Maintainers III: Policy, Practice, and Care

Panel Description: The papers on this panel draw on historical and other approaches to examine the different maintenance needs of transportation systems over their lifecycles.

Paper Abstracts

Jung Eun Park: "Addressing Planning Fallacy in Infrastructure Investment Decision Making"

Infrastructure projects have been notorious for their inability to keep to budget. In an attempt to address cost overruns, the United Kingdom first adopted Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning theory to challenge biases in human judgement and reference class forecasting soon became mandatory in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the American Planning Association encouraged planners to use reference class forecasting in addition to traditional methods, but the practice has yet to catch on. Reference class forecasting was originally developed to cure honest mistakes in the private sector. Does it effectively work in the public sector where intentional misrepresentation is prevalent? By comparing major infrastructure projects in the United Kingdom and the United States, this research finds out whether notable estimating improvements have been made with reference class forecasting and what lessons we can learn from the British experience.

John Laurence Busch: "Steaming Quid Pro Quo: Early Waterway Maintenance during the First High Technology"

In 1807, an American named Robert Fulton built and ran the first commercially successful steamboat in history. In so doing, Fulton achieved something epically important: he proved that humans could create an artificial power that altered a person’s location to practical effect faster than by natural means. No other invention had achieved such a thing before, and accordingly, steamboats may be considered the first “high technology” in history. Fulton and his financial partner, Robert R. Livingston, also achieved something else quite important for themselves: they fulfilled the terms of the exclusive steamboating franchise granted to them by the State of New York. In fairly short order, other States decided that they too should grant exclusive franchises to entrepreneurs for the running of steamboats within their boundaries. But these States wanted something in return: they wanted maintenance. This paper and presentation will explore how different States in the Early American Republic addressed the opportunity of introducing a new technology while at the same time leveraging the abilities of the applicants to maintain waterways within a given State’s boundaries. It will then describe how this “steaming quid pro quo” came to an end. Finally, it will suggest that these 19th-century transportation maintenance solutions could be used as a means to re-examine the idea of giving States greater leeway in finding creative solutions to their 21st-century transportation maintenance challenges. The presentation will close by noting that similar compare-and-contrast exercises could be conducted on the other time-and-space-altering high technologies that followed steam-powered vessels.

Gerard Fitzgerald: "The Thirsty Iron Horse: Water Softening Technology and Steam Locomotive Infrastructure Technology in the United States 1900-1950"

The hills, mountains, valleys, rivers, and deserts of the nation created a seemingly never ending series of civil engineering challenges for railroads as the country embraced industrialization during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is less well known that as steam technology evolved, the water powering locomotives presented railroads with mechanical engineering and infrastructure problems that were just as complex. The history of American railroad approaches to water softening will be briefly reviewed to show how the nation’s railroads adopted a more scientific and economic approach to water use during the early 20th century. The national railroad system involved the movement of trains through a spectrum of ecosystems across the country that forced railroads to customize various water softening techniques to meet the geologic and meteorological nature of each locale. Technological and scientific response to the problem accelerated during the first two decades of the 20th century and most American railroads eventually began to employ chemists to oversee the composition of the water used to power steam locomotives, while simultaneously approving large-scale modifications to the numerous online water tanks and pumping stations and also financing the construction of new water softening and treatment facilities.

Amanda McMillan Lequieu: "Transportation Infrastructure Decline as Lived Metaphor in the American Rust Belt" (Advance Copy PDF Below)

This paper discusses the rise and fall of transportation as a lived metaphor for people who live in deindustrialized regions of the United States. It asks two questions: 1) what does transportation maintenance look like in a region of consistent economic decline? And 2) how do people who live in those regions understand transportation? This line of inquiry emerges as an unexpected theme emerging from a broader interview project. I conducted 90 interviews in two communities at opposite ends of a former, Midwestern steel commodity chain. In both a rural, iron mining community and an urban steel manufacturing neighborhood, transportation infrastructure emerged unbidden and central in interviewees’ descriptions of boom and bust. The late 19th and early 20th century construction of industrial transportation—rail, shipping, and roadways—was recalled with fondness by interviewees as facilitating the economic growth and cultural connection central to social thriving in these iron and steel communities. The closure of the anchor companies in these communities was the climax in interviewees’ narratives; the gradual decline (both intentional and natural) of industrial transportation infrastructure emerged again and again in interviewees’ stories as a visible, experienced, and emotional metaphor of the gradual disconnection and loss they experienced. References to declines in industrial transportation often segued to frustrations about the uneven distribution of public transportation (bus and passenger train) or highways. Declines in industrial transportation propelled massive depopulation in my case study regions; depopulation, in turn, caused declines in public transportation.

