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.

Bob Bennett, former chief innovation officer of Kansas City, Missouri, founded B2 Civic Solutions in 2019.

"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.

"Typically, government and the tech world are not interacting, so we sort of facilitate that," said Rachel Haot, the partnership's executive director and the former chief digital officer for New York City and New York State "Our goal is to identify ways that private-sector innovation can benefit public transit."

Rachel Haot was named executive director of the Transit Innovation Partnership, a public-private initiative of the MTA and Partnership for New York City, in March 2018. Photo taken 2015.

The partnership's Transit Tech Lab, an accelerator program for startups, enables companies to pilot their technologies with the MTA. Six finalists among 100 applicants are working with the authority to help speed up buses and better communicate the effects of delays on subway riders.

"These are not solutions in search of a problem," Haot said. "These are solutions that are responding to something that's been identified."

Both city and MTA officials also need to grasp with how rapid outer-borough growth and its related challenges affect operating and capital budgets. Roughly 70% of city job growth in the past decade has been outside Manhattan. Many of those areas are still transit deserts.

"What you're seeing is a diversification of our economy, [and] a diversification of where companies want to be," said William Rudin, whose Rudin Management Co.'s portfolio spans 16 office towers and more than 10 million square feet of prime New York real estate.

"The traditional Midtown-Downtown is now supplemented by Hudson Yards, Market South, Meatpacking and then spreading into the outer boroughs — Brooklyn, Long Island City [Queens] and the Bronx."

Related gentrification fears have triggered an emboldening of outer-borough interests.

"That's where we're seeing the pushback also against development, the anti-growth sentiment," said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City. "Historically these have been the bedroom communities, the middle-class communities, the source of affordability for people that didn't have the wherewithal for Manhattan."

A political firestorm followed last fall when Fortune 500 behemoth Amazon Inc. announced it would establish an additional headquarters in Long Island City, just across the East River from Manhattan. The tech behemoth pulled out two months later amid a political firestorm.

"We saw with Amazon, we're seeing with Industry City, a surge of anti-development sentiment that's coming not from a fear of growth, but a personal fear of displacement and we're obviously not dealing with it very well at this point," Wylde said. "We're not doing much to deal with these fundamental fears and as a result, extreme politics can play on them."

Joshua Schank, the chief innovation officer for Los Angeles Metro — which is planning a 40-year, $120 billion transit buildout and whose region is considering congestion pricing — cited a disconnect between tech pitches and agency needs.

"We need to change the way we're talking about them," said Schank, the former executive director of the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington.

"Autonomous vehicles are a great example. From a public-sector perspective, we need to look at how we can incorporate how we can reduce the number of people getting killed, right? But that's not how the private sector's thinking about it. They're selling it as a mobility revolution that's going to transform everybody's life.

"There are a lot of things that they want to accomplish that are not consistent with our public-policy goals, so we have to think about how we talk about them," Schank added.

In Boston, the seventh most congested city in the U.S. and home to the nation's oldest subway system, think tank Pioneer Institute is sponsoring a "better government" competition that includes a $10,000 grand prize to an idea that improves transportation and mobility.

The idea, Pioneer said, can be a new concept or a recently implemented program that shows promising results.

Pioneer began the competition in 1991. Past winners have included Purdue University's back-a-boiler income share agreement program; a Florida virtual school; and a unified permitting system for the redevelopment of Fort Devens, 40 miles northwest of Boston.

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here.
Infrastructure Public-private partnership New York
MORE FROM BOND BUYER