newport bridge – RI Future

August 21, 2015August 24, 2015

Would suicide barriers remove hopelessness for bridge jumpers?

Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /hermes/bosnacweb08/bosnacweb08bf/b1577/ipg.rifuturecom/RIFutureNew/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 4387

JamestownBridge — The Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge. (Bob Plain)

I work on the water just south of the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge in the West Passage of Narragansett Bay. On most days, I enjoy the best views of Rhode Island. Recently though, it became the most tragic scene I can imagine.

From our boat, we noticed a car parked at the apex of the expanse, 135 feet above the water. There were several other cars stopped a little farther along, and through binoculars I could see people running toward the center. As we motored over, police cars and a fire engine arrived on the scene.

By the time we got close to the bridge, there was a body floating in the water. The harbormaster and Coast Guard lifted it into a rescue boat and raced off towards Plum Beach in North Kingstown, presumably the easiest place to meet an ambulance, though the haste was unfortunately a formality. The body had been floating face down for at least several minutes, what seemed to me like a lifetime. Another person had taken their life by jumping off a bridge in Rhode Island.

This was the second suicide from the Jamestown Bridge this year, according to statistics kept by the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority. There has been one suicide so far on the Newport Pell Bridge and one on the Mount Hope Bridge. No one has committed suicide from the new Sakonnet River Bridge this year, but there has been one attempted suicide. In 2014, there were four suicides and 11 attempted suicides on RITBA bridges. Since 1980, there have been 36 suicides and 92 attempted suicides from the Newport Bridge, and 24 suicides and 25 attempts from the Mount Hope Bridge.

Bridge jumpers, as these suicidal souls are sometimes called, are a small percentage of the self-inflicted deaths that occur in the Ocean State every year. In 2014, there were four bridge suicides and 116 suicides in total. But jumping from a bridge may well be the most public form of suicide.

“You may end the pain for yourself but you spread it to so many other people,” said Denise Panichas, the executive director of the Samaritans of Rhode Island. “There are so many people affected … from the 911 operator, to the bridge employees and first responders and harbormasters and the people on and around the bridge.”

The Samaritans are famous for maintaining a hot line for desperate people to talk to other people. In places where there are high bridges, like Rhode Island, they also maintain highway signs urging people to call the hot line, and Panichas says they have proven effective.

“Everyone knows us from our signs on the bridges,” she said. “The signs have been up close to 38 years, almost as long as we’ve been around.”

The Samaritans of Rhode Island also sponsor the annual “Cross the Bridge to Hope” charity event. Participants run or walk over the Newport Bridge – which also boasts some of the state’s best views – to help raise money for suicide prevention in Rhode Island. You can support Team Samaritans by clicking here.

“So it’s both our curse and our hope,” Panichas said of the bridges.

The same could be said of the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority.

“We are well aware of how serious an issue this is,” said James Manni, director of operations, safety and security for RITBA. Addressing it, he said, is a priority – including adding a new in-service training program with the Samaritans.

“We’ve had some basic training in the past but we actually want to take that a step further,” Manni said. The new training will include “proper protocols to follow, and also the proper things to say and do if you do encounter a suicidal subject.”

RITBA employees are often the first to learn of a suicidal person on a bridge, and sometimes the last to see them alive. Bridge workers have witnessed jumpers in person, and via security cameras, Manni said.

Manni was a Rhode Island State Trooper for 25 years before becoming head of security for the bridges. In 2001, a woman drove through a toll booth four times while he was parked there. “When we left within five minutes she jumped off the Newport Pell Bridge,” he said. “So we were being a deterrent without even knowing it.”

There are other deterrents, besides human presence and signage.

suicide barrier sagamore — Suicide barrier on the Bourne Bridge near Cape Cod. (Bob Plain)

The Sagamore and Bourne bridges, that connect Cape Cod to the rest of Massachusetts, each have high fences that bend inwards, making jumping a much more difficult endeavor.