Matthew Hersch: "When the Upgrade Never Comes: Planned Obsolescence and the Challenger Disaster"

Published ten years after the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and its crew shortly after lift-off on January 28th, 1986, Diane Vaughn’s Challenger Launch Decision fixed upon NASA’s “normalization of deviance” to explain why the shuttle flew that day despite multiple warnings of problems capable of destroying it. Three years later, the second edition of Charles Perrow’s book Normal Accidents pushed this already bleak assessment of the space shuttle in an even more nihilistic direction by arguing that complex socio-technological systems like the shuttle are more-or-less doomed to failure despite the best efforts of those maintaining them. Yet while other technological systems likely behave as Vaughn and Perrow claim, Challenger was felled neither by maintenance failure nor its own complexity. In that case and the later loss of shuttle Columbia in 2003, it was a single component in each vehicle that failed—a gasket and a particularly brittle piece of the shuttle’s outer cladding—and these single-points-of-failure were known problems whose risks were well-understood from the program’s inception. The shuttle was not an otherwise reliable craft maintained too badly to work well. The problem was, as physicist Richard Feynman later concluded, that the shuttle worked exactly as it was designed: to give the appearance of a functional space vehicle until funds became available to build a less risky replacement. The space shuttle failed because it was designed to fail, the victim of a thirty-year wait for an upgrade that never came.

Panel Description: Maintenance and repair are essential and take myriad forms in transportation. The talks on this panel will give us in-depth studies of what transport maintainers do all day.

James Risk: "Innovating Maintenance or Maintaining Innovation?: Policy and Practice in the United States Lighthouse Establishment, 1789 - 1852"

In the ninth official act of Congress, the United States federal government assumed responsibility for maintaining the young nation’s lighthouses, buoys, and public piers. Over the next six decades, the United States Lighthouse Establishment contracted with individuals who possessed mechanical ability, but who at the same time lacked formal education in science and the arts. In the course of their daily activities of maintaining the coastal lights, those individuals made improvements to the lighthouse lamps and developed new technologies to aid in lighting the coast. These advancements were made under the guise of maintenance, leading many to overlook the innovative aspect of the improvements. This also led the United States Lighthouse Establishment’s unstated policy of privileging maintenance over innovation. The Lighthouse Establishment’s practice highlights one of the important debates in the history of maintenance and innovation - one does not exist without the other. The relationship between the two is cyclical. In the case of the United States Lighthouse Establishment, maintenance bred innovation which in turn required additional maintenance. Between 1789 and 1852, the Lighthouse Establishment’s administration politicized this debate. The government favored the thrift of the maintainers while more formally educated engineers criticized the administration for its poor maintenance. The engineers attributed the poor maintenance to the administration’s failure to innovate and keep pace with real technological advances in optical science and ultimately used the argument against maintenance to wrestle control of the Lighthouse Establishment away from the Fifth Auditor and the Treasury Department.

