What did Roosevelt Island learn over the past several weeks of the Tramway crisis?  What have we yet to learn?

We know, for one thing, that even the best in the business can make a dumb mistake.  RIOC put American Tramways on the job because it has the credentials and the depth on the bench required to manage and maintain a system like our Tramway.  Even so, a single error turned a one-month shutdown into a hundred-day (plus) hiatus – bad enough for anybody, but a particular hardship on the disabled, who rely on the Tram as their only glitch-free ride to Manhattan.

On the other hand, we knew all along that perfection is reserved to the gods and denied all mortals.

So we learned that it pays to hire the best, but also to hope for the best.

Beyond that, we might seek another lesson in all this – one having to do with effective administration.

We can’t know all that went on behind the scenes as American Tramways struggled to recover from its mistake in cutting the replacement haul-cable eight feet short.  To be fair, we have to give the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation credit for moving things along.

Yet, even at day’s end Thursday, RIOC apparently was not aware that Red Blomer of American Tramways had quietly ordered a replacement cable.  That suggests that the working relationship isn’t as close as it should be, and that RIOC may not have been riding herd on the Tramway operator as closely as residents have a right to expect.

In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine engineers at the Department of Labor signing off on a Tramway modification that might later be blamed for an accident, even if it were not the proximate cause.  Why take a chance?  And why expect a State agency without a compelling interest in returning the Tramway to service to stick its bureaucratic neck out?

RIOC should have known, we think, that spare cables can be stored, as Website NYC10044 learned in some extended reporting this week.  That fact contradicted what Rob Ryan told residents back in January, and he was probably speaking without accurate guidance from his own staff and American Tramways.  Indeed, American Tramways’ interest was in avoiding the purchase of another cable, so it was convenient to allow Ryan to believe storage of a spare wasn’t an option.

So we hope RIOC has learned that closer and better-informed supervision is a worthy goal.

But for now, let’s just celebrate the imminent – we might hope – return of our beloved Tramway.

DL