We live a couple of blocks from Straus Park, a large traffic triangle, dominated by a lovely fountain dedicated to the memory of Isidor and Ida Strauss who died on the Titanic. In the spirit of the revitalization of public spaces in the 90’s, a neighborhoods group took over the programming and maintenance of the horticulture of the park – and they do a lovely job. This little space is a terrific neighborhood amenity.
Six months before the onset of the pandemic we got a dog, and part of my regular dog walking route was through the park. As a result, I came to appreciate the parks virtues all the more. I enjoyed the sparrows splashing in the park’s fountain. In the spring, the bulbs planted the prior fall are a colorful pleasure. The vibe from people reading, eating and just relaxing on the many benches speaks to the virtues of urban life, bringing together people from many backgrounds to enjoy sharing a public space.
When I first started my dog walking routine in 2019, I noticed that the park had several “BigBelly” trash cans. There are large rectangular structures of utilitarian design, which are advertised to compact trash using solar power, enabling pickups from them to be less frequent. One of the cans in Straus Park was not functioning and was conspicuously wrapped in black plastic bags. It is worth noting, but not worth dwelling upon, that I have long found BigBellies to be the pirates of street furniture and was dismayed that the Parks Department thought it appropriate to deploy them (in large part because the emptying of trash bins is something to be encouraged, as it provides activity in otherwise dormant public spaces, creates “eyes on the street,” as well as the low skill, entry level employment so much needed in New York). But, jeez, if DPR is going to use them, they ought to at least be maintained.
Every day, sometimes several times a day I would walk by this piece of junk, and it would annoy me. It came to a point where my wife demanded I stop talking about it. The pandemic came and mostly went, and four years later the damn thing was still there. This was important because non-working features of a public space are an indication of disorder – suggesting to users that anti-social behavior is tolerated. That i) leads others who are so included to engage in anti-social behavior and ii) gives other the idea that anti-social behavior is possible/likely in that space – leading to a perception of lack of safety there. In Straus Park there were lots of other ques that the park was being well maintained and that there was an understanding among park users about certain standards of behavior: the horticulture was highly and visibly tended, the fountain worked, trashed was routinely picked up. All kinds of people used the park – and clearly subscribed to the social contract regarding conventions of acceptable behavior. The broken BigBelly itself wasn’t a tremendous problem – but it could have been the first incline on a slippery slope to neglect.
In the fall of 2022, I finally decided to try to get it fixed. I took pictures of it. I emailed a request that it be repaired and removed to 311 on October 27th with the photo. I got back a service request confirmation from 311 and then nothing happened. On December 28th, I a sent a copy of the service request confirmation to our local City Council Member, the Riverside Park Conservancy (which in the past has taken some responsibility for Straus Park), the Parks Department general email box and the Parks Commissioner (I guessed at her email address). The email to the Parks Commissioner bounced back. I contacted former Parks Commissioner, Adrian Benepe, our neighbor, who pointed me in the right direction and gave me an attaboy for trying. The Commissioner, who I don’t know personally (unlike most of her recent predecessors) I have only heard referred to a Sue Donoghue, uses Susan in the Parks protocol email address.
I also called the BigBelly corporate office in Boston and tried to persuade them to fix or remove the thing. They told me to buzz off, as the can belonged to Parks and they weren’t responsible for it.
I then left for a month in Hawai’i.
Three weeks later, while in Waikiki, given the magic of mobile phone technology, I got a call from a Parks Department employee (at 5AM local time). I later returned the call. The Parks employee acknowledged receipt of my request to the Commissioner’s office (not the original 311 request) and told me removing the BigBelly from Strauss Park was now on his “to do” list as the district manager for the park, and it would likely be removed in the next few months. I zealously advocated with this nice person that DPR should be embarrassed that this broken piece of equipment had been open and notoriously existing in Straus Park for at least four years without repair or removal. Given my knowledge of DPR operations, I suggested to him several ways of getting the resources (like a Riverside Park pick-up truck) required to get rid of the can. We ended the call amicably and he said he would see what he could do.
Upon our return from the Mid-Pacific, I made a beeline to Straus Park to see what was up – and the can was at last gone. I felt a smug sense of accomplishment and returning home, sent around a thank you email to all concerned. I doubt anyone else noticed. And it certainly wasn’t a big deal. But it does tell us two important things. First, that the Parks Department does not have sufficient resources to do basic park maintenance, which has been obvious for some time (as evidenced by routine overflowing trash baskets and un-mowed turf in Riverside Park).
311
But more importantly it is an object lesson in the failure of the City’s 311 system – which has become a data collection program, and not a way to improve delivery of services. In my time at DoITT, I was excoriated for not routinely closing out cable complaints as had been done by my predecessors. We closed out complaints only when issues had been resolved to a customer’s satisfaction, or when we had made a determination that the customer’s issue wasn’t susceptible to satisfactory resolution. My team was rebuked for not meeting our SLR (service level requirements). In my experience, 311 requests do not result in effective and appropriate city action. Requests get routinely closed out by the bureaucracy because its internal standards for resolution have been met – which has nothing to do with actually solving the problem. 311, with all of its elaborate software and hundreds of employees taking calls, appears to be a Potemkin Village. While the Annual Mayor’s Management Report may record and report the number of type of requests, it does not reflect the actual resolution of problems in the real world outside the bureaucracy. It is virtually useless as a management tool, as far as I can tell.
My original service request said that I would receive a response within thirty days. I’m still waiting. [Note to spouse: sorry about this post. It’s now out of my system. You won’t hear about it again.]
