Car Science: midtown madness
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It's this week's news edition which means we get to talk about how everything is unmitigatedly terrible for a few thousand words. This week's edition has the benefit of everything being unmitigatedly terrible but for once it's not the overwhelming sense of lack of agency in the face of a climate crisis, it's that all landlords should be in jail. Which is much more of a direct outcome and so consider this the feel-good garage fatality newsletter where we take on myths and the property-hoarding classes. And talk about concrete.
Last week a 98-year-old parking lot in Manhattan collapsed. Video and photos hit Twitter quickly, with people keen to point to the size of the cars visible on the roof of the building and whether the weight of EVs could be causing older structures to suffer and collapse. Then it turned out the building owners had multiple structural violations out against it, some of which were still unresolved.
Before we get into all that, let's just say: if EVs were causing structural problems for parking lots then it'd still be on the landlords to accept they either had to limit the number of cars in there, keep EVs on the ground floor or do structural work that would prevent the place collapsing.
If you run a parking lot that cannot structurally support the cars that are being parked in there that's on you, buddy and it's your job to prevent your workers being injured and killed, not the fault of Big Rivian or whatever.
The Manhattan parking lot incident resulted in a man's death because his employers didn't give him a safe working environment and there's no mitigating factors, be it car weight or building age, that let them off that hook. Fuck those guys.
Now: was it to do with EVs? Let's settle in.
There is, it's gotta be noted, a tendency for even the most woke liberals to get heavy handed about EVs causing accidents. Like awhile back, when we were looking at the I-Pace transporter fire that was nothing to do with the EVs and entirely to do with truck brake maintenance and depot negligence. Truckers knew that, anyone looking at the origin point of the fire could see that but by the time it'd ripped through Twitter not unlike a 2,000C inferno, what everyone had read was: EVs spontaneously go on fire because of the batteries.
The truth doesn't matter after a certain point because people have got something else in their heads that makes enough sense. People know that EVs sometimes catch fire - if their batteries are pierced or they're subject to extremes of temperature, like another, external source of fire or because they were built by Tesla. People don't know that truck brakes can get so hot they ignite the truck tyres, which once there's a rolling burn can set fire to first the brakes then the actual steel holding the truck together. That happens way more often than EVs going on fire and it's why truck companies have a duty to perform regular brake maintenance but it's both less interesting and less instantly able to understand.
Which brings me to the Manhattan parking lot. Or rather, to 1925 when it was built. Back then the car of the day was the Ford Model T, which had a kerb weight of 750kg. That's 25kg lighter than my Twingo, so it would be fair to say is not very on par with modern vehicles, which tend to be in the region of two or three times that. Take the Ford F-150, for instance; it's been the bestselling "car" in America for decades and its lightest current iteration (petrol engine) weighs 2,111kg unladen.
Cars in the US currently weigh the most they ever have - like everywhere - but the difference in the US has been much less sharp than in Europe. In the 70s the average US car weighed 1,841.5kg. Now it's 1944.5kg - that's more than 100kg and not a small amount but that's how much European cars have bloated by in just the last decade.
That's a lot more dramatic but you don't hear all that much about EU car parks collapsing. In the US, though, this happens a bunch. Just in the recent past there's been this high profile one in Manhattan, one in Baltimore last July and another deadly one in Boston in March 2022.
I haven't seen an assessment of, specifically, parking garages but the US has some pretty extreme infrastructural problems - so does the UK, where I live and I did get the full nostalgic hit of nearly falling through a bridge in Tbilisi last month, so this isn't particularly judgemental it just happens to be a fact. As of 2019 there were 47,000 (yes, forty seven thousand) bridges that were known to be structurally unsound in the US.
That seems bad, whatever way you put it. Call in the Goatman, for these devils are not maintaining their bridges.
With parking garage collapses they're so common they get kind of cute little names like The Picciano Parking Garage Collapse and the March 26 Government Centre Parking Garage Collapse and now this one's called the Manhattan Parking Garage Collapse 2023. Would it be better if something deadly and entirely preventable did not get titled like a natural phenomena? Sure but this is America.
Anyway, back to Manhattan: as pretty quickly emerged, the structure had been cited for repeated violations, including ones that would compromise its structural integrity.
So: is it about the cars or is it about landlords being giant pieces of shit? Well, as I opened this newsletter with: either way, it's the latter. Literally if you're running a business it is your fucking job not to kill your employees and RIP the poor guy who got murdered by his bosses.
But: what, given clearly bosses and landlords want the right to be negligent pieces of shit, could prevent this? Well, hey, remember a few weeks back when we were talking about concrete. Or more specifically, talking about talking concrete. Well, what if a building or bridge or whatever could tell you when it's at it's fucking limit? And then repair itself to save your negligent ass?
Enter the Centre for Intelligent Infrastructure at Purdue university. As previously discussed, this is one context where being smart makes sense; fuck the lettuce in the fridge, it is genuinely useful to know when your bridge might go off.
Last time we talked about concrete that might know when it's rigid enough to be structurally sound; this time let's talk about concrete that knows when it's fully fucked. And could potentially repair itself.
Self-healing composites are one of those semi-real things that aren't total vapourware but are a long way off actually happening. Places where they have is like, the grille of the BMW iX (my girlfriend, do not insult her) but where it could actually make a huge financial and infrastructural difference would be in stuff like bridges.
Unfortunately, self-healing concrete isn't quite there yet. But: sensors that can tell you (or preferably, some authorities who are more responsible than you, if you're a negligent landlord) when your crap-ass concrete is about to collapse so you can't ignore it are actually real and viable, hooray.
The same scientist as with the roads, Luna Lu, who's a hero in the concrete world and yes I am trying to interview her for a podcast, is working on exactly that. And maybe it's the 'this coffee is hot' warning of a lawsuit not actually a fix for people being maliciously terrible but hey, it's a start.
Anyway: hopefully now you're up on why collapsing buildings on employees is wrong. Grab a guillotine, we're meeting on Saturday.
See you on Friday for an edition about robot road rage.
Hazel
x
ps: as an aside, if you follow me on Twitter you'll know I am a big fan of Buzzfeed Unsolved/Watcher and I'm now intensely charmed by the idea of Goatman Steve (apparently the terrifying, demonic Goatman's name) as a frustrated entity taking over bridges because they're in shambles. you call this a liminal space? a fucking portal? you jokers, it's got five structural violations in the first ten feet.