram at all. Given ordinary maintenance, it should last for years to come. The prediction of how long it will last has not been made, but everything we've examined shows a significant remaining life.

I don't care much about spending the state's money. I do care about needlessly spending $10 million of ours. And most of all, I disagree completely with the idea of negatively impacting peoples' daily lives just because we feel like it, instead of it being necessary for some remedy or to correct some deficiency.

The bottom line is that there's no need to replace the Tram.

There is a need to do about 70 small things, which I describe as scraping up the crumbs from the table. Things like an electric fuse box that hasn't been used for 20 years and should have been removed. Or a little bit of concrete that's cracking. They don't affect safety or reliability, but they do indicate a lack of attention to detail. And our supposed Tram management company, and our RIOC people who are supposedly watching the Tram management company, should have had these fixed. But
we don't need to race out and call 911 and say, "Holy smokes, we need a new Tram."

Q: If we leave safety aside, the reasons being given for replacement have to do with reliability and concern about the longevity of what's there, and you feel none of those are compelling issues.

MP: Not only are they not compelling issues, they're simply not issues at all.

If I take the conclusions advanced by Parametrix, the firm RIOC has had in place for some time, their conclusion is that everything is wrong with everything and has to be replaced immediately. Those are my words, but that's the essence of it. But the supporting data they offer is zero. Absolutely, totally zero.

Thornton-Tomasetti, whom I brought in, concluded nothing is wrong with anything and, from what we can see, it's difficult to even produce a prediction of the foreseeable future when anything might be wrong. Their supporting data was visual observation by skilled personnel; video camera observation of internal areas Parametrix said we couldn't examine without destroying the equipment being examined; magnetic particle
testing, which is a universally accepted means of detecting cracks in metal; and ultrasonic testing of the cables and the hanger-arm pin.

When three companies like Thornton-Tomassetti, Pitkin, and Hardesty and Hanover say there's nothing wrong with anything, it's probably a good idea to pay attention.

When I got the preliminary report from their office, I got the three of them together, and I asked them, What can we do to make the Tram safer? Instantaneously, the answer came back, Nothing. The Tram is as safe as this type of vehicle can be. There is nothing even suspect, and the odds of anything happening to the Tram are less than you getting hit by lightning.

Q: What about the cables - the track cables in particular?

MP: We examined the cable. We found only one area in one cable where there were several cracks, none of them even a minor safety hazard.

Q: These are tiny breaks in the tiny wires that make up the cables...

MP: Yes. The cable is made up of a group of wires that then are spun into a small rope called the strand, which is then spun into a cable or a rope.

The manufacturer of the cable has a very specific set of circumstances in mind, and a very specific set of specifications to do the job the rope is designed to do.

We found in the analysis that we did for all of the rope that we could test, which is everything except those parts that were right above the saddle - we found several individual cracks - one here, one there, which means nothing. In one of the ropes, we found 14 cracks, but they were not close enough together to produce any danger at all. These 14 cracks caused a possible loss of 1.25% of the theoretical breaking strength of the cable. Anybody with any cable experience will tell you that's a so what? There's no worry there.

I then asked the same question about reliability. I got the same immediate answer - that the Tram was an extraordinarily reliable device and there was essentially nothing to be done to make it more so.

Q: Let's talk about reliability. With the Island's population increasing and the subway's capacity at morning rush-hour having been reached, you don't want to have the Tram down. Most recently, there was a week-long slipping of the track rope, but there have been other times when the Tram has been down because it needed this, that, or the other. The argument for a separated system, as I heard it, is that you can have one
side of the system still running while the other is down for whatever work is to be done. That increases your reliability in terms of being able to be in service at all times - or almost all times. I think they said downtime would be very low - just one or two percent at most, with the new system.

MP: What we have now is a "jigback," which operates like a clothesline. The system with two separated sides is called a "funifor."

There's no question that two cabins that can operate independently can provide more availability than two in a tandem system, but the real question is, how much are we really increasing availability?

To find that out, I took the downtime records that RIOC had been keeping for the last seven years.

I divided the downtime into three types. One type we have no control over simply involves pushing a restart button to cure it. For instance, there are times when we've had to shut down the system because of lightning, or because of some terrorist threat, or something like that. No sense in thinking that the new system would do any better, so I just said, that's a tie game. Toss that aside.

Another category is scheduled maintenance, virtually all of which can be done between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m.

Q: Don't some of those things have to be done in daylight?

MP: None of the information I have would indicate that, but there may be some city operating code or union regulation that would mandate the hours in which this type of work can be done. We'll certainly respect that, but, even if we kept it in the time segments that it's in now, it wouldn't affect the numbers much at all.

The final category is downtime, where we have no control over the occurrence, and we need to get things fixed as quickly as possible. Over a seven-year period, I think there were 27 or 37 such instances. In my analysis, I conceded, the existing Tram cannot fix any of those. In that comparison, it loses.

