My Progressive Wish & A Vision For Rochester’s Future
Rochester has been having an existential crisis for quite a while. What should our identity be? We’ve moved on from defining ourselves as the home of Kodak and Xerox. Just as our largest employer is now the University of Rochester, our vision of the future has changed to a knowledge-based economy.
Rochester is trying to leverage the wealth of talent to be found in local universities to make itself a city of innovation, technology, and the cutting edge. I’ve found ads advertising the city in such magazines as Wired or Fortune.
Yet a city doesn’t become a hotbed of entrepreneurship and tech by cutting taxes. It is clear that investment in infrastructure is a large part of the solution. I remember a recent report that polled business leaders as to what they wanted in a city. Infrastructure and rule of law came first. Low taxes was a distant third.
Milton Friedman, the patron saint of the economic side of the conservative movement, changed his mind later in life. The key to macroeconomic wealth, he realized, isn’t low taxes. It’s the rule of law, and efficient infrastructure.
While the symbols of physical infrastructure such as roads, power plants, and hospitals are still important, a new force must be recognized. If Rochester is serious in its desire to be a “tech city,” it has to put its money where its mouth is. Rochester needs high-speed broadband.
Now, Elliot Spitzer is calling for a statewide broadband initiative, but I don’t trust the state legislature. Knowing the entrenched interests found in the Assembly and Senate, if any plan is enacted, it’ll give telecoms massive kickbacks and tax breaks for little gain. Maybe they’ll even try to “license” a network from a private company.
That’s the wrong way to go. In any case, Rochester has to do better than the rest of our large state if we want to stand out.
One of the longstanding problems in setting up broadband infrastructure is the “last mile” between the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and your home or office. While the “backbone” of the internet is composed of high-speed fiber optics, the “stream” of information is choked by the slow, old-fashioned copper wires connecting the local ISP and your PC.
Other paths to municipal broadband exist. Rochester is already deliberating city-wide WiFi. We could instead use the faster and stronger WiMAX.
The Erie Canal was the source of Upstate New York’s wealth for perhaps longer than a century. Again, the citizens of New York cry out for a bold plan to lift them out of the doldrums.
If Rochester wants to be the city of the future, it should invest in the future. We need a comprehensive plan to both boost the “trunk” of fiber leading to our city and to turn all those “last miles” into optic fiber. Then we can truly utilize the engineering and entrepreneurial talent to be found all around us.
I love the fact that Friedman changed his mind later in life. The conservative movement apparently missed the memo.
I like the idea of WiMAX. What do you think it would take to do it right? I don’t trust the state leg right now either.
Quick thoughts:
- Some sort of Mesh Network, though that probably goes without saying.
- Fraud will be a big problem, obviously. There’s a scam right now in internet cafe’s where people set up their own WiFi network, ignorant businessmen log onto this network thinking it’s the Cafe network, and then the scammers can monitor all the traffic going on their network.
- To combat this, you’d probably stipulate that the WiMAX network is inherently insecure, so if you want to do some online stock trading, for example, you’d have to use a landline.
- Lobbyists and lazy legislators will try to give some corporation a contract to set up a monopoly on municipal wireless. This is a bad idea. It is imperative that the government/people own , if not run, the infrastructure.
Sounds like a good idea, but the true question is how much an initiative like this would cost…
Easy. Rochester designates a “high tech business district”. Let’s say for the sake of argument the city designates it as 5×5 blocks, and pays for Fiber to the PC. See if it works. If all is well, businesses will flock there and create a renaissance of greatness. If not, no one will turn down nice broadband.
Test period sounds reasonable, but with a $21 million budget gap for the 07-08 fiscal year the City is already tight on money, so it would be tight to push through.
Good idea though, without really researching… My gut tells me it would be a good use of tax dollars
Maybe if we stopped funding vehicles for corruption like Comida, and instead funded useful stuff like, we’d kill two birds with one stone.
Along with infrastructure, there is the huge intangible issue of quality of life - specifically, how do cities attract and retain bright, young risk-takers who are the most desirable employees and the most likely to found businesses of their own. I’m convinced that San Francisco became the epicenter of the dot com world in part because it has always had a reputation as a place where “geeks and freaks” were accepted.
Wi-Fi networks might help attract computer geeks to the city, but so many other places are doing that, why not push the things that make Rochester unique, which the city’s got already - cool old buildings, ethnic diversity, a strong arts scene, a river gorge running through the middle of the city, a huge lake just to our north, some of the best wines in the nation just to our south. There are so many government initiatives that would cost very little money, but would send out huge signals that the region is serious about attracting the sort of people who would normally gravitate to San Francisco, Seattle or New York City.