Stephanie Kelly, the executive director of the Samaritans on Cape Cod and the Islands, says the “suicide barriers” have been extremely effective at reducing the number of bridge jumpers.

“We’ve had one in five years,” she said. “1,000 percent I think they’ve been effective.”

The Bourne and Sagamore suicide barriers were the brainchild of Monica Dickens, who founded the Samaritans in the United States and in Cape Cod, said Kelly. “One of the most incredible things she did back then was realize that the Bourne and Sagamore bridges were meccas of suicide,” she said.

In 2012, Ithaca, New York, in conjunction with Cornell University, installed so-called “suicide nets” below bridges near gorges that had become suicide hot spots. 27 people, 15 of whom were students, committed suicide in the upstate college town between 1990 and 2000.

And the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco plans to install a $76 million stainless steel net 20 feet below the bridge that would extend out 20 feet on both sides. People can still jump, but the fall won’t be fatal.

GGBridge_suicidebarrier_net-1024x768 — Photo illustration of stainless steel mesh net to be constructed under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. (Golden Gate Transportation District)

“Ever since the bridge was built we’ve had an issue with people committing suicide,” said Priya Clemens, a spokeswoman for the Golden Gate Transportation District. In 2014, there were 38 confirmed suicides and 161 attempts on the bridge, she said. Unlike bridges in Rhode Island, the Golden Gate Bridge is open to pedestrians. It is 3.1 miles long. The Newport Bridge is 2.1 miles and the Jamestown Bridge is 1.3 miles.

The suicide nets, said Clemens, are “something we wanted to a for a long time but we didn’t have the political will. Our board was willing to say this is a big public safety issue.”

Manni said RITBA has considered barriers and nets, as well.

“This is something that has been looked at and considered,” he said. “We are not opposed to that at all. We are willing to do anything to make this situation better.”

To date, RITBA doesn’t think barriers are the answer.

“By the time someone is standing on the center span of a bridge, you are pretty far into it,” said Manni. “We want to reach people before that.”

Panichas, of the Samaritans, said, “I am not an expert in the effectiveness of barriers. I’ll leave that to the experts.” But that she would prefer resources be put towards prevention and wellness. “In the end it’s about access to care,” said Panichas. “Medical care, a caring community and a caring family. Don’t look at the method. I’d rather they take that effort and put it into care.”

She added, “There are three things we know about the truly suicidal. They feel hopeless, they feel that no one cares if they live or die and they think they will be doing everyone a favor if they die. Do barriers remove the hopelessness? I always question whether a barrier on a bridge will remove the hopelessness.”

January 14, 2014

Why user fees make sense for roads

Deprecated: Function get_magic_quotes_gpc() is deprecated in /hermes/bosnacweb08/bosnacweb08bf/b1577/ipg.rifuturecom/RIFutureNew/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 4387

Several times in the course of Twitter conversations, C. Andrew Morse of Anchor Rising has challenged my claim that user fees (for example, tolls) are a conservative method of paying for a road. I challenged him to back that statement up.

Morse states his case this way:

1. Conservatives in general believe that public good provision is in the set of things that government should do well…
Breaking public goods into individual transactions isn’t, in general, the best way to provide them…w/public good being used in its economic sense here, not to mean “anything that it might be good for the public to have”.

I think it’s easy enough to understand why liberals would feel discomfort at the idea of tolls (although they’re wrong). The idea sounds an awful lot like “I pay for mine, you pay for yours. We’re all individuals.” In a proximate sense this is exactly how the system works for the road in question, but believing in tolls does not commit one to the belief that people don’t have a universal right to certain basic access to sustenance. I would go so far as to say that as a progressive, I believe in a universal right to transportation–with cars as part of that mix. I do not however, either as a progressive or as someone who respects the power of markets to rationalize the distribution of goods, believe that we have a universal right to cars.

