Ohio is having a winning week. First, its Cleveland Cavaliers made history, claiming its first NBA title (and becoming the first team to come back from a 3-1 deficit during the finals). Now, Columbus, Ohio, has won the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)’s Smart City Challenge, edging out a group of six other finalist cities, culled from 87 applicants vying for $40 million in DOT funding, along with $10 million pledged by Vulcan, an organization founded by Microsoft‘s Paul Allen to fund technology designed to address climate change, in order to help the winning city build out an electric vehicle infrastructure. The contest was launched in December of last year.
Austin, Denver, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, Portland and San Francisco were the other six finalists. “More than developing new technology, the Smart City Challenge required mayors to envision new solutions to close the gap between rich and poor, and bridge the digital divide through smart design to meet the needs of all residents,” said DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx during a press call to announce the winner. “All seven candidate [cities] dreamed big, designing first-of-their-kind transit corridors, EV [electric vehicle] fleets and cars, and buses with vehicle-to-vehicle [V2V] technology.” But Columbus, he said, “put forward an impressive, holistic vision for all residents. It was able to connect problems,” such as longer travel times due to a growing population, impacting the environment and quality of life, with “specific, measurable technology solutions.”
Jeff Zients, director of the National Economic Council (which advises the President on economic matters), described the Smart City Challenge as a call for cities to use technology to transform their transportation systems to reduce emissions, increase access to transportation to all citizens, and decrease the incidence of accidents. All seven of the final candidates pitched programs that would utilize V2V communications, self-driving and electric vehicles, in ways that would integrate Internet of Things technology. In addition, most of the private companies that have agreed to work with the DOT to support the winning program—Amazon Web Services, NXP Semiconductors, Mobileye, Autodesk, Sidewalk Labs, AT&T, DC Solar and Continental Automotive—also utilize, sell or support IoT technologies.
Mobileye will provide Columbus with its Shield +TM driver-assistance safety technology, which uses cameras and computer vision to help bus drivers avoid collisions with cyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists. Sidewalk Labs, a part of Google parent company Alphabet, will provide it with public data collection services and a transportation analytics platform.
In a press release issued last month, NXP said its involvement in the Smart City Challenge project will include the use of NXP’s “vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X) technology, long-range, secure and private RFID tagging for automatic vehicle identification and road-safety systems, and smart card ICs to enable secure admission to transportation, access control, retail and other municipal services.” V2X refers to communications between vehicles or between a vehicle and infrastructure, such as a short-range radio device attached to a lamppost or traffic light.
The V2X and V2V communications infrastructure is based on the Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) protocol. NXP is bringing its V2X and V2V technologies to market via a hardware and software package called BlueBox, which integrates radar, lidar, cameras and secure V2X software into an appliance that the company is currently testing with carmakers. It is designed to support increasingly autonomous vehicle functionality.
This summer, Zients said, the federal government will be announcing guidelines for the use of self-driving vehicles, as well as for the use of V2V communications systems.
In its winning bid, Columbus, which is quickly growing and is home to many tech startups, said it would use autonomous shuttles to connect “the first mile and the last mile”—referring to the distances between one’s home and public transit centers, and between those centers and a workplace—in order to make commuting easier and less carbon-intensive. In its animated pitch video, in fact, is a shuttle that looks exactly like Olli, the autonomous vehicle that Local Motors debuted last week. Local Motors, an eight-year-old startup, partnered with IBM to develop the vehicle’s navigation engine, which uses IBM’s Watson developer application programming interfaces (APIs) to power such applications as text-to-speech, speech-to-text and natural language classifiers, enabling passengers to “converse” with Olli and ask it questions about the route it is selecting. Olli uses Watson’s cloud-based cognitive-computing capability to collect data from more than 30 sensors embedded in the vehicle.
Columbus will also deploy a wireless communications platform that will connect its city-owned car fleet and public transit vehicles with sensors mounted at intersections, in order to optimize traffic flow and support safety applications. Additionally, the city plans to test connected-vehicle technology to make the movement of freight traffic safer and more efficient by having trucks wirelessly communicate with each other and coordinate their speed via a traffic signal management system, in order to keep the trucks rolling with fewer breaks for red lights. Plus, a smartphone app designed for truckers will provide real-time traffic information.
Another smartphone app for visitors will encourage tourists to use public transit, by providing navigation guidance and linking directions with event information coordinated.
In addition to the $50 million from the DOT and Vulcan, Columbus has secured another $90 million from various public and private sources to help fund its smart-city program.
“We’re very excited about the opportunity to make Columbus America’s first smart city,” said Andrew Ginther, the city’s mayor, “and to serve as a laboratory for other cities around the country and the world.”