The Application of Telecommunications to City Services

In June 1971, the Committee on Telecommunications, National Academy of Engineering produced a report "Communications Technology for Urban Improvement" containing some twenty specific ideas on the use of telecommunications-information technologies to improve living conditions in U. S. cities. The suggestions covered such urban applications as citizen-local government interaction, education, health care, environmental monitoring, transportation, citizen safety, and emergency services. In the several years that have elapsed since the Committee's report was published, an encouraging number of the suggestions are being implemented or planned experimentally. A relative lack of market aggregation, and other problems attendant on experiments involving cities has resulted in the Federal Government being the principal fundor of experiments. The Committee on Telecommunications is now carrying out studies in the following areas: 1) the planning of the viable metropolitan communications system of the future; 2) reviewing for the Department of Housing and Urban Development its ongoing experiment on the development of information systems to serve city needs, and 3) studying for the U. S. Postal Service the latter's long term, i.e., 10 to 15 year, needs for electronic message distribution systems.