The Adams Administration recently announced the appointment of a “Director of the Public Realm,” a newly created position. The idea for this post was advanced in recent years through the advocacy of civic groups concerned about public design, like the Municipal Art Society and the Design Trust for Public Space. The creation of the office became something of a (quiet) rallying cry during the last Mayoral election. The Mayor has appointed Ya-Ting Liu to the job, who, while not someone I know (not that it matters), seems well qualified for the role, with degrees from Berkely and MIT, and time spent at Transportation Alternatives and City Hall. Presumably, in the eyes of the public design and placemaking communities this is a professional who is both for the right things and is knowledgeable about the workings of city government, reporting directly to a Deputy Mayor. As someone who has worked on improving public spaces, streets and sidewalks in New York City for 30 years, including as the long-time chair of the Streets and Sidewalks Committee of the MAS, I can only wish her well.
Unfortunately, though, having a Director of the Public Realm probably isn’t a particularly good idea. It’s unlikely to contribute much to making public spaces better. It does give the civic groups (which during the Bloomberg Administration became quiescent) someone they can talk to in City Hall, and who would presumably be receptive to their ideas. However, based on my experience in City government, the office has a low probability having much impact, and over time will add to the bureaucratic dysfunction of city government as senior officials in City Hall lose interest in the initiative and/or are replaced by people who don’t see it as the priority Mayor Adams and Deputy Mayor Joshi presumably do.
The news rack designed by Ignacio Ciocchini for Grand Central Partnership. Ciocchini has designed most of New York City’s best street furniture
I experienced this firsthand in my time at the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT, now Office of Technology Innovation, OTI). DoITT was a relatively new City agency, established as a home for the once important city cable franchises (after the elimination of the discredited Bureau of Franchises as a result of a charter change) and the new and growing in importance technological support functions for other City agencies. It grew into a sizable bureaucracy that included the City’s 311 service, its procurement of hardware, software and telecommunications services, with its own capacity to code software to meet the City’s routine needs and with the capacity to house and support redundant servicer capacity for data and software.
A parallel Office of the Chief Technology Officer was created during the Bloomberg Administration. A key strategy of Mayor Bloomberg in accomplishing his administration’s goals appeared to be working around existing bureaucracies, by setting up offices in City Hall focused on the Mayor’s policy priorities, like sustainability and technology innovation. I speculate that Bloomberg and his staff decided that working through the existing agencies would frustrate their initiatives, and that life was too short to attempt to reform the deep dysfunction in City operations, particularly with respect to procurement and human resources.
While the CTO might have had some viability when it was first established in driving new ideas in municipal technology, it became just another bureaucratic power center. After Bloomberg, in the De Blasio Administration, it was staffed by smart, committed advocates dedicated to closing the digital divide (I have previously written here about my skepticism as to whether there actually is a digital divide https://www.theplacemaster.com/2022/07/31/expanding-the-reach-of-the-internet-in-new-york-city/). The Bloomberg priorities became orphans. The De Blasio CTO announced lots of grand plans that never came to much. But more significantly, the CTO spent much of its time sparring with DoITT over turf, credit for accomplishment and the Mayor’s attention. All three of the Commissioners whom I served made clear that the CTO was an adversary and encouraged ignoring them and engaging in parallel projects. There was much energy wasted in sniping at each other. Personally, I tried to leverage the resources available at the CTO, swiping my best staff member from them and trying to improve the CTO’s work product when and where I could (including spending two weeks editing and rewriting the Internet Master Plan, which when it came to me was drafted by a consulting firm the City had hired in a language that only remotely resembled English). Recently, that Master Plan, a signal achievement of De Blasio CTO’s office was abandoned by the Adams Administration (in my view no great loss, despite, or maybe even because, of my contribution).
Ciocchini’s proposed design for the telecommunications kiosk. Far superior to the design approved by the design commission
In my experience, there is simply no substitute for hiring talented, dedicated, well-trained, right-thinking officials in the relevant agencies and empowering them to take risks and make decisions in order to enable the bureaucracies to “get stuff done.” Setting up offices in City Hall to coordinate policy and spearhead thoughtful new initiatives isn’t a thing that actually functions in the real world. It just doesn’t work, and over time because of the fighting over turf, makes the bureaucracy worse. Over time, the managerial vectors have moved in the wrong direction, with decision making power drifting up and being centralized in the Mayor. The order of the day in the agencies has become avoiding making mistakes and waiting for direction from City Hall.
In the design and public space realm in City government there have been agency staff who have had a positive impact on in making good design in public space a priority from both the top and middle management of agencies, some over and some under the radar. As Design and Construction Commissioner, David Burney created a Design Excellence Program, which has become partially embedded in the agency’s DNA – employing a wider range of architects and engineers, some of whom have established high design credentials. At the MTA, Wendy Feuer and now Sandra Bloodworth have made its Arts in Transit program a huge success. They created a gold standard selection process for artists that has produced outstanding results – most recently in the Times Square/Sixth Avenue subway connection and in the new Grand Central Madison. Wendy took her design sensibility to the City’s Department of Transportation’s Urban Design group, and, working with Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, successfully inserted design and public space management interests into DOT’s day to day work.
In my time at DoITT I sought out others in City government concerned about quality design in public projects and on the streets and sidewalks and tried to create an informal network of like-minded bureaucrats. At the same time, I attempted to imbue our DoITT team with a sensitivity to design issues and the impact of telecommunications infrastructure on public space. The first two commissioners for whom I worked were technologists who didn’t have design top of mind, and I was able to work under the radar. Later, we rammed through a number of utilitarian objects of streetscape, the implications of which are only now being realized (and resisted) and my ability to influence policy went to nil. Newly installed larger mobile telecom 5G transmitter enclosures on light and signal poles and very tall, utilitarian LinkNYC 5G structures (about which I have previously written) are now beginning to appear on the City’s streetscape.
