Shift Magazine - October 7, 2019 - 16

SMART CITY
REALITY CHECK
Columbus, Ohio, navigates challenges of balancing
its vision with practical ways to carry it out

BY PETE BIGELOW

OLUMBUS, Ohio - Maybe it
was Midwestern modesty. Or
perhaps it was a deer-in-theheadlights realization that transportation leaders from across the country
would now be watching them.
But when Columbus, Ohio, beat 77
cities from across the United States to
win the federal government's Smart City
Challenge in 2016, the initial elation was
followed by apprehension.
"When we won, I think we thought
maybe we were further behind some
other cities," said Jordan Davis, director
of Smart Columbus, a joint-venture organization created to spearhead the public
and private sectors' smart-themed initiatives. "We had every vendor knocking on
our door, pitching this and that."
But Columbus wasn't behind cities

shift * october 2019

such as tech-savvy San Francisco or
Austin, two of the seven finalists for the
$40 million in grant funding from the U.S.
Department of Transportation and $10
million from billionaire Paul Allen's Vulcan
Inc. Much of the transportation technology that leaders across America envisioned as a means to reinventing their
cities remained in its infancy.
Three years after winning the Smart
City Challenge, which helped Columbus
further raise $720 million in private-sector
pledges, Columbus has indeed delivered
on many goals. It deployed automated vehicles and connected cars, installed electric
charging infrastructure and encouraged
adoption of green-friendly vehicles. In
August, a beta version launched of Pivot,
an app that allows customers to plan and
pay for multimodal travel.

Davis and others have figured out
where the promises of tomorrow meet
the realities of today. At a time when
the drumbeat to push smart technology
has reached a starry-eyed crescendo,
Columbus offers a clear-headed playbook
on what a Smart City is actually capable
of in 2019.

AUTONOMOUS-TRANSIT LINK

When business and community leaders
first gathered to write the Columbus grant
proposal, they envisioned autonomous
vehicles playing a prominent role in their
blueprints of the transportation future.
In particular, they crafted plans to use
self-driving shuttle buses to better connect Easton, a neighborhood about 20
minutes north of downtown that features
a shopping mall, entertainment center and

Shift Magazine - October 7, 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Shift Magazine - October 7, 2019