MAYOR BLOOMBERG DISCUSSES HOW THE CITY'S APPLIED SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY INITIATIVES ARE CREATING NEW JOBS AND IMPROVING QUALITY OF LIFE FOR NEW YORKERS IN WEEKLY RADIO ADDRESS
The following is the text of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s weekly radio address as prepared for delivery on 1010 WINS News Radio for Sunday, April 14, 2013.
“Good Morning. This is Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
“The fast-paced world of information technology is the biggest game-changer in our daily lives and in the life of our city. And our Administration continues to harness the power of information technology to create new jobs and opportunity for New Yorkers – and also to improve our quality of life.
“Last week, for example, we joined the leaders of New York University in opening the doors of a temporary home for that school’s new ‘Center for Urban Science and Progress’ in Downtown Brooklyn. CUSP is one of three winning entries in a competition the City held two years ago to create major new ‘applied sciences’ campuses in our city – schools that will be hives of innovative research and hubs of creating new products, services, and jobs in our city.
“Although it won’t be fully built out until 2017, CUSP will hold its first classes this fall. They’ll focus on a sci-fi-sounding field called ‘urban informatics’: exploring and employing the vast new amounts of data that technology is generating about the world’s cities. With three-fourths of people on Earth likely to be city dwellers by 2050, the volume of such information will just keep growing – and also keep spawning ideas for making cities better and safer places. Major private sector firms certainly see it that way. Last week, Microsoft Research and Lutron Electronics, a company focused on reducing energy consumption, joined corporate giants IBM, Xerox, Siemens, and Cisco on CUSP’s growing roster of private sector partners.
“Those partnerships – along with CUSP’s new cooperative agreements with the Federal Energy Department’s major research labs – are going to make the school one of the world’s most exciting research centers. It, and the other new applied sciences schools we’re helping develop at Columbia University and at Cornell NYC Tech’s new campus on Roosevelt Island, are also going to fuel job creation here for decades to come. There’s been a 30 percent surge in tech sector jobs in our city since 2005 – one of the major reasons why New York City continues to outpace the nation in new job growth. Developing and staffing these new schools is going to generate tens of thousands more good-paying jobs – in construction, administrative support and other fields, as well as in tech.
“CUSP’s research may sound a bit futuristic. But when it comes to information technology improving City services and quality of life, the future is already here. Case in point: last week we also unveiled two new high-tech pilot programs designed to make parking your car on City streets easier. Drivers in the Bronx’s Belmont Business Improvement District can now pay for parking by – securely – providing a tech partner of the City’s with license plate and credit card information, and then use a smartphone app or a toll-free number to identify the nearest Muni-Meter. A new on-line color-coded map also gives drivers updates on the availability of metered parking. For more information, just go on-line – naturally – to the Department of Transportation’s page at the City’s web site: nyc.gov. And while you’re there, take a look at all the other ways you can get City services and help using our information technology tools.
“This is Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Thanks for listening.”