A decrepit dining shed removed by the City
Best case, Ms. Liu seeks out those with design sensibility and expertise in public space programming in the agencies and provides support for their efforts, works to encourage the agencies to create centers of good design (and I can’t think of any agency that doesn’t have an impact on structures and streetscapes) and creates programs encouraging the incorporation of design and placemaking sensibilities in all of the City’s endeavors in public spaces and City facilities. To advance my own hobby horse, creating a striking, distinctive purpose-built telecommunications structure to replace the eyesores now going up all over town, would be a lay-up and great place to start. I’d also suggests securing resources to program DOT’s Open Streets initiative. The Administration’s excellent New New York Action Plan would be a good place to start to find worthwhile ideas for revitalizing commercial corridors and improving public spaces.
Ms. Liu’s initial assignment will probably to come up with rules institutionalizing the tremendously successful Open Restaurant and Open Streets programs created during COVID. As is typical with New York open space issues, there are loud voices seeking to shut those programs down, and to heavily regulate commercial activity on streets and sidewalks. Those forces need to be boldly resisted. My suggestion is to get rid of the dining sheds in the roadbeds, which have outlived their COVID pandemic usefulness, some of which have become derelict. Putting chairs and tables on sidewalks should be made as streamlined as possible – with the City getting a license fee per square feet occupied – calibrated by borough and neighborhood. Economic actors who use public space to generate revenue should pay for the privilege (that includes you, broadband providers!).
Deployment of the kiosks wasn’t as straightforward as either the City or CityBridge had assumed. First, as it turned out the energy service and conduit for fiber optic cable to the payphone sites turned out to be degraded and entirely useless for purposes of the LinkNYC kiosks. As a result, CityBridge would have to do more trenching than it anticipated and Con Ed would need to be called upon to provide electrical service to all of the Link sites. That became a pinch point in the speed of deployment because Con Ed had a lot of demands on the staff that provided new service to business sties (requiring street openings), and because of the swiftly developed bad blood between CityBridge and Con Ed staff, CityBridge requests for service went straight to the bottom of the request pile.
Con Ed then decided that CityBridge needed to pay its maximize charge for delivery of service because the LinkNYC kiosks were “permanent” (like buildings), and that each kiosks would have to be individually metered and billed (unlike street lights). This was a large unanticipated additional cost to CityBridge, which it challenged unsuccessfully at the State Public Service Commission (a decision incorrect on the legal merits, in my judgement).
Siting the kiosks also turned out to be more complicated than anyone expected – because the kiosks were larger and differently shaped from phone kiosks they couldn’t just be replaced one-for-one. Also, site conditions had changed from the time the phone kiosks were installed, and by the time CityBridge surveyed sites for Link kiosks. Plans for each site had to be review by DoITT staff, and then inspected by DoITT inspectors (who were retrained from having been payphone inspectors for decades) for compliance with various siting criteria – particularly clearances from other street furniture. Pre-COVID outdoor cafes proved to be a significant obstacle to Link kiosk siting. CityBridge never made the deployment targets (each Borough had its own targeted minimum number of kiosks to be deployed each year) required by its franchise agreement.
Most of the publicity about the Link program during its yearly years arose out of concerns that they were a magnet for the homeless. There was widespread publicity that homeless individuals were watching porn on the internet tablets built into the kiosks. The charging ports were also seen as drawing folks looking to recharge their phones (although the question of how it was that apparently destitute people had handheld devices and monthly phone service plans was never raised or explained). In a number of places in midtown Manhattan, homeless people did congregate around the kiosks, it seemed to me for reasons unrelated to their functionality that I couldn’t figure out (we also found people sleeping under derelict telephone kiosks that had no functionality). For a while, we were reasonably successful in working with the outreach teams under contract to the City’s Department of Homeless Services to get services to people congregating around the kiosks. But, fundamentally, the situation wasn’t a problem generated by the LinkNYC program, but by the Administration’s failed multi-billion dollar strategy for dealing with street homelessness (but that is the subject for another long blog). The basic fact was that the LinkNYC kiosks did not cause homelessness.
I spent a fair amount of my time when working for DoITT trying to understand who was using the Wi-Fi and the other features of the kiosks and how they were using them. CityBridge provided data on usage (which is available on the City’s open data portal) which I reviewed monthly. I also tried to spend a couple days a month wandering around city neighborhoods, checking on their functionality (as did our terrific team of six inspectors), and observing, a al my guru, William H. Whyte, how people were using them in real time. I made sure my site visits were in neighborhoods far from the city’s center and were ones I hadn’t been to before.
The system was highly utilized – with millions of users and millions of terabytes of annual downloads. I concluded that the bulk of the use in Manhattan was by tourists and other visitors. Most New Yorkers have data service. That’s not to say that making the service available to that user group isn’t of value – but it wasn’t exactly advancing the goal of closing the supposed digital divide. What was interesting was how the kiosks were being used outside Manhattan. They were becoming a kind of social center. I saw people setting up chairs near them, using the Wi-Fi or charging their phones. Businesses put out tables and chairs in front of their storefronts for Wi-Fi users. I observed people using the telephone functionality – making very long calls, much to my surprise. The data showed that the top websites accessed and phone numbers called had to do with contacting social services – finding out about missing SNAP and other transfer payments. Clearly, the Link kiosks were becoming an important resource in otherwise underserved communities and had a great deal of value there. They were enlivening the sidewalks in commercial corridors in Brooklyn and The Bronx. This is something that should continue to be a focus of the Link program.