Adam Smith referred to the diamond-water paradox. This is the idea that something like a diamond, with virtually no practical uses (Okay, well, some…) is precious, while something as life-affirming as water can cost next to nothing. I think a road in some sense can be understood through this lens. Though not as precious a thing as water, roads are desperately needed for the functioning of an economy, yet despite their intrinsic value they are judged by most of us to be free.

Water is actually a good example to start with. We should have a universal right to water. A person needs a gallon of it each day to drink, and several gallons more each for sanitation, cooking, and so forth respectively. As a progressive, one should commit oneself to the idea that it is wrong for any person, no matter what their faults, to do without such a basic thing. But when we give away millions of gallons of the stuff to farms as a supplement to agriculture, it’s not the same thing. This goes beyond providing the basic needs of every individual towards a more blanket subsidization of a private interest. Such a subsidy has serious consequences on the market efficiency of our agricultural system. It distorts any self regulation of environmental impact due to water usage that might be expected to happen from cost. And it’s unfair: a farmer who does not receive this subsidy will be at a disadvantage to one who does, making this type of subsidized farmer a special protected class that sits outside of the normal realities for others in his/her industry.

Healthcare is another example. I believe that progressives are wrong to expend so much effort defending the flawed Affordable Care Act, because from my perspective it’s basically a bail-out of the insurance industry. There are beneficiaries on the other side (I’ll be one). But to quote the late John Kenneth Galbraith, one does not feed the birds first by passing the oats through a horse. I’d go a bit further than Galbraith. His criticism was that we shouldn’t use a private entity to provide a public good. I would universalize his statement. We shouldn’t argue for a policy because it has secondary or tertiary beneficiaries if the structure of the program is inefficient at providing those benefits. A free market or a single payer system both have advantages for provision of healthcare. The ACA essentially takes away the benefit of either.

If you assume that just as one has a basic need for water, one also has a basic need for transportation, then naturally you will follow that conclusion correctly to the result that government should have some collective role in providing for this need. Yet, just as in the case of water, while one has an overall right to access, that does not grant one the right to be given more than the basics. We should laugh at a policy of taxing everyone for highways and then leaving them free at the source of use just as we would laugh at a policy to tax everyone equally to provide the “public need” of a Mercedes for every household, or to “provide for public housing” by buying a Newport Mansion for every household (Okay, I suppose in the case of Alex & Ani, that’s exactly what we did, but I digress).

Markets have a place in our decision-making about roads, because like every other thing under the sun, roads have a cost and a benefit. Too often, progressives and conservatives alike talk about their respective programs as if the money rains from On High without coming from someplace. Take this Atlantic Monthly article excoriating Chris Christie for his transportation policies as an example from the left. Overall I agree with it, but then there’s this passage:

A staggering 400,000 people make the trip from New Jersey to New York each day by car, train, bus, and ferry, the most that commute between any two states. That exhausting journey gets messed up any time a choke point gets blocked (say, by a power problem in the Amtrak tunnel, or, in this case, the closing of several toll lanes in Fort Lee). For the typical Jersey commuter, it’s a rare week that passes without a glitch.

The ARC tunnel had been designed to relieve some of the enormous pressure on the few bridge and tunnel crossings between New York and New Jersey, where demand is expected to rise nearly 40 percent by 2030. The tunnel had bipartisan support from state lawmakers, and former Governor Jon Corzine, a Democrat, broke ground on the project in 2009 to much fanfare. Construction was already well underway on ARC, the biggest public works endeavor in the nation’s history, when Christie pulled the plug.

The federal government had committed to pay for 51 percent of the project, which had estimated costs in the neighborhood of $10 billion. Then-Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, Ray LaHood, made a personal trip to New Jersey to plead with Christie to reconsider his stance.

But Christie stood firm, winning kudos from Republicans across the nation as a tough-minded conservative who was willing to make difficult choices about reining in government spending. It was his breakout appearance on the national scene, and a lot of people liked what they saw.

