Tired of endless delays that leave you waiting at bus stops and train stations? Frustrated by being stuck in traffic during your daily commute? Spending part of your vacation stuck on the tarmac?
Thanks to the team at Building America’s Future (BAF), a bipartisan coalition advocating investment in the country’s infrastructure, there’s now an app for that: I’m Stuck.
The free app, available for both iOS and Android, allows disgruntled travelers to document delays, jams and overcrowding in our transit system, automatically forwarding a location and picture to their member of Congress. I’m Stuck channels all that griping about our inefficient, outmoded and underfunded infrastructure into direct political action. Although it may not provide instant relief for travel-related woes, a groundswell of disapproval may draw politicians attention to the problem over the long haul.
“Usually commuters think traffic is like weather: It is something that happens to them, and they have no control over it. But that isn’t the case at all,” says former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who co-chairs BAF with former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray La Hood, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “The policies we put in place, or the lack of a coherent long-term infrastructure plan, directly impacts the daily experience of Americans trying to get around their communities. This app gives commuters and passengers a tool to voice their frustrations to Congress. It is called ‘I’m Stuck,’ but the truth is America is stuck until Washington takes action.”
It’s clear that American’s infrastructure is in desperate need of an upgrade. In their latest annual report, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation a failing grade of D+. To get the country where it needs to be by 2020, they suggest at least $3.6 trillion needs to be invested in unstable bridges, congested airports and pothole-riddled roads.
BAF’s team says the idea for the app arose during brainstorming sessions about how to engage the public in a notoriously dry topic. Instead of circulating petitions about bills like Sen. Bernie Sander’s $1 trillion investment plan, a $50 billion bond sale or a proposed hike in the gas tax — topics that, they say, frankly make people’s eyes glaze over — BAF encourages people to share their everyday experience as it happens. (For safety, they suggest passing your phone to a disgruntled passenger if driving.) So far, the app has been downloaded 16,180 times across all 50 states, and more than 12,000 emails have been sent to representatives in Congress.
“‘I’m Stuck’ is going to bring elected officials closer to the people on the ground,” says BAF’s president Marcia Hale, sharing with them the everyday “pain and frustration of outdated and overburdened transportation systems.”
If the app registers enough irritation about gridlock on the freeway, as BAF hopes, it could eventually beat the worst gridlock in the country: the one that clogs the halls of Congress.
Want to see where your fellow Americans are getting stuck? Check out the interactive map here.
(Homepage image: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)
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Tag: Michael Bloomberg
Can $45 Million Worth of Data and Technology Improve U.S. Cities?
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has long supported civic innovation, but the philanthropist is ramping up efforts to help local governments through his charitable foundation’s Innovation Delivery grants.
Bloomberg Philanthropies pledged $45 million to American cities looking to use big data and digital tools to help municipalities solve urban issues like economic development or infrastructure.
“We’re asking cities to do so much more,” says James Anderson, who heads up the innovation programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “We need cities to come up with bigger, better ideas more often, and we don’t want to leave innovation to chance.”
More than 80 prospective cities were invited to apply for a grant, which can range from $250,000 to $1 million annually for three years. Candidates must have at least 100,000 residents and a mayor in office for at least two years.
The Innovation Delivery grants will also come with a team of experts to help roll out the charity’s data-driven model, which has been developed based on programs in Chicago, Louisville, Atlanta, Memphis and New Orleans. The teams will serve as an in-house consultant agency for the recipients.
Touting success in the aforementioned cities, Bloomberg notes that using the Innovation Delivery model has led to Atlanta moving 1,022 homeless individuals into permanent housing and New Orleans reducing its murder rate to 19 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, retail vacancies in Memphis’s central economic corridor dropped 30 percent while Louisville was able to cut back the amount of ambulance responses redirecting 26 percent of 911 medical calls to immediate care centers or a doctor’s office.
“Innovation Delivery has been an essential part of our effort to bring innovation, efficiency and improved services to our customers,” Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer says in a press release. “Philanthropy can play an important role in expanding the capacity of cities to deliver better, bolder results. Bloomberg Philanthropies is one of few foundations investing in this area, and it has truly been a game changer for our city.”
Bloomberg Philanthropies will also fund any research, technical assistance and partnerships with other organizations that could expand the foundation’s model, according to the release. For cities that may not qualify or other interested lawmakers, the foundation has also compiled the Innovation Delivery Playbook, which outlines the approach through successful examples in the pilot cities.
Grant winners are expected to be announced this fall with the initiatives planned to kick off in spring 2015.
MORE: Watch: Rachel Haot on How Governments Should Adopt New Technology
Rachel Haot Revolutionized City Government. Now She’s Working At The State Level, and Wants Your Input
Rachel Haot was first amazed by computers when she was eight. She logged onto IBM’s early Internet service, Prodigy, to play checkers. “It was the coolest thing,”she told The Verge.
Twenty years later, in January 2011, Haot became New York City’s first Chief Digital Officer (CDO). It was her job to write a Digital Roadmap in 90 days, but also to define the CDO role. She was the first person to hold that title in any major American city, and her work has changed our cities’ attitudes to 21st-century tools.