At one point I recommended, following the Holly Whyte formula, that we work to place movable chairs and tables near the kiosks, since many of the complaints about their use were about people sitting near them on the ground. My thinking was that this would “normalize” this use and support the vitality of commercial corridors around the city. This suggestion was not well received, despite the near universal acknowledgement among urbanists of the utility of movable chairs to animate public space, as evidenced by their success in Bryant Park.
MORE PROBLEMS ARISE
In 2017, CityBidge began to complain that it wasn’t making its advertising sales targets, in part because of deployment delays and in part because ad sales weren’t living up to expectations. As a result, the franchise agreement was being amended when I arrived at DoITT around that time, to provide a slower roll out of kiosk deployment and a deferment of payment of a portion of guaranteed minimum payments. A forensic audit of the financial records of CityBridge was performed for the City by a highly respected CPA firm to determine its financial condition. All were assured that the terms of the second amendment would solve CityBridge’s financial problems, based in part on representations made by CityBridge and Sidewalk Labs staff, and in part on the audit results.
Immediately after the approval of the amendment to the franchise agreement (by City Hall, the Office of Management and Budget and the City’s Franchise and Concession Review Board, made up of representatives of the Administration, the Comptroller and the Borough Presidents. The FCRC is an interesting vestige of the City’s powerful Board of Estimate, made up of the Mayor and Borough Presidents and which once controlled the City’s zoning and franchising functions until it was found to be unconstitutional on the basis of being undemocratic – given that each Borough President had an equal vote), CityBridge requested of the City permission to amend its privacy policy to be able to collect the Mobile Advertising Identifier generated by peoples’ mobile phones and use it in order to increase the value of its ad panels (and by the way, you can turn off the generation of an MAI by an iPhone by going into its privacy settings).
There was some degree of bad faith in this request, since the claim of CityBridge was that the ability to collect the MAI was essential to the economic successful of the franchise – a success that was supposedly assured by the adoption of the Second Amendment to the Franchise Agreement (the first amendment involved approval of a change in the members of the consortium making up CityBridge). The request caused tremendous ructions within the De Blasio administration which had privacy hard-liners in charge of its electronic privacy policy. The Administration had also gone through a laborious process of gaining the approval of the electronic privacy advocacy groups, like the New York Civil Liberties Union (also ardent privacy hawks) to not oppose the LinkNYC program. The reality of the privacy protections built into the franchise was that the Wi-Fi use of the LinkNYC signal was more secure and had higher standards of privacy than that provided by the any of the cable companies’ internet service to homes. The Link program collected the email addresses of the users in order for them to sign up for using the program, and nothing else about the users. Those email addresses were prohibited to be used for any other purpose or to be shared with any third party. The privacy protections were, as far as I could determine, rock solid.
Much was made of the potential for privacy invasions from the kiosks. They had three cameras. One was for use with embedded tablet for telephonic and emergency communications, and two on either side of the kiosks were for the monitoring and prevention of vandalism of the kiosks. To the best of my knowledge those side cameras were used only occasionally, and the videos generated were kept for a maximum of seven days and then erased. The kiosks also had a range of sensors that, to my best knowledge, were never used. These sensors had the capacity to collect pedestrian traffic, vehicle traffic, weather and seismological data – all which might have been of great value to the city and none of which were ever used. My understanding was that since the data was found by Sidewalk Labs to have little economic value (nobody wanted to pay for it), the sensors were never turned on. There was nothing the slightest bit “big brotherish” about City use of LinkNYC as far as I could tell, and I would have known.
I am actually something of a privacy dove. The MAI had the potential for huge value for both CityBridge and the City. It was anonymized, so it had a very limited impact on user privacy, but it upped the efficacy of the value of the ad panels. Most interesting to me was that the MAI could enable the Link system to relate the passing of an ad by a pedestrian to a sale to that person minutes later through their mobile phone. Let’s say an ad for Brooks Brothers was shown on a panel and an individual walked by it. If within a short period of time that individual went into a Brooks store a purchased a shirt, the Link system could get a commission on the sale. This was the kind of effectiveness/outcome metric that is so difficult to determine in the out of home advertising market – and would have provided the system with a huge competitive advantage. It would also have allowed Intersection to precisely determine how many viewers each ad panel had, something of great interest to advertisers, and would enable a more precise value to be placed on each ad.
Finally, much of the internet advertising sales world is driven by algorisms and a complex computerized marketplace by which ads are sold through instantaneous electronic auctions. Billboards, obviously, unlike internet banner ads, can’t participate in that electronic pricing system and as a result, are limited in their value. Tapping into the MAIs captured by the Link system would enable those ads to be sold through the electronic auction marketplace. The system would know how many people were seeing an ad at a particular location at a particular time and could auction off an ad at that time and place. Without the MAI data, the Link ads were not able to easily participate in this process (although I did argue internally that using data available from smartphones collected by Google without the MAI, such sales were possible, without success).
The City’s Chief Privacy Officer and the DoITT General Counsel were adamant. No way was CityBridge was going to be able to amend its privacy policy to collect the MAI under this administration. This was communicated to CityBridge quite clearly in June of 2017.
To put the recent hyperbole regarding the fifth generation of mobile phone technology (5G) in context, a rough estimate puts porn and gaming at 40% of internet data. So, increasing the speed and capacity of internet infrastructure will largely go to improving the experience of those uses. My flip evaluation of the utility of 5G technology has been that it is great if you want to do robotic surgery or download all of Game of Thrones on a street corner.