Liska Chan: "Making-do in Manhattan’s Chinatown"

Using Manhattan’s Chinatown as a case study, this paper will build on arguments around making-do, first as described by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life as “tactics,” a form of improvisation, expanding it to include Svetlana Boym’s notion of “diasporic intimacy” (Critical Inquiry 24, 1998) as an expression of care, and Shannon Mattern’s Places Journal (November 2018) article, which explores the value of maintenance as an alternative to, or a form of, innovation. It will show that making-do found in Chinatown places values of invention and adaptation above those which are normative and standard, production over that of consumption, informal over formal, and vernacular and personal over that which is designed and mass produced. On Chinatown’s streets one cannot walk 20-feet without encountering evidence of making-do, where readily-available and cheap devices such as tape, hose, string, and wire are utilized to make barriers, shelters, temporary awnings, splash guards, and walls. Making-do does not adhere to the norms of common practices of urban place-making. One notices it because of its contrast to normative forms, yet it is ubiquitous and a defining feature in Chinatown. A paper that closely examines the aesthetics of making-do in Chinatown is an important first step in unpacking not only how it is a distinct and important practice that shapes everyday life in lower Manhattan, but also how this little studied vernacular is a form of maintenance, a potentially subversive act of inventiveness and ownership, a resistance to assimilation, and an expression of key dynamics in immigrant cultures between identity, enfranchisement, and the claiming of urban space.

Andrian Deoancă: "Worker's Skin"

This paper examines repair technicians’ practical, symbolic, and affective interaction with dirtiness at a state-run depot that services locomotives for Romania’s public passenger rail carrier. Since the fall of state-socialism in 1989, the Romanian Railways Company, a monolithic powerhouse of the centrally planned economy, had undergone a process of vertical separation that safeguarded public rail enterprises from privatization, but also sent them in a deep economic slump. This double-edged process of state encompassment and state divestment inflates the importance of mending aging equipment that public enterprises can not afford to replace, and simultaneously renders workers’ bodies vulnerable to processes of material decay. The poor state of the machines, the ruination of the workshops, and the low-tech, manual, nature of their labor bring technicians routinely in physical contact with grimy, viscous, and abject materials that contaminate their skin. Although getting dirty is part of the job and a symbolic centerpiece of their masculinity, technicians talk about dirtiness in a morally charged idiom of “filth” that casts their degraded labor in terms of embodied disgust and social abjection. Informed by twelve months of participant observation in an electrical locomotive shop at the Bucharest Depot, this paper employs “skin” and “filth” as heuristic devices to explore the contradictions of maintenance labor in a post-socialist context of underfunded public services, crumbling infrastructure, and degraded workers’ identity.

David Ballard: "Maintaining while Improving on the Fly: The US Air Traffic Control System"

The National Airspace System (NAS) is a digital and physical infrastructure that provides a setting in which diverse private and public air transport activities can occur simultaneously. The collection of activities enabled by the NAS –the users of the NAS – is sometimes called the National Air Transportation System. This paper will examine some of the challenges and difficulties faced by an air transportation system comprised of increasing numbers of users with diverse levels of capability. These challenges take place in a dynamic environment, one in which total (commercial) air traffic is growing and at times becoming more concentrated at specific high demand airports. Such changes in system use will bring new challenges to those who operate and maintain the aviation infrastructure. This is especially exemplified in the need to increase the digital capabilities of the aircraft using (especially) the high demand airports, with parallel needs to improve airport and air traffic control technologies and capabilities – an exercise sometimes likened to changing an automobile’s tires while it drives down a highway. Achieving an acceptable level of system safety while serving the needs of NAS users and their customers relies on a large cadre of workers and managers who exhibit a wide array of responsibilities, specializations, and skills. These range from air traffic controllers to airport baggage handlers.

James Longhurst: "Meter Maids are Maintainers: A Research Plan for the History of Disputed City Streets"

If we think of urban streets as socio-technical systems meant to be shared between multiple users (i.e., as a commons), then maintenance of those systems includes not just care for the physical infrastructure, but also day-to-day management of the conflicts between those varied users. Without such daily care, the entire system fails; the commons cannot be shared without management. Why then have the human practitioners (including traffic police and majority-female non-police parking attendants) of this necessary maintenance been mocked, belittled and held powerless over the last century? As a historian of urban and environmental policy, I propose a new research project that links the spirit of the Maintainers with work in mobilities studies, active transportation advocacy, and urban planning. The current system of automobility fails to effectively share urban space between competing users without ill-health, massive social inequity, and fatalities. It takes the perspective of the Maintainers to fully understand why this is so.

Abstracts may be edited due to character limits