by Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region
As the Internet has risen, so has New York City. Even as the quantity and velocity of information - sound, pictures and words - that can be shoved through a wire increases, so has the population, employment and financial muscle of New York City and its region.
It wasn't supposed to work this way. With the advent of the Internet and computer, people could live anywhere they want to, the theory went. Architect Michael Pittas predicted in the June 1994 issue of Metropolis magazine that in a decade or two telecommuting would turn center city office districts into "dinosaurs" and "may be the prelude to the extinction of the modern office building as we know it."
Not the case. While some people do live on the beach and communicate via laptop with their offices, there has also been a big growth in classic central business district office employment.
It seems that the explosion of global commerce that the Internet has fueled - things like back offices or even front offices in India - has also fueled the need and productivity of people gathering together in an old-fashioned way - on the same street, in the same building, or at least in the same city.
So today is New York City's time in the sun. Even as more and more people have access to things like Wifi and hi-speed Internet, so does the region proceed with things like another tunnel under the Hudson, the 2nd Avenue subway and the construction of a new Moynihan Station. We are expanding our communication systems even as we expand our transportation systems. In fact, the two compliment each other.
All this comes to mind because a while ago it hit me that communication is really a form of transportation. Cars, trains, planes and ships move people or things from one place to another. Telephones, the Internet, the postal service, radios, fax machines and other devices move words, numbers, images and sounds from one place to another.
Maybe that's why both are so crucial and transformative. While people use them for purely utilitarian means, both transportation and communication change the nature of places.
But they change places in ways that are difficult to predict. The telephone around 1900 was, according to MIT Professor Julian Beinart, supposed to save the family farm by connecting it better to the outside world. Instead, the telephone, if anything, accelerated the family farm's demise by accelerating commerce and large-scale industrialization that could brush aside a small family farm.
Streetcars and subways in the early 20th century were supposed to decongest urban centers like New York. Instead, big cities got even denser as train lines enabled even more people to swoosh in and out of work to and from new higher-rise buildings. And the car was supposed to bring people closer to nature. Only a few individuals foresaw that when everyone drove, the city would come to the country and nature would recede into the distance.
Transportation and communication are alike in other ways. Government is heavily involved in both. It originally set the operating systems for communication and transportation, be it Internet protocol or rules of the highway, even if companies like Verizon or Toyota carry out the actual construction. Government also does much of the basic research and infrastructure development on both fronts. If you study the development of either transportation or communication, you find yourself immersed in government research grants and agencies, ranging from the first federal Bureau of Public Roads in the 1880s, to the work of the defense department's DARPA after World War II. Microsoft, Intel and Google built their fortunes by standing on the shoulders of government, as did transportation companies like Ford, Pan Am and Pennsylvania Railroad.
In recent decades, our communication systems have taken quantum leaps in their pace, range and capacity.
That's not the case with transportation today, at least in the United States. We still get around by car, truck, train, plane or ship at speeds and capacities that haven't improved much in half a century or more.
In the early 1930s, my late father drove between his hometown of Norfolk and the small resort town of Virginia Beach in a Ford Model A. It took him half an hour. Eighty years later, that same journey takes, well, half an hour, depending on traffic.
Better intercity train service hasn't sped up such trips. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Even air travel is in many markets less robust than it used to be. For short hops now, you sometimes board a low-ceiling, propeller-driven plane that requires you to walk across an open runway, even in the rain. Soon, they'll be handing out goggles for open-cockpit seating.
Why hasn't transportation, like communication, kept on improving? Simple physics may be one reason. It's more difficult to accelerate a physical object than an electrical impulse through a fiber optic cable. But leaving that aside, part of the reason is probably the shrinking involvement of government in research and advanced infrastructure construction. Oh, we still build plenty of roads and even some train lines. But government has shied from investing in magnetic-levitation trains or supersonic passenger planes - things that would really push the envelope of what is possible in transportation. That's not the case in Western Europe and Asia.
Given how vital both communication and transportation are to virtually any field of endeavor, it pays to pay attention to both. On that, we are at least on solid footing.