5G is the latest iteration of mobile phone and data transmission technology that is now being rolled out around the country and the world. In fact, one often reads ominously that the US is “falling behind” on the implementation of 5G. The value of the new technology is essentially that more information can be pushed through fiber optic lines and wireless transmission at higher speeds as a result of how the packages of electrons carrying digital data are bundled. The result is a higher capacity for traffic, significantly faster speeds and importantly, less latency in the transmission. Latency is the time between a user pushing the “enter” key and the time the information being requested fully loads on a screen.
The reduction in latency is not only important because it keeps people from throwing their mobile devices against walls out of frustration, but more critically, it enables a whole range of new internet applications that demand effectively simultaneous real time responses in order to be effective – like self-driving cars (which also aren’t coming any time soon). A graphic example of the problems arising out of latency delay is the inability of musicians to play together using zoom. Because of latency, using existing technology, it is impossible for participants to play music together over the internet (without additional compensating software). Low latency would also, for example, make possible robotic surgery, because the visual and vital sign information being conveyed to the surgeon on one end would be instant with a doctor’s surgical procedures on the other.
This brings to the fore an important fact about 5G transmission – many of the most useful aspects of its increased speed having nothing to do with mobile phone transmission – as they would be used inside – like surgery or improved efficiency in warehouse operations. A lot of the claims being made about the commercial value of 5G have nothing to do with mobile phone service in public spaces.
Mobile service hot spots
Right now, as far as I can tell, the most important use of 5G service in New York City is to expand system capacity at high use times and places – where the current transmission system is nearly maxed out. The highest use, densest locations for mobile phones I understand to be in Times Square (42nd Street), at 34th Street and 7th Avenue and at Broad Street and Wall Street. Apparently, the highest use times are during the early afternoon rush hour, particularly on Fridays (“honey, (i) should I pick up a loaf of bread on the way home” and/or (ii) “I’m gonna be late. I’m having a drink with the team after work” or (iii) “my train/bus is late.”). In order for the system to accommodate the increased traffic at those times and places, the pipe needs to be wider, and 5G information bundling creates a wider pipe.
It’s worth noting that the high visibility of the perceived lack of “technological equity” has added a political dimension to the public discussion of mobile telecom infrastructure. Frankly, given the way in which mobile telephones are used, there isn’t much of an immediate need for additional capacity in New York City outside of the Manhattan core (that’s not to say there won’t be in the future – and any 5G build would likely ultimately need to be city-wide). But because of immediate concerns about “equity,” the industry is going to be required to distribute its equipment across the five boroughs, in order to be given the green light to build the additional transmitters the system really needs in Manhattan.
A typical New York City mobile telecom installation
Mobile phone signals are transmitted by macro transmitters (those towers you see along highways and on building roofs) and more recently, and more widely via micro transmitters, which in most cities are glommed on to municipal light and signal poles. This is a huge pain for the mobile telecommunications industry, as there are tens of thousands of municipalities across the country, and each of the three national wireless companies has to make their own deals with each of them. You probably haven’t noticed the installations in New York City, because here they have been pretty well designed to blend in. They are painted the same color as the pole to which they are attached. They consist of a rectangular box near the top of the pole and a “whip” antenna sticking up from the top of the pole. Needless to say, the poles weren’t originally designed to carry telecommunications infrastructure, and it not being essential to their mission, the City’s Department of Transportation is less than thrilled with having this stuff attached to their poles and being responsible for their safety. DOT’s job is to keep the lights on at night and the signals working 24/7. In addition, City agencies have their own use for this aerial real estate – particularly DOT and the NYPD. The police use the poles, for example, for surveillance cameras and speed monitors. This is highly contested real estate. Until recently, only one of the three mobile companies’ equipment could be accommodated on each pole.
As with all telecommunications regulation, the base layer is Federal – and the outdated 1996 Cable Act governs the interaction of municipalities of mobile telecommunications infrastructure in the public way. When one thinks of mobile telecommunications, one thinks of wireless transmission, but for every mobile transmitter there must be a wired connection to the network. There is a mostly separate (from cable, except for Verizon) system of fiber optic cable supporting the mobile phone network under New York streets and hanging from utility poles. Companies providing mobile telecommunications infrastructure (and there are a number of companies who provide this as a service to the Big Three, in addition to the mobile companies themselves) need to have a franchise from the City both to lay their wires under the streets and across utility poles, as well as to place their transmitters on City poles.
During the Trump administration, the industry friendly Federal Communications Commission adopted rules that constrained the regulation of the deployment of mobile infrastructure in the public way by municipalities, just as it did with cable regulation. In the case of mobile telecom, the FCC limited what local government could charge for the use of its space to essentially the cost of administering the licensing program, and created accelerated maximum timelines for approval of the location of transmitters. The latter was certainly required, as many local governments out of a concern for aesthetics, or bureaucratic lethargy, stood in the way of the mobile telecom deployment.
However, this was not at all true in New York City, which, about 20 years ago, set up an efficient system for fairly allocating and licensing pole use to the mobile telecom infrastructure companies. The industry saw the City’s system as a national model and were (mostly) happy with how things were, and especially with the City’s experienced and highly responsive team that administered the program. To put this in context, NYC has about 300,000 light and signal poles (although there is no complete inventory of poles), and the last time I looked about fewer than 10,000 were being used as hosts for mobile phone transmitters. But, because of the preemption of Federal law, the City has been cast in the same boat as all other local governments. Of course, the FCC’s newish rules are the subject of continuing litigation. The industry has not sued the City to attempt to make it conform with the new rules, presumably because they are reasonably satisfied with the status quo – and they are in a rush to deploy their transmitters and don’t want to delay the process by initiating a lawsuit here.
