Business: America the Inefficient

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Brother in Washington. In the San Francisco area, the Bay Area Rapid Transit authority (BART) is a three-county agency that was supposed to build a mass-transit system for the entire region by 1968. Snarled in squabbles among the municipalities, and hampered by unrealistic cost estimates and design blunders, it will not be completed until 1972 at the earliest. Among its ludicrous inefficiencies, BART has somehow managed to lose 100 lampposts, a total of 200,000 lbs. of metal costing $150,000. Workmen pulled them from a street that was being torn up for a new subway line, and BART's managers just cannot find them.

In Chicago, the Transit Authority early this year opened a 5.2-mile new subway and surface line. In the first ten days, there were four derailments and one collision, injuring more than 40 people. Chicago Daily News Columnist Mike Royko was moved to write: "Everybody agreed that it had indeed been a big event in transportation history, ranking right behind the voyage of the Titanic and the landing of the Hindenburg."

In the Northeastern U.S., ever costlier commuter trains make fiction of their timetables and livestock of their passengers. In cold or wet weather, the cars can be counted on to run as much as three hours late, providing bumpy rides in often unheated or brutally overheated trains. The creaky commuter lines serving Boston eat up so much in subsidies that State Senator Mary Fonseca has suggested that Massachusetts might save money if it bought autos for commuters instead. Particularly in Manhattan, the commuting fiasco has cost business uncountable lost man-hours of work and all sorts of extra expenses (example: hotel bills of managers who are forced to stay in town overnight). The transit snarls have led to marital quarrels, cold dinners, a feeling of nonrecognition between father and son, and the phenomenon of the weekend that begins at 2 p.m. Saturday, when the commuting father finally wakes up. Suburban psychologists are making a tidy business of treating real or imagined commuter ailments—general nervous tension, depression, and in a few cases, sexual impotence. Burton H. Mandel, an advertising executive, is suing the Long Island Rail Road for $50,000 in damages for causing him to suffer "commuter neurosis."

The Sinking Skyscraper

Private enterprise, which prides itself on being superior to Government bureaucracy, unfortunately seems to be becoming more like the Government every day in the inefficiency department. The building industry is notorious. When workmen put in the concrete floor of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center of Los Angeles County, someone forgot that space was supposed to be left for parts of the air-conditioning system. Result: the concrete had to be broken up with air hammers. Another odd thing happened one year after construction started on Chicago's 100-story John Hancock Building: it began to sink into the ground. Air pockets had developed in the concrete caissons on which "Big John" rested, for reasons that the courts are being asked to determine. Workers spent the next five months tearing down two stories of steel framework and refilling the caissons. Cost: $1,000,000.

The fruit of these foul-ups is frustration for millions of Americans—and a desire to duplicate the heroics of the man who fired a pistol shot into a vending machine.