What makes a city smart: how it uses the data it already has
While gadgets and tech toys adorned the main exhibition hall at this week’s Smart Cities NYC conference in Manhattan, cities and agency officials focused on making technology work situationally.
“Any city can be a smart city right now with the data that they control,” said Bob Bennett, founder of B2 Civic Solutions and the former chief innovation officer in Kansas City, Missouri, regarded as a leader in the smart cities movement.
“When you want to know when a community is truly growing, you don’t have to put in brand new sensors or high-speed technology,” Bennett said. Governments, according to Bennett, already have data sets through new businesses, home additions, property value increases and school performance.
“You just have to leverage it.”
Podcast: Bob Bennett tells Paul Burton how governments can effectively use data: https://www.bondbuyer.com/podcast/any-city-can-be-a-smart-city
Reputations are at stake, according to Midori Valdivia, chief of staff to New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Patrick Foye.
The MTA, which operates the city’s subways and buses, is battling a series of crises that range from chronic service breakdowns to reports of employee overtime abuse, all of which have affected perceptions of the authority.
“In a time when institutions are dealing with this credibility gap, it’s so important for us to be really clear in our intent and our goals whenever we’re interacting with these kinds of private entities, and thinking about what does that product look like and how does it actually truly serve the customer, or are we doing some type of subsidy for technology companies, and we’re not interested in that game,” Valdivia said.
The MTA, which operates one of the nation’s oldest systems and is one of the largest municipal issuers with roughly $41 billion in debt, just received a financial shot in the arm through the state legislature’s passage of a congestion pricing package for Manhattan.
Technology for MTA officials is more about making century-old infrastructure work than about flying cars or robots in underground tubes.
Two miles from the Pier 36 conference venue in the same week, advocates discussed accessibility needs at the Lower Manhattan headquarters of civic organization TransitCenter. Quick-turnaround information is a vital infrastructure component, said Alex Elegudin, the MTA’s senior advisor for systemwide accessibility.
“Because [MTA unit] New York City Transit is on such a big push for digital information, we’ve got screens popping up everywhere if you live in New York City,” Elegudin said. “That’s potentially half the battle.
“Having screens that have dynamic information where you can control the content on the screens will help us, specifically for those who are deaf or hard of hearing; making sure everything we’re having is in text form; and for wheelchair users, making sure we have our latest elevator outage on those screens.”
Accessibility is one cornerstone of MTA New York City President Andy Byford’s so-called Fast Forward modernization plan.
“We would be remiss to focus on all the shiny new things that are out in the exhibit halls today if we were ignoring the back-to-basics philosophy,” said Tiffany Chu, co-founder and chief operating officer of Remix, a San Francisco startup that offers planning tools for public transportation officials. “What we realized is that in the age of all these new, shiny apps, there was a real hunger to fix the underlying backbone of our cities, which is the transit network.”
One of the MTA’s new initiatives is the Transit Innovation Partnership, a public-private undertaking with the business leadership organization Partnership for New York City.