This is particularly the case because Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T, given the publicity they’ve created about the benefits of 5G service, want to deploy 5G transmitters quickly. The companies have each based a good deal of their national advertising to hyping the competitive advantage of each of their 5G systems. Again, those systems aren’t all that useful to consumers yet because mobile customers mostly have access to quite high speeds all over New York City (except at peak locations at peak times) and because not many people have bought phones that have the capacity to process the 5G signal. This is in part because of the additional expense associated with 5G phones and in part for technological limitations on the handheld devices themselves (particularly with respect to battery life and reliability). It will take several years for adoption of affordable, practical 5G handheld devices to catch up with deployment of transmitter technology.
The real fly in the soup here is that wireless 5G transmission needs many more transmitters than a 4G/LTE system. The 5G micromillimeter wave system, which is the backbone (and the high-speed part) for much of the 5G networks, has a shorter signal length and is more easily blocked than the medium wave 4G/LTE networks we’re all using now. There is an inverse relationship between wavelength and signal power/distance. The shorter the wave, the less far it goes and the more easily it is interfered with. That is, for example, why AM radio signals can be picked up across the country – they use a very long wave signal. 5G needs a couple of orders of magnitude more transmitters – thousands more. Human bodies and leaves have the capacity to block micromillimeter wave signals.
That deployment of more transmitters requires more City real estate and given that up until recently only one transmitter could be placed on a pole, that meant a push was on for the City to ramp up the distribution of poles. This ran into a number of logistical roadblocks. First, corner signal poles were more valuable to industry, as they logistically had a larger radius of transmission for the short micromillimeter wave transmission. As a result of a consent decree being negotiated by the City in Federal Court having to do with the City’s dilatoriness in making its tens of thousands of street corners comply with Federal accessibility requirements, the City began requiring anyone moving a light pole near a corner to replace all four corners at an intersection.
4G and 5G pole installations
Industry has proposed to the City designs that carry more than one transmitter – as the future standard. These installations are heavier and require the replacement of the pole and the construction of a new foundation for it – triggering the accessibility retrofit requirement for corner poles – making such an installation cost prohibitive. For the time being, the mobile telecom industry is avoiding the coveted corner poles and sticking with midblock poles so as to avoid triggering the six figure cost associated with corner ramps. Also, in the highest need locations there simply aren’t enough poles to accommodate the required transmitters. On 42nd Street and 34th Street the local business improvement districts objected to the erection of transmitters on distinctive poles they had erected in the 90’s in those essential locations. There simply are not enough available poles.
This is something like what a New York City cable pedestal looks like. Searching the internet I couldn’t find photos of either an actual NYC pedestal or a Verizon “refrigerator box” cable splicing enclosure. That tells you something.
When I was in City government, I advocated for a purpose-built telecommunications structure for sidewalks all over the city. Principally, this got DOT out of the telecommunications business that they didn’t want to be in – and their inspection of poles and installations had become a pinch point in the approval process, given available resources. This would be a structure licensed and regulated solely by the City’s technology agency – making the process simpler. The structure would be designed to accommodate all of the City’s telecommunications needs – mobile, Wi-Fi, cable and 911 – much like the LinkNYC program, but without advertising. The program would be financed by renting out space to telecommunications companies in this telecom condo. The structure would also replace ugly, refrigerator sized cable splicing boxes which exist all of the city outside Manhattan. The Altice and Spectrum boxes, called pedestals, have been around for decades and are generally located in the space between the street and sidewalk. Worse are the Verizon boxes, that hang from telephone pole – on some as many as four, two of which were hung at eye level. That equipment would all go into the proposed telecom structure.
The structure would need to be 32 feet high, in order to meet the needs of the mobile telecom industry. This would lower the number of needed structures (the higher the structure, the further the signal could be transmitted). Yeah, that’s tall. And yeah, that’s another big piece of stuff on the sidewalks. But my idea was that this structure could be designed by the best and become a symbol of 21st Century New York City, much as the Art Nouveau Paris Metro entrances have become a symbol of Paris. Also, I thought for initial locations, the City could replace the 6,000 DOT wayfinding kiosks, that look like the obelisk from “2001, A Space Odyssey,” and, thanks to the ubiquity of GPS and mobile phone maps, became obsolete nearly as soon as they were constructed. They were a good idea in the 90’s. The would be replaced with the telecom structure – using their sidewalk space. The idea got some, but not enough, traction.
The LinkNYC 5G kiosk
BUT, along came the alleged economic failure of the LinkNYC program (which I plan to discuss in detail in my next post). Part of the solution to creating a new “sustainable business model” for the free public Wi-Fi program was to allow the company that built the system to partner with a telecom infrastructure provider, replace the Wi-Fi kiosks with new 32-foot-tall kiosks, and permit them to (exclusively) host multiple mobile telecom transmitters in the structure. That structure, pictured above, has been approved by the Public Design Commission and is beginning to be deployed. Given the equity issues, the City is requiring that it be built first disproportionately outside Manhattan (despite the fact that the need for additional mobile telecom capacity is in the Manhattan core). I’m not personally fond of the design – and think it could be a lot better – but I do recognize the need for the height – and the need for a structure of this sort, particularly in the high demand spots in Manhattan. This part of the story is only beginning to be played out – as I doubt that the implications of the deployment have been fully understood by elected officials, the public and the other industry players.
New York City will get 5G service in a timely fashion. It will be as fast, available and reliable as anywhere in the world. Given the competition between the big three and other discount providers that use their network infrastructure the prices will remain highly competitive (I have Altice Mobile service, for example, that uses the T-Mobile system and get unlimited talk and text for $30 per month. The price (for 4G LTE service) is guaranteed forever (whatever that means)). You aren’t likely to notice the difference any time soon – unless you’re planning to step out to the corner to download all of “Better Call Saul.” With a little luck, you won’t notice most of the transmission infrastructure.