Like Bloomberg, Haot is a technology entrepreneur. In 2006, she founded GroundReport, one of the first citizen journalism outlets. Her insight was that anyone with a phone can be a primary source for breaking news. Which is why on the GroundReport platform, anyone can submit an article or media for publication. Advancements in personal technology meant to Haot that “the crowd” isn’t just a scattering of passive readers, but a mass intelligence eager to contribute to everything.
During Haot’s four years as CEO of GroundReport, she saw the power of this principle as more than 7,000 people around the world contributed text, images, and video to the site. When Mayor Bloomberg approached her to make NYC Internet-awesome, she left GroundReport and moved to City Hall. Her transition from one job to another should, in theory, be seamless. The idea behind GroundReport — that the collaboration of many ordinary people can supply extraordinary value — also makes sense as political science. Journalism and democracy both work better when they’re more open and inclusive.
But in practice, she faced an uphill battle. NYC is arguably the intellectual capital of the world, but ancient IT systems and clunky bureaucracy bogged down City Hall. And then there was the culture. Another Bloomberg staffer, Stephen Goldsmith, was Deputy Mayor when Haot arrived and worked regularly with her. He said that getting departments to embrace new technologies like social media and data analytics was “very difficult.”
“New York City is a huge platform of information,” Goldsmith says. “When Rachel arrived, it was underdeveloped, underutilized, not personalized — just waiting for social media to unlock it.”
In the spring of 2011, Haot’s office published the “Roadmap for the Digital City,” which recommended a series of steps to make NYC the best at “Internet access, open government, citizen engagement and digital industry growth.” Some ideas included: installing public WiFi hotspots in parks and subways, investing in digital education and Internet access for low-income families and redesigning nyc.gov.
The benefits of open source collaboration and the importance of a great user experience have been obvious to Haot since she was very young. But her other talent is spreading computer literacy. Haot also has a knack for showing the technologically hesitant how the Internet can make their jobs easier.
Which is the main thing that needs getting done at state and local governments, says Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institute and co-author of “The Metropolitan Revolution.” “Digital is not something one person does,” she says. “It’s an approach a government has internally and externally. Digital has to be infused into everything.” Haot told A Smarter Planet she begins her conversation with other department heads by asking what their goals are. Then, she “backs into talk about digital tools” in pursuit of those goals.
Last fall, NYC announced that 100 percent of the Roadmap’s projects had been completed. Then in December, Haot announced she’d be taking the position of Deputy Secretary for Technology for New York State. Goldsmith, reflecting on the cultural change wrought by Haot, says, “The staff matured a lot in the time that she was there. In the end, there was much more of an appetite for digital.”
Now, from her new perch in Albany, New York, she’s issued the following challenge to NationSwell readers:
“How can we in government improve our service delivery and performance by embracing digital tools? How can we support a vibrant tech ecosystem statewide? Broadly: How do we realize the State’s innovative potential?”
Help her out by taking action using the button on the left.
How a Group of Exercising Seniors Hopes to Change a Crime-Plagued Neighborhood
While much of Brooklyn has enjoyed an influx of wealthy citizens who have grown weary of the Manhattan scene, the community of Brownsville continues to be entrenched in a deadly cycle of high poverty and senseless crime. In 2013, former mayor Michael Bloomberg declared New York City as the safest big city in America, with crime down a total of 30 percent over a 10-year period. In Brownsville, this declaration couldn’t be further from the truth. Over that same period, the neighborhood’s incidence of serious crime went down only 9 percent. And in 2013, the area had 13 murders on record — just three fewer than in 2012. But a group of about 40 elderly women and a few men are doing something together to improve their community and fight poverty: They’re exercising. “It makes people want to come out and do more, rather than be afraid,” Linda Beckford, a 70-year-old Brownsville resident and member of the group, told NPR. “A lot of seniors are by themselves and they don’t want to come out.”
On a recent February day, the women gathered at the local community center, where instructor Sid Howard, who is also a coach with New York Road Runners, led them in an aerobics workout. He starts the class with the elderly in chairs, where they warm up with rubber exercise bands. Eventually, they get up, stretch, dance and work muscles that haven’t moved in ages. On warm-weather days, the group takes to the streets, walking and dancing together. Not only is this an opportunity for them to get active and have fun, but it also gets people used to seeing their elderly neighbors, who before Community Solutions started the program used to stay primarily indoors.
Delores Stitch, one of the ladies in the group, says that she thinks the seniors get more respect now from their young neighbors. “They stop in and speak to us,” she told NPR. “The kids, the young adults, the middle aged.” In the summer, the group will walk to a local fresh produce stand, which is run by teens through another program focused on reinventing the neighborhood. Despite its high rate of crime and bad reputation, many residents of Brownsville and members of the social seniors group have lived here for decades. As Gwen Grant, 65, puts it, underneath the harrowing statistics lies a lot of promise, especially in the kids. “As seniors, we have to be interested in the kids. Don’t just say, ‘They’re bad, they’re troublesome,’ ” she says. “We have to give them what we know. We can also learn from them as well.”
You’ll Never Guess What NYC Is Turning Its Biggest Trash Heap Into
As NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg prepares to leave office, he’s shining up the Big Apple’s green reputation (and his legacy) with a few final announcements. Check out this one about the Freshkills Park on Staten Island that is getting the city’s largest solar energy facility. What’s remarkable about this green recreational area is that it used to be the world’s largest landfill. Just goes to show what creativity and technology working together can accomplish.