So now, the question becomes, what are those, and how long do they last? I took RIOC's own data and, after correcting some errors they acknowledged were in it, I asked, how many of these occurrences would there be, statistically, based on historical data? The answer came out to be one a year. And how long would the interruption last? The data say 30 minutes.

So we're going through this escapade, hugely disrupting the daily lives of thousands, in order to avoid what statistics show would be one occurrence of a half-hour duration once per year. That's what the actual record shows for the last seven years of the Tram.

We're going through all this to eliminate, in all likelihood, one event per year lasting 30 minutes.

Q: Presuming all that is correct, it seems we're left with the $15 million that is available right now, which RIOC says may not be available next year or, perhaps more importantly, at the crisis moment when it's needed in the event of an unpredictable total Tramway failure and shutdown. An outsider might say it's a waste of state money. But looking at it from the perspective of a Roosevelt Islander, one might say, wait a minute, we've got a 30-year-old Tram - will it last another 30 years and, if we don't think it will and we can all agree that economic times are going to get harder and harder, should we not therefore take advantage of this moment of having more than half of the price of a new Tram available from the state?

MP: I have long since given up caring about the $15 million, except to the extent that it leads us down the path of doing something we don't need to do.

But the $15 million is, in round numbers, about one ten-thousandth of the state budget. So imagine that a year from now, we call our politicians and say, OK, we're ready, we have to replace the Tram now. What politician do you think would say, I can't get that money for you, but don't worry, come back and vote for me next year. What politician do you think would ever do that? And what political party do you think
would ever take out an infrastructural part of the New York City transportation system - for one ten-thousandth of the state budget?

Q: Let's talk about possible consequences if we don't do it. If we're comparing a new Tram that would last 30 years with asking the old Tram to last another 30, is there any sense that the old Tram might suffer an age-induced multiplying of its problems or their frequency? Any feeling that it's a good idea to do this because 30 years from now the existing Tram will be 60 years old?

MP: I don't think the answer has to do with whether the Tram is 30 years old or 30 seconds old.

The issue is, is the Tram capable of doing today what it was put in place to do 30 years ago? With the tests we've done, the answer is a resounding yes. Does that mean nothing will ever go wrong? No. But if you go by historical data, the likelihood is that something may happen. If it does, it'll happen once in a year, and if it happens once in a year, it'll last 30 minutes. That's what the statistical data show.

But let's assume that my calculation is 100% wrong. That says that, instead of having one incident of 30 minutes duration in a year, we're going to have two. Or one will be 60 minutes long, instead of 30. Is that worth taking the Tram down for a year and having all this inconvenience? It certainly isn't, in my book. But maybe other Islanders would say yes. I'm not arguing to have or not have a new Tram. What I'm arguing is what I've said from the very beginning: Whatever we do, it ought to be justifiable and explainable to the average person with the right perspective in simple language, and it should be supported by credible data. All the credible data I've seen says that we don't need to replace the Tram now.

Q: What about obsolescence, say, 29 years from now?

MP: Yes, some people will bring up the issue of obsolescence of certain parts, like for instance, the electronics. They'll say that the manufacturers who make those parts will, for lack of a marketplace, discontinue manufacture. and we won't be able to replace some parts. But there are a couple of easy remedies. The first is to predict which may fail in the next 10 or 20 years and buy a replacement right now. The second is to get one of the top electrical engineering firms to look at the system and give us some insight as to where they could get a part replaced if we needed to. There are firms with the same expertise and international reputation as Thornton-Tomassetti. A simple phone call can get them here to give us the advice we need.

Then, there are the "consumables" - things that are designed to wear out in service, because of the job they do or because they protect a more costly part with which they come in constant contact. When these parts need replacing, they simply get replaced. But you don't buy a new house because your electric mixer stops working. You replace that one piece of equipment.

Q: The new system has to be designed so that both cabins are never on tower 1, and never on tower 3, at the same time, because neither of those towers was built to support two at once.

MP: Right. There must be a guarantee that those cabins can never be simultaneously on tower 1 or tower 3. We have that guarantee right now with a jig-back system. With the proposed system, we'll have to make sure that the cabins are prohibited from arriving at towers one and three at the same time. The safest way is to build up towers 1 and 3 to the same capacity that tower 2 has. That's time and money, but is really the only way you can guarantee that everything will be okay in case of a simultaneous arrival. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Thornton Tomassetti insist on that approach.

Q: You've made the Board aware of your concerns?

MP: Yes, in January when I wrote a memo to Shane. I copied the Board on that.

Q: What about other residents? Do you think they agree, or understand your points?

MP: I don't know. If they do and they think it's OK, then I'm wasting my time and energy. If they don't, then they ought to ask for a complete objective explanation of what the alternatives are, and what they're getting in return for their money and their disruption.