The first class of Urban Park Rangers, with Mayor Koch and Gordon Davis at the center. In the lower right, with the tie, is my friend, neighbor, collaborator and future Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.
“New York, New York, New York; Four Decades of Succuss, Excess, and Transformation” Thomas Dyja (Simon & Schuster, 2021)
The great goal of social science is to amass large amounts of data relating to a social phenomenon, and then organize and synthesize that data in order to explain how that phenomenon works – essentially separating the out the signal from the noise. In “New York, New York, New York; Four Decades of Succuss, Excess, and Transformation,” Thomas Dyja sets out for himself that extremely high bar. He pulls together an overwhelming amount of information about the governance and culture of New York City from 1978 to the present and attempts to tease out what actually happened. It is nearly impossible to believe that one author could accumulate and one mind could retain and come to an understanding such an avalanche of facts. In telling this story, he succeeds beyond any reasonable expectation.
I came to New York in 1978 and have lived here continuously ever since. I began working in the public sphere in 1991. So, in a very material sense, this is my (along with a great many other peoples’) story. I was in, or near, the room where some of the stuff he describes happened. I worked with or knew a significant double-digit percentage of the people he talks about. I generally come out where he does in his broadest conclusions, but as is absolutely inevitable in the blizzard of information Dyja has digested, some of the “facts” and figures he cites either are incorrect or can’t be right (There have never been 50,000 people sleeping on the streets of New York. There have been 50,000 people receiving services for the homeless from the City – mostly living in shelters, most of them families – and not the single adult men who most New Yorkers have in mind when they think of the homeless. While he cite’s Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis, can it be true that 50% of gay baby boomers died of AIDs?). Dyja also accepts as true a number of the basic assumptions that constitute the conventional wisdom regarding public policy in the city over the last forty years, some of which are just aren’t true or are gross over simplifications (gentrification leads to displacement, homelessness is caused by lack of housing). But, certainly, Dyja’s heart is in the right place, and he is willing to call “bullshit” on a good many self-serving and false claims. I certainly can’t argue with his placing our work on the Bryant Park restoration, and the thinkers we relied on like Holly Whyte and George Kelling, at the dead center of his epic.
The book relies on press reports and interviews with high profile players for much of its factual foundation. Unfortunately, the New York press often gets the details of local coverage wrong (and more than occasionally gets the entire story wrong), taking the press releases of public officials at face value – and while newspaper reporting may be the first draft of history, it constitutes an unreliable basis on which to write its later versions when it comes to New York City government. It has also been my experience that folks in public life in New York tend to gild their lilies – they take credit for stuff they didn’t do and they seem to remember that positive results they stumbled into were things they planned. Relying on those sources without questioning them will lead to false positives. But when bringing together so many stories, checking them all out would be a lot to ask.
The book’s great accomplishment is to highlight the policies of the Koch administration that laid the groundwork for New York’s revitalization (particularly in housing and public space) that continues through today, and the cadre of smart, effective professionals that Koch attracted to government the like of which has not been seen since (unfortunately). My personal recollection of third term Ed Koch was of a bullying narcissist. As the New York Times recently reported on at length, Koch remained in the closest during the AIDs crisis and actively worked to cover his personal tracks. Koch also deployed racially inflammatory rhetoric, amping up the city’s most debilitating division. To put it mildly, he consciously failed to attempt to understand, and even dismissed, the concerns of New York City’s large Black community. But, at the end of the day that didn’t drive Koch Administration policy, which, using clever financing mechanisms, built tens of thousands of new affordable housing units (which over decades ultimately became hundreds of thousands), transforming the city’s most neglected, abandoned and disinvested neighborhoods into desirable places. And speaking of places, Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis thought up the idea of private non-profit entities to secure resources for and improve the management of parks – leading to the restoration of Central, Bryant (in which I was directly involved) and Prospect Parks. I am convinced that those two programs, in housing and parks, were the key elements that changed the perception of cities and sparked the return to urban centers across the country – a force so powerful that it has continued through 9/11, the financial turbulence of 2008, hurricane Sandy and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dyja’s writing about 9/11 is particularly beautiful; capturing the moment perfectly. He avoids the solipsism and self pity that infects so many other attempts to describe that horrific day. It was a primary election day, on which I was working the polls for mayoral candidate Mark Green in the northeast Bronx. I ended up in a four hour walk to the Upper West Side, with a non-functional transit system, limited information and an inability to get through to home on the phone. All along the walk home I had a view of smoke rising from lower Manhattan as I moved south. When I got home and turned on the television, the video of the time between the planes’ flying into the buildings and their collapse was the worst thing I have experienced before or since. Dyja bravely and frankly identifies the forces that made the return to normal at the former World Trade Center site impossible and that have left us with a permanent, disheartening gash in New York’s side (which will never be remedied), and a collection of inhumanely scaled towers.
It was interesting to read of the yin and yang during the Bloomberg Administration of Amanda Burden and Dan Doctoroff, which I didn’t understand at the time, while I was toiling ten miles away from City Hall in the neighborhood development fields of Jamaica, Queens: Burden having worked for William H. (Holly) Whyte, the advocate for small scale urbanism and close observation, and Doctoroff being the purveyor of grand plans (like the failed New York Olympics) and big ideas (like the failed Hudson Yards). The bastard child of this dynamic is the hugely popular tourist attraction of the High Line, which isn’t really a successful public space (because it is mostly a place to walk through, rather than linger in) but has been a powerful engine for real estate development along its flanks, and a model for similar projects across the country.
