Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, April 25, 2010
Citiwire.net

How does a metropolitan region project – and then plan – for its future? How was it done in the 20th century? And what’s new for the 21st?

I have a simple answer. For 20th, the word was infrastructure. For the 21st, it needs to be innovation.

That’s why the Regional Plan Association, where I work, decided to focus its 20th Annual Regional Assembly this month on new technologies that are radically more efficient, and promise significant cost-savings for cash-starved regional systems.

Our historic concentration, including three landmark regional plans – in 1929, 1969 and 1996 – focused on hard infrastructure such as transit lines, electricity, water supply, and especially early in the century, on accommodating automobiles. (Our 1929 document, for example, proposed 2,500 miles of limited access highways and included a plan for Radburn, N.J., entitled “New Town for the Motor Age.”) Later we took a different tack, urging as early as 1969 reserving several Manhattan streets for pedestrians and transit, and in 1996 a four-borough Second Avenue Subway.

But this month, for our audience of 800 regional business and civic leaders assembled at the Waldorf-Astoria, we struck a different note – presaging, I’d venture to guess, RPA’s next regional plan . Namely, that it will be a Smart Region plan, focused strongly on technology and innovation. Because, as my colleague Jeff Zupan likes to say, our job is to promote ideas “whose time has not yet come.” And to get really serious, as the nation must, about doing more with fewer dollars.

An example: we provided an audience for Zipcar – not because it’s an easy way to rent a car off the street, but because we know the capital cost of providing structured parking is killing great mixed-use, transit-accessible development projects that would satisfy market demand and add to property tax rolls from Newark to Bridgeport. ZipCar says that every parking space for one of its cars eliminates the need for about 14 other conventional parking spaces. That means developers could reduce their auto-related capital costs by 93 percent- a boon for TOD.

Congestion pricing is a clear winner for cities, as London, Stockholm and Singapore have demonstrated (and we still hope to do in New York). But beyond using the laws of supply and demand to manage city streets, technology provides us with many options for addressing traffic congestion. The taxi fleets of Stockholm, New York and others cities are now equipped with GPS monitors. In addition to exposing systematic overcharging by a few rotten cabbies, these mobile monitors provide instant feedback on traffic flows and capacity. Programmers at IBM are going beyond real-time analysis to create models that will predict traffic congestion before it happens. Soon stop lights will be connected to central databases that can calibrate the signals to ease traffic before it builds up.

The smart grid is another potentially transformative innovation, creating a two-way electrical supply system that monitors the flows and demands on energy to prioritize uses and needs and reduce overall power demand (and, by extension, carbon emissions). And electric vehicles are essentially batteries on wheels, charging up during the night (when demand is lowest) and providing mobile sources of supply that can be drawn down during peak periods. Suddenly, metropolitan areas become the country’s most efficient and interconnected energy users, gaining incredible competitive advantages. Power supply company NRG is in the process of making Houston the nation’s first city to have full electric vehicle recharging capability. Yes, Houston!

And we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the capabilities of GIS. As data sets become more robust, they will also become smarter – learning to connect with other systems and evolve.

Just as these technologies are transformative, they are also picking up speed. Information moves quickly through crowds, and we’re seeing transit authorities and public agencies start to open up their data with wonderful results. Boston’s MBTA began making real-time data feeds available for five bus lines last November. Within an hour, a programmer had created an application on Google which showed the real-time location of buses on those lines. In two days there was a new web page which tracked the movement of the buses. In a week, a desktop application provided countdown information for a rider’s specific stop. In a month, the Centre Street Station in Jamaica Plan had an LED sign that counted down to the next bus’ arrival. In five weeks, all this data was integrated on apps for the iPhone and Android. In seven weeks the data could be delivered to any phone. Finally, two months after the data was made available, a texting service would send any mobile phone real-time data on the arrival of the next bus at any station.

Who knows precisely where these new technologies and capabilities will lead us? But that’s where planning comes in — to try to sort through the priorities and possibilities, and then identify where these exciting new developments can and should take us our cities and regions in the future. There will always be new capital projects we need to focus on – high speed rail for the Northeast Corridor, for example, or seamless transit connections to New York’s airports. But here’s a bet that the next comprehensive regional plans – for New York and every other major metro – will be focusing much less on new highways and subways, and much more on innovation, technology, apps and creativity. It’s going to be a wild ride!

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Tom Wright is Executive Director of the Regional Plan Association