Teaching Case: Should New York City (NYC) Build the Brooklyn Queens Connector (BQX) or Will it Soon Be Obsolete?

Abstract

Marc Andreessen (a co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, who was an early stage investor – either personally or via his firm - in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, LinkedIn and others) famously observed that software is eating the world, by which he means that every industry sector is being impacted by the confluence of ever declining computing and digital storage costs, combined with continual improvements in software. In the private sector the result has been the rise of firms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber and so on, with the simultaneous devastation of many traditional organizations (e.g., physical retail bookstore chains such as Borders Books, and/or many local newspapers) that were made effectively obsolete. We often think of this as a private sector issue, perhaps only impacting the public sector in terms of thinking about work force retraining and similar activities, but in truth this wave of obsolescence has implications for the public sector in areas we don’t normally associate with digital technology. For example, the rise of autonomous vehicles, and related technologies, may have important implications for the feasibility of big transport infrastructure projects, such as the BQX.