Room for Improvement – The Mobile Tower Crane Builds the Future

Before the mobile tower crane, there were some areas of the urban landscape that couldn’t be redeveloped. They had, of course, been developed in the first place – otherwise they wouldn’t have been a part of the urban landscape at all – but their location, and the ways in which they were developed first time round, made it impossible to get the big lifting vehicles necessary to rebuild, or modify, in place. Narrow streets, high buildings, tight corners, “down town” style city blocks – all emblems of progress that suddenly found themselves standing in the way of their own progress. By dint of their size, their shape or simply the difficulty of accessing their location (try building a tower crane in a one lane city street), these were urban locations condemned to stand motionless while the future passed them by.

And then the mobile tower crane came on the construction scene. A machine with the girth and lifting power of a static tower crane (those whacking great platform things with the boom arms and the huge blocks of concrete hanging off them as counter weights) – and the manoeuvrability of a truck. A mobile tower is basically a telescopic crane, complete with swinging boom arm and counter, mounted on the back of a very long wheel base, multi axle truck bed. Because the truck is turning on multiple axles, it can actually get into very tight corners indeed – an expert driver can pretty much make a right angle down a one way street with very little difficulty. The mobile tower crane also has a telescoping boom, which means it can be parked in a more convenient spot a couple of streets over, and extended across to the lifting area without even having to pull up there.

Because the mobile tower crane only need come in when the lifting part of an urban construction job is in progress, the disruption to busy areas of cities caused by rebuilding is significantly reduced. Disruption was always the other major obstacle to redeveloping tight urban spots – it’s all very well regenerating a down town type area, but what use is that if the whole rest of the block (or, more commonly, several blocks) has to be closed down for months? Using a mobile tower crane pretty much negates the need for road closure except during the week (for example) when actual lifting is taking place.

Cities, when they were built, were thought to be the future. Modern engineering, and modern life, has made it very evident that the future is never here – it’s always tomorrow, and it always involves rebuilding or improving stuff that was supposed to be the last word in awesomeness. That last word got stuck in the throat, for a while, when the construction industry realised that there wasn’t any room to get in and make improvements. The mobile tower crane, though, made that room for improvement possible again – and so the future can, once more, be built. The brave new world of modern progress is back on track.