I want a NYC app that can track where I am in an emergency and uide me to safety

Excellent idea. I want that also.

Excellent Idea.

So far, the two city-wide emergencies we've suffered in the last 10 years (9/11; '03 blackout) also involved the loss of mobile infrastructure, and for non-city-wide emergencies (fire, flood, bldg collapse) 911 is still a better bet than an app, I think.

Hi Clay,

The key point to note here is the date of those events: 2001 and 2003. Smartphone adoption was much lower back then, as was cell tower bandwidth, which lead to a preference for voice over data. Smartphone adoption and mobile bandwidth increases immensely year on year. In Fukushima and Haiti, it was the Internet that stayed up vs. power and telecommunications. Having an app that establishes a trusted relay between civilians, first responders and Government sounds like a good idea to me!

The internet stayed up in '01 and '03 as well and, in '03, the PSTN also stayed up. What went down were the cell towers. This isn't a question of bandwidth so much as power engineering; the mobile phone operators all swore that they all had backup power, and it turned out that what they had were 1-hour batteries at the base of their towers, which all drained at faster-than-anticipated rates.

You are also incorrect abou your counter-examples: Mobile phone service failed in the aftermath of both the Haitian* and Japanese** quakes. Saying "the internet stayed up" was meaningless to people trying to access it via mobile devices as recently as March of this year.

Put another way, if any part of the grid stays up, then any communication device will be useful for emergency communication, and if the grid is down, any device that relies on that part of the grid will be useless, no matter what apps it is running. If we engineered our mobile systems for disasters, apps might be useful, but given the history of the last decade, it's pretty clearly not, at present, a client-side problem. In-line meshing wifi-routers that plugged into the PSTN would be more useful than an iPhone with an app and no tower to talk to.

* http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-haitis-cellphone-networks-failed
** http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-03-12/rest-of-world/28683249_1_trains-phone-lines-tokyo

Both links you cite focus on the loss of voice communications after quakes. The Haitian interview actually states that Haitel's network stayed up after the quake. I know senior medical personnel who were on the scene in Haiti 96hrs after the quake who had Edge connectivity on their smartphones and could access the mobile web. We saw mobile internet traffic sore in the wake of the Japan crisis. Skype and Twitter activity right after the tsunami in Japan in areas affected by the quake was off the charts. Manhattan alone has 3000+ cell towers, so even if they all collapsed after the first hour, that's still 60 minutes of context when it counts the most. I would add the recent Snowpocalypse we had to the list of situations where an app like this could be beneficial to affected citizens. Even if the network completely collapsed, the app may still be useful by having maps, evacuation routes and other data pre-loaded on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5olMWz0-Pxc&feature=player_detailpage#t=2057s