Making New York City smarter

What do you do with 1,200 payphone booths in an age when everyone and their grandmother has at least one mobile phone?  Smart cities have the answer.

Times Square in New York

Faced with a multitude of redundant phone boxes, Jeff Merritt, the then director of innovation for New York City and current head of the Internet of Things at the World Economic Forum, decided to recycle rather than dump. So he used them as a first step to creating one of the world’s largest and fastest municipal Wi-Fi networks.

The booths were replaced with kiosks that not only allow people to connect their personal devices to super-fast, free Wi-Fi but also include a charging point as well as a tablet that gives access to city services, maps and directions. 

They even work as phones – the kiosks are equipped with keypads and microphones so that people can make free phone calls to anywhere in the US.

The network, which is eventually expected to be expanded to 7,500 kiosks, started operating in October 2017.

“It will provide New Yorkers, rich and poor, with access to a 21st century communications network,” Merritt says.

“And it won’t cost them a dollar.” Merritt could not have pulled off this feat on his own. Building a smarter city, he explains, can only be achieved by combining the vision of the public sector with the expertise of private companies. 

In this case, Merritt put together a consortium consisting of firms that generate revenue primarily through selling advertisements on the screens of the 10-foot-high kiosks. The revenue was split 50/50, and the city is guaranteed income of USD500 million over the next 12 years.

"We as a government would never have guessed that gigabyte-speed Internet was technically possible. Nor would we have guessed that digital advertising could pay for the multimillion dollar build-out and guarantee revenue on such a scale,” he says.

The public-private initiative is just one of the many digital smart city projects being implemented in New York to improve the metropolis's services and help drive its economy.

Cities' IoT

A one-time State Department staffer who helped promote democracy in the Balkans, Merritt has developed an expertise in smart cities, social entrepreneurship and government innovation over the past two decades.

The Internet of Things (IoT), he says,  plays a central role in smart cities because it provides access to the information required for intelligent decision-making. Big infrastructure agencies such as water authorities have been using connected devices to collect data for some years, but their use is expanding all the time.

“Billions of gallons of water come into the City every day from upstate New York, and we use sensors to make sure it’s kept clean and uncontaminated to protect the health of New Yorkers. When it reaches consumers, there are meters in their basements, which employees used to visit to read so we could bill them and maintain the system. But we now have wireless meters that send real-time information on usage and on spikes that can identify leaks.”

IoT becomes more exciting when it moves from a single connected smart device to devices communicating with each other, as happens on the system run by New York's Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA). A few years ago, it started using GPS trackers to keep New Yorkers informed about when buses would arrive at stops. These trackers were then connected to wireless remote control of street lights.

“When buses approach traffic lights, the lights change to give them priority,” he says. “It speeds up the buses, creating a more regular service and cutting journey times by around 20 per cent.”

The buses using the new service can run punctually like a mass transit rail system. This encourages people to use them rather than their cars – reducing congestion, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Lessons learned elsewhere are grist for Merritt’s mill. For instance, Copenhagen’s experience with public/private partnerships helped structure a pilot a programme that aims to use smart city technology to improve the quality of life and boost economic development in Brownsville, a deprived community in Brooklyn.

And now New York is becoming a resource for others.

“Cities around the world look to New York for leadership, and we try to make sure that we share our lessons with them – as well as learning from their experiences,” Merritt says.