As the Internet has risen, so has New York City. Even as the quantity and velocity of information - sound, pictures and words - that can be shoved through a wire increases, so has the population, employment and financial muscle of New York City and its region.
It wasn't supposed to work this way. With the advent of the Internet and computer, people could live anywhere they want to, the theory went. Architect Michael Pittas predicted in the June 1994 issue of Metropolis magazine that in a decade or two telecommuting would turn center city office districts into "dinosaurs" and "may be the prelude to the extinction of the modern office building as we know it."
Not the case. While some people do live on the beach and communicate via laptop with their offices, there has also been a big growth in classic central business district office employment.
It seems that the explosion of global commerce that the Internet has fueled - things like back offices or even front offices in India - has also fueled the need and productivity of people gathering together in an old-fashioned way - on the same street, in the same building, or at least in the same city.
So today is New York City's time in the sun. Even as more and more people have access to things like Wifi and hi-speed Internet, so does the region proceed with things like another tunnel under the Hudson, the 2nd Avenue subway and the construction of a new Moynihan Station. We are expanding our communication systems even as we expand our transportation systems. In fact, the two compliment each other.
All this comes to mind because a while ago it hit me that communication is really a form of transportation. Cars, trains, planes and ships move people or things from one place to another. Telephones, the Internet, the postal service, radios, fax machines and other devices move words, numbers, images and sounds from one place to another.
Maybe that's why both are so crucial and transformative. While people use them for purely utilitarian means, both transportation and communication change the nature of places.
But they change places in ways that are difficult to predict. The telephone around 1900 was, according to MIT Professor Julian Beinart, supposed to save the family farm by connecting it better to the outside world. Instead, the telephone, if anything, accelerated the family farm's demise by accelerating commerce and large-scale industrialization that could brush aside a small family farm.
Streetcars and subways in the early 20th century were supposed to decongest urban centers like New York. Instead, big cities got even denser as train lines enabled even more people to swoosh in and out of work to and from new higher-rise buildings. And the car was supposed to bring people closer to nature. Only a few individuals foresaw that when everyone drove, the city would come to the country and nature would recede into the distance.
Transportation and communication are alike in other ways. Government is heavily involved in both. It originally set the operating systems for communication and transportation, be it Internet protocol or rules of the highway, even if companies like Verizon or Toyota carry out the actual construction. Government also does much of the basic research and infrastructure development on both fronts. If you study the development of either transportation or communication, you find yourself immersed in government research grants and agencies, ranging from the first federal Bureau of Public Roads in the 1880s, to the work of the defense department's DARPA after World War II. Microsoft, Intel and Google built their fortunes by standing on the shoulders of government, as did transportation companies like Ford, Pan Am and Pennsylvania Railroad.
In recent decades, our communication systems have taken quantum leaps in their pace, range and capacity.
That's not the case with transportation today, at least in the United States. We still get around by car, truck, train, plane or ship at speeds and capacities that haven't improved much in half a century or more.
In the early 1930s, my late father drove between his hometown of Norfolk and the small resort town of Virginia Beach in a Ford Model A. It took him half an hour. Eighty years later, that same journey takes, well, half an hour, depending on traffic.
Better intercity train service hasn't sped up such trips. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Even air travel is in many markets less robust than it used to be. For short hops now, you sometimes board a low-ceiling, propeller-driven plane that requires you to walk across an open runway, even in the rain. Soon, they'll be handing out goggles for open-cockpit seating.
Why hasn't transportation, like communication, kept on improving? Simple physics may be one reason. It's more difficult to accelerate a physical object than an electrical impulse through a fiber optic cable. But leaving that aside, part of the reason is probably the shrinking involvement of government in research and advanced infrastructure construction. Oh, we still build plenty of roads and even some train lines. But government has shied from investing in magnetic-levitation trains or supersonic passenger planes - things that would really push the envelope of what is possible in transportation. That's not the case in Western Europe and Asia.
Given how vital both communication and transportation are to virtually any field of endeavor, it pays to pay attention to both. On that, we are at least on solid footing.
@RegionalPlan
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