There is a lot in the book about the commercial worlds of hip hop and the art market, which may be useful scene setting – but about which I, personally, don’t very much care and think aren’t particularly culturally important. The New York of the late 1970’s and early-to-mid 1980’s may have been one of urban decline, but it was also a uniquely yeasty and important era for high culture here – particularly in music and dance. To me, it would have been much better to use the work of people like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp as the cultural yard stick against which to measure changes in the city over the period. The transformation of Carnegie Hall from an overheated place where paint chips fell from the ceiling on to your head during classical concerts to the glamourous outpost of European high culture fostered by Sandy Weill is a story worth telling. The book has no mention of other cultural innovators like Stephanie French. But, Dyja wrote his book, not mine.
On the homelessness front, Dyja only briefly quotes Rosanne Haggerty, my social entrepreneurial heroine, and instead relies on testimony from the crafty, sly fox of the unhoused, Bob Hayes. I would like to know more about the Haggerty’s departure from the path-breaking Common Ground and that organization’s transformation into Breaking Ground, now a central institution in what Haggerty calls the homeless/industrial complex. The current state of services for the homeless in New York is the result of bad data, misinformation and worse public policy, which Dyja doesn’t clearly explain.
Oddly, NY x 3, provides more detail and moves more slowly through the early Koch years and accelerates the narrative pace during DeBlasio Administration. It’s the opposite of how history is usually recounted – with the past receding and the present in the forefront. As a result, the beginning of the book is a rewarding slog, and the end of the book feels rushed and less detailed. There is a great deal about David Rockefeller (Chase) and Walter Wriston (Citi), but nothing about Jamie Dimon (Chase) and Dick Parsons (Citi) (another one of my heroes). That, notwithstanding, Dyja provides the most telling analysis of the eight years of DeBlasio’s mayoralty of which I am aware; which is impressive, given that we’re it is only months behind us. While I was a middling official in City government during DeBlasio’s last four years, I wasn’t sure of what was hitting me. I was a believer in DeBlasio’s attempts to improve the situation of the city’s worst well off, but was mystified by the chaos, lack of direction and just plain bad decision making that seemed to be trickling down from above. Dyja sympathetically explains DeBlasio’s lack of managerial skills, diffidence and indecisiveness.
Typical of the kind of small inaccuracies that creep into daily journalism, I was counsel to all three BIDs. Taken by the Times at a City Council hearing in 1996.
The book made me long for the New York of my youth. Not because the era was more fun or interesting, but because City government during the 80’s effectively implemented policies that made a difference – and the Mayor and Deputy Mayors (like Ken Lipper, Nat Leventhal and John Zuccotti) backing up risked taking innovative managers like Gordon Davis at Parks and Paul Crotty at Housing. What we are now left with is a sclerotic, risk averse local government that is strangled by its outdated, dysfunctional personnel, legal and contracting procedures. What we have inherited is ineffectual public administration by press release. I was privileged to be a part of the private sector effectiveness of New York’s largest business improvement districts, which Dyja also focuses on (although, in a small detail that perhaps only matters to me, he glancingly misses why Rudy Giuliani had Dan Biederman and me fired from Grand Central Partnership). So, I don’t really have much to complain about on that score.
The book’s epigraph is a quote from the wonderful and underappreciated Whyte, whom I also knew and tremendously admired. Whyte was the father or godfather of Bryant Park. Perhaps Dyja’s recognition of Holly, whom he cites through out the book, and Richard Rein’s revelatory recent biography, will give Holly his day. As Deja makes clear, Holly Whyte has given us the tools to create create great urban places. I, for one, will ever be grateful to Dyja for his superhuman research and telling this story with so much elan and passion. I’m assigning New York, New York, New York to my children, who take a safe and vibrant New York City for granted, so that they can get something of a feel for what Dad was doing while they were growing up.
I have just contracted with Rutgers University Press for the publication of Learning from Bryant Park: Placemaking in Bryant Park. Revitalizing Cities, Towns and Public Spaces in the Spring of 2019. I am so fortunate to be working with the experienced publishing professionals Peter Mikulas and Micah Kleit on this project.
When I went to work for Grand Central Partnership among my first assignments from Dan Biederman was to figure out how to deal with sidewalk issues: vending, newsracks, newsstands, payphones and making public toilets more available. In dense urban centers sidewalks, while public space, are highly contested territory, and the regulation of activity on them in New York City is arcane and labyrinthine. Not only pedestrians care about sidewalks. Adjacent property owners not only have responsibility for cleaning and maintaining their sidewalks, but they care about what happens in front of their multi-million dollar investments; particularly with its impact on ground floor retail. In midtown Manhattan, many buildings have vaults under the sidewalks that expand their basement space – and so are concerned about how much weight is put on them and whether anyone is punching holes in them.
A range of people have traditionally engaged in commercial activity on the New York City sidewalks – and these uses are heavily, if often ineffectually, regulated. There are separate governing schemes for four kinds of sidewalk venders: general merchandise, food, veterans and first amendment vendors. The Department of Parks and Recreation has its own scheme for concessioning venders within city parks as well as on adjacent sidewalks, and even sidewalks across the street from a park! The City permits individuals to erect newsstands at any sidewalk location that meets certain siting criteria – with no discretion by the City with respect to the location. If the proposed structure fits – the applicant is entitled to a permit. The Department of Transportation manages the enforcement of some (but not all) of these rules and is ultimately responsible for the physical condition of the sidewalks and with seeing to it that sidewalk uses don’t interfere with transportation (bus stops) or public safety (fire hydrants). Continue reading →
