The recent Henry Hart Rice Urban Policy Forum at NYU Wagner School titled “What Makes New York Work?” featured Kate Ascher, the Executive Vice President for Infrastructure of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and also the author of a new book, “The Works: Anatomy of a City.” Ascher gave a light contrast of the old and the new structure of public infrastructure and utilities such as the mail system, power, subway, trash, sewage, clean water, maritime cargo, rail and freight. The pneumatic tube mail network illustrated in her book was one of the most fascinating “old” infrastructures that NYC had in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A piece of mail dropped at Herald Square took 11 minutes to get to the Met and 4 minutes to Grand Central. The audience was fascinated by this fact, though we all use email which travels much faster than this speed. Another fun factoid is that the current recycling plan which has been in place for about one year is similar to that designed by Colonel George Waring in 1895, where he ordered NY residents to sort their garbage. As there are many things that work in the city, there are plenty that do not. It is not an anomaly to find a broken payphone in the subway, pot holes as well as disconnected push-button traffic lights. Ascher’s research showed that about ¾ of those push-button traffic lights in the City are disconnected (and we all wonder why it takes so long for the light to change after pressing the button!). The City claims that it costs $400 a piece to remove them, so they decided to disconnect and leave them alone.
Undoubtedly, infrastructural problems faced by New York City are common to metropolises around the world. Half the world across, Beijing, also an old and glorious city, seems to have found a workable solution by employing the concept of mobile government or “M-Government.”
In 2004, the Dongcheng District created a two-tier municipal administration to manage its urban infrastructure using its GPRS network. The first tier is the Supervision Center. The district is divided into cells, each with supervisors patrolling with a mobile handset to check and report infrastructural problems. The information, including photo images is sent back to the Supervision Center with the position on the GIS. The Supervision Center then passes the information along to the Command Center to take appropriate action. The use of mobile technology encourages an effective coordination of supervision and enforcement in providing better public service. Currently, New York City has a 311 system that was put in place a couple of years ago. It is one of the most direct interface between the government and the public. The system relies on citizens to call in problems or things that need repair. It also serves as a conduit for disseminating information to the public. However, it is rather passive as compared to the m-government project in Beijing. If a 16-sq. mile Dongcheng District can use mobile/grid technology, all the more reason for a 22-sq. mile Manhattan to learn from this example and make use of the ICT sector.
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