Two years after Christie killed ARC, a report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office came out that suggested what he had said about the cost of the tunnel was wrong. Among other things, the report found that he had dramatically overstated the share that New Jersey would have had to pay. Christie had claimed that the state would be responsible for 70 percent of the ARC costs, while the GAO found that number would have been 14.4 percent. The state ended up having to repay $95 million to the federal government in a negotiated settlement. (my emphases)

This is the kind of statement you see on left and right all the time: an accounting of costs that talks about “how much the state will pay” after the feds throw in their share, as if the federal part of the expenditure doesn’t matter. I fully agree that this was a project that was well worth its cost, but this is just bad accounting. The people of New Jersey are not just taxpayers in New Jersey. They also pay federal taxes. If a project is good on its own merits, then so be it. But if we’re arguing that it’s good because someone else is supposedly paying for it, we’re fooling ourselves (You can count on conservatives like John Kasich of Ohio to make the same type of ridiculous argument in defense of a project like the so-called Opportunity Corridor in Cleveland, so it’s a bipartisan disease).

If local and state governments thought about road projects in terms of the costs they carried, as well as the benefits, then the way we approached roads would be very different. Chuck Marohn of The Strong Towns blog makes this argument forcefully every week on his podcast. An engineer, Marohn was drawn to express himself on planning by what he observed on the job. He found that time and again, cities and towns allowed sprawl to be built for the benefit of the jobs, tax revenue, or outside grants that it would draw in its first iteration, without considering the long-term cost of maintaining the expensive infrastructure when it wore out. By building towns on large lots, one story high, with wide expanses of road, plumbing, and electrical connections connecting them at a distance, Marohn argues that the fantastic appearance of growth belies the fact that there isn’t enough revenue to cover long term costs. This has obvious importance to progressives concerned about land use policy and “alternative” transportation, but it’s fundamentally an example of where the basic mechanism of the market has been distorted by outside government interference.

Road pricing can be used to sustain the long-term costs of a project, like the Sekonnet Bridge, not only from a supply but a demand side. People’s peak demand for a “free” service is always higher than if they had to pay its costs. Jarrett Walker of Human Transit describes this as being like the people who sleep out in tents all night to get free tickets to a concert. The campers are paying in time what they might pay in money. This is what happens to people on a clogged road. The “free” (actually subsidized) use of the road has no check on people’s use of it, so that people pay in time during their commute for what they might have paid for in money.

Road pricing is only part of the externality of driving. Parking is among the most expensive aspects of a trip for most people, outweighing gas expenditures for the trips we make everyday (because so many of those–the commute to work, the trip to the grocery store, picking the kids up from soccer practice, are relatively short). We have a range of zoning requirements that force developers to create excess parking spots to meet a Christmas Eve peak demand, with the base assumption being that such parking spots are free (in reality, they average around $15,000 per space).

While making car users pay for the things they use, like road space or parking, has been portrayed by many so-called conservatives as “taxing”, in reality what is happening is that the users of a product do not pay for it at the point of consumption. Since most Americans drive to work, this might seem untroubling–after all, if we paid for these things up front, wouldn’t it mostly pan out the same way that it does if we did secretly through taxes? The error in this assumption is that the arrangement of our buildings, the distances we choose to travel, the methods we would use when we do travel, and so on are all static phenomena. The tragedy of the commons in this case is that the few people who try to break against the tide and ride a bicycle or take a bus someplace are left high and dry with no real infrastructure to support them, despite the fact that their way of getting somewhere is inherently more market-based and efficient.

What’s far more precious than a diamond is our ability to survive and thrive on this planet. But if we’re going to overcome the devastating effects of climate change, we need to address the market distortions in our transportation and land use.

It’s sound conservative policy.

~~~~

June 21, 2013December 13, 2015

Summer scup fishing under the Newport Bridge

Even on the summer solstice, there is rarely a Jamestown resident at Taylor Point, sometimes called “pew view” because of its proximity to the sewage treatment plant. But it’s one of the more popular fishing spots for those who come to Conanicut Island from the mainland.

He's happy about his scup. — He’s happy about his scup.