Book Review: Politics across the Hudson: The Tappan Zee Megaproject

Although stories of large public works projects might not seem like high drama, they teach us many lessons about governance today. This is certainly the case with Philip Plotch’s account of the new Tappan Zee Bridge, a slow-developing project to replace the original structure that opened to traffic in 1955. The bridge crosses the Hudson River 17 miles north of the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan and is part of the New York State Thruway System.

The book presents a detailed account of several decades of mostly political events leading up to the project, and it offers several interesting themes for students of infrastructure history and policy. One theme is deteriorating infrastructure, with an original structure built to last 50 years reaching the end of its life and serving traffic that greatly exceeds its capacity at a time when plans to fix it were frustrated by political gridlock. Another theme is the rising difficulty of regional planning amid uncoordinated states, cities, special districts, and other authorities. Still another is bickering among politicians and interest groups that use the many available tools to slow progress as they seek to fulfill their own agendas. Lurking behind all of these is the essential question of how to pay for mega-projects that serve multiple purposes. If only one phrase was allowed to describe these themes, it might be infrastructure governance.

To this reviewer, the story is compelling because of personal experience of driving the original Tappan Zee bridge in the 1950s soon after its completion, crossing the other Hudson River bridges many times while driving to and from West Point during my cadet days at West Point, and, above all, seeing the nearby awe-inspiring Verrazano Narrows Bridge under construction in 1964. Maybe it is because I am a civil engineer, but there is something about great bridges that thrills me. My guess is, however, that you do not have to be an engineer to sense the same feeling about these majestic structures.

As the story of the Tappan Zee unfolds, we see how rapid growth in transportation demand was by the 1980s creating pressure to do something to relieve congestion. Dueling authorities were seeking ways to address the rising pressure, but the different agendas of the state thruway, transit authorities, and local governments kept frustrating efforts to address the shared issues. A signature conflict in agendas was between the New York State Department of Transportation (DOT), which sought solutions in demand reduction by ride-sharing, and the New York Thruway Authority, which had bondholders to pay from toll revenues. Another signature conflict was between the construction industry and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, which was seeking to reduce dependency on auto transportation. The evolving story also captures trends in transportation planning, such as the 1980s popularity of transportation management strategies like congestion pricing and high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes. A HOV lane proposal actually turned out to be a hot political issue, which was eventually defeated.

The story also reveals the styles of different governors along the way, beginning with Dewey who pushed for roads and bridges during the early 1950s. Later, Governor Pataki liked mass transit and wanted a rail line across the new bridge. According to Plotch, this plan created unrealistic expectations about a project that would have cost some US$16 billion and stretched out the planning period. During this era, many alternatives were floated, eventually reaching some 156 in all. This number was reduced to six by the fortunate intervention of technical planners in the state DOT. Governor Spitzer wanted to take firmer action in the 2007-2008 period, but he resigned and was followed by Governor Paterson, who seemed overwhelmed with debt problems and other issues in 2008-2010. Governor Andrew Cuomo is portrayed as action-oriented and a master at deals, while following a more insular decision style than his predecessors. The previous open style of governance had resulted in about 425 public meetings hosted by the project team over a 9-year period, and these were greatly reduced during the Cuomo involvement. Cuomo benefited from an Obama Administration decision to designate the bridge as high priority in 2011, which meant an expedited review process. Whereas in 2008, a New York State plan for a bridge with commuter-train tracks and lanes for high-speed buses faced a cost up to US$16 billion, in 2011, Cuomo and the Federal Highway Administration announced a bridge replacement project without transit estimated to cost US$5.2 billion. It was to be a double-span bridge (four lanes per span in opposite directions) with designated bus lanes and bike/pedestrian lanes. Construction started in 2013 and is scheduled for completion in 2018.

The author’s criticism of the project shows throughout the book, such as with comments about the difficulty in regional planning and lack of effective political leadership. He wraps this up with an acrostic of FAILURE, for

While each of these forces causing delay is no doubt important, the author chose to bear hardest on lack of leadership. This is, of course, an easy criticism to make. When you consider the daunting challenges, is it realistic to think that some charismatic leader could have taken on this challenge to complete the right project in a more-timely manner? After all, did the issue not need time to mature? Were the favored solutions of the 1980s and 1990s conducive to long-term solutions for the bridge? Where was the infrastructure czar like Robert Moses, the legendary New York City figure, who could bring order out of the chaos and wave a wand to create a solution? Does the lack of leadership criticism instead point toward an attribute of our governance system that makes planning and development continually more complex due to more regulations, more transparency, more activism and conflict, and more arguments over public funding of projects? Certainly, the case shows these trends, and they also occur in other public works conflicts that range from clean energy strategies to finding solutions to river management conflicts. The plain fact is that infrastructure politics, broadly defined, is a growth industry that reflects fractionalization in the political life of the nation today.

The author clearly thinks that a more integrated approach to transportation planning would improve things. One wonders exactly how he thinks this could occur, given the entrenched balkanization of the political landscape. He mentions his interview with Robert Caro, author of the The Power Broker, the account of Robert Moses’s great influence on New York City’s public works. He gives Caro credit for giving him insight into politics, economics, metropolitan governments, sprawl, and transportation. Moses is, of course, the poster child for hard-driving executives who are able to push projects through.

In his introduction to Moses’s (1970) treatise on public works, Raymond Moley wrote “ . . . all great public works have been somehow associated with autocratic power (p. 11).” Moley was a political economist who served in the New Deal but became a conservative Republican later. His contempt for orderly processes also shows through in his introduction to the book: “I am sure that Moses would agree with me that the pretensions of academic men to create what they call a ‘science’ of public administration is an exercise in futility.” One wonders what he would have thought about the 425 public meetings held during one phase of the project.

While the quest for “leadership” can sometimes be read as a hunger for an autocratic czar to decide things, another way to view the case of the Tappan Zee Bridge replacement is to see it as an exercise in systems thinking, if I can be permitted to use that term. Complex problems such as this can be mapped through the tools of systems thinking and we can see the transportation system of the region as a high-level system that breaks into smaller sub-systems of diverse kinds with many feedbacks, time-dependent processes, and players with varying degrees of influence. As the system churned through its successive phases, it exhibited a dynamic evolution of concepts, relationships, and decisions. It exhibited democracy and representative government at work. A return to simpler days where a Robert Moses could roll over the opposition and push a project through seems impossible and it is inevitable that shared power and effective administration will be the order of the day.

Plotch compiled a masterful summary of the many episodes and dynamics of this complex project. His interviews of more than a hundred key players led to the giant puzzle he found in the project. That puzzle creates a case study, which can be used by students of public administration and political science to understand how complex infrastructure problems are addressed through shared governance. Readers of this journal will appreciate the journey through the case, but lamentably the numbers of readers who will take time to plow through a volume such as this will be small. Such is the state of public involvement today, with so many confusing issues confronting the public. This conundrum is found in many places with rising complexity of issues and apparent falling capacity to address them. One can only hope and work toward greater public understanding and continuing improvement of governance in these rapidly changing times.