Podcast: The Infrastructure Show

The New York State Thruway Authority is replacing the 6-decades-old Gov. Malcolm Wilson Tappan Zee Bridge north of New York City. To accelerate completion of the New NY Bridge, fast-tracked environmental permitting, procurement and labor agreements were combined with design-build contracting to advance a plan discussed for more than a decade to a new bridge opening in 2018. In this podcast we talk with David Capobianco, Director of Structural Design for the Thruway Authority about the features of the bridge and the process for delivering it

There are many floating bridges in use around the world, but the Seattle region has three large bridges of this design. The State Route 520 Bridge over Lake Washington, the Gov. Albert D. Rosellini Bridge, is the longest in the world. Heavily used and assaulted by wind and waves for more than five decades, this bridge has been replaced by a new facility. Here to tell us about this large and complex project is Julie Meredith, Washington State DOT Administrator of the SR 520 replacement program

The Gateway Program is a collaboration between Amtrak, the states of New York and New Jersey, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the U.S. Department of Transportation to address the rail bottleneck between New Jersey and New York, the busiest rail passenger corridor in the U.S. At the core of this program is construction of new twin rail tunnels under the Hudson River. These will supplement the 108 year old existing rail tunnels, which were damaged during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and which have insufficient capacity to meet the growing demand. In this discussion we learn about the Gateway Program and plans for these new rail tunnels from Andrew Galloway, Chief of Corridor Development at Amtrak

Water needs for municipalities and agriculture can intersect and sometimes conflict. In this third interview in the series exploring some of the nation’s water challenges, we talk with Bill Stowe, General Manager of the Des Moines, Iowa, Water Works, who describes the problems that drainage of chemicals, principally nitrates, from nearby farms affects the quality of input waters and the treatment technologies and costs of potable water. Driven in part by substantial advances in agricultural productivity, solutions may lie in adjustments in farming technologies and regulatory actions that address the externalities of large-scale agriculture

Water infrastructure issues are much in the news in the U.S. — not only in the West, where drought continues to take a high toll, but also in other parts of the country, where the water needs for municipalities, energy production, commercial interests, and agriculture intersect and sometimes conflict. In this interview, one in a series of three exploring some of the nation’s water challenges, we talk with Bob Yamada, Director of Water Resources for the San Diego County Water Authority, about the mix of strategies adopted to meet the growing needs of the authority’s customers, and the new Carlsbad Desalination plant. This advanced technology reverse osmosis facility was built, financed, and will be operated through a public-private partnership under a water purchase agreement to serve the region for the next three decades.

Water infrastructure issues are much in the news in the U.S. — not only in the West, where drought continues to take a high toll, but also in other parts of the country, where the water needs for municipalities, energy production, commercial interests, and agriculture intersect and sometimes conflict. In this interview, one in a series of three exploring some of the nation’s water challenges, we talk with Robert Glennon, Regents’ Professor and Morris K. Udall Professor of Law & Public Policy at the University of Arizona, author of Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It. Prof. Glennon discusses the trade-offs between competing demands for water, the conflicts in allocation, and strategies for both conserving and sharing scarce water more effectively.

New and stronger concretes have become the standard material for very tall buildings, particularly residential buildings, where structural stiffness is important for the comfort of occupants. In this interview, Paul James, Senior Vice President with Lendlease U.S. Construction in Chicago, talks about the tradeoffs in design and materials selection as a function of use of the structure, the rate limiting factors in the construction of tall concrete and steel buildings, the effects of weather on construction speed, and the role of the construction engineer in material specification

New and stronger concretes have become the standard material for very tall buildings, displacing steel in structural design. These concretes bring higher, selectable strengths and workability properties that make them particularly efficient and effective for architectural megastructures. In this interview we learn about designing tall concrete buildings in a conversation with architect and structural Joseph G. Burns, who is Managing Principal with the design firm Thornton Tomasetti in Chicago

Concrete is among the oldest of building materials; for example, it was the principal material in the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, completed in 128 AD. Research and innovation have led to radical changes in concrete and its applications, particularly over the past 30 years. These changes have made it possible to use concrete for the tallest buildings in the world, buildings that, only a few decades ago, would have been built of steel. In this first in a series of three podcasts we examine the science of concrete to understand the material itself, and how research has changed its properties to facilitate important new uses for concrete, particularly for megastructures. We learn about new concretes from Emeritus Professor Surendra P. Shah of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois

Breaking the Freight Bottlenecks for the Expanded Panama CanalThe effectiveness and efficiency of a marine port is closely tied to the performance and capacity of the landside transportation network that moves goods to and from ships. The expanded Panama Canal, designed to handle significantly larger ships, will challenge U.S. Atlantic and Gulf ports with those larger ships and the resulting higher rate of flow of products in and out of ports. Assuring sufficient landside capacity is a task shared by the private sector (both railroad companies and intermodal terminal operators) and governments responsible for the highway network. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) has formed a stakeholder group to identify and address the needs of shippers, carriers, and ports along the Texas Gulf Coast. TxDOT has been investing in expanded roadway infrastructure to ease key bottlenecks, particularly those affecting the major port of Houston. In this discussion, Professor Schofer explores some key activities of TxDOT with Caroline Mays, Freight Systems Branch Manager for TxDOT