[ad_1]
2016, Colon, Ohio surpassed 77 other small and medium-sized cities in the US For a $ 50 million pot which he wanted to reshape his future. Department of Transportation Smart City Challenge it was the first competition of its kind, designed to be a starting point for adapting to new technologies that were suddenly everywhere in the city. Companies like Ride-hail Uber and Elevator they were rising, Car sharing companies like Car2Go and were rising nationally autonomous vehicles it looks like he was in the corner.
“Our approach is revolutionary,” the city wrote in its winning grant proposal, pledging to focus on projects to support the city’s least-equipped neighborhoods. He outlined plans to experiment with Wi-Fi-enabled kiosks, travel planning apps for residents, pay for buses and transportation fares, and applications for finding autonomous ferries and trucks connected to sensors.
Five years later, the Smart City Challenge is over, but the revolution has never come. According to the latest project report released by the city’s Smart Columbus Program this month, the pandemic occurred when several projects were underway. Six kiosks located in the city were used to organize eight trips from July 2020 to March 2021. EasyMile launched autonomous shuttles in February 2020 to carry passengers at an average speed of 4 kilometers per hour. Fifteen days later, a sudden brake he sent a cyclist to the hospital, pause the service. The truck project was canceled. Only 1,100 people downloaded an app called Pivot to plan and book travel on vehicles, shared bikes and scooters, and public transportation.
The discrepancy between the promise of Whiz-bang technology and the reality of Columbus represents a recent shift in technology from a silver bullet to a new one, and the latest talk about the problems that web applications can cause on IRL streets. “Smart city” was a difficult marketing term associated with urban optimism. Today, citizens are thinking more carefully about technology-enabled issues surveillance, the concept of sensors in every home is not as bright as it once was.
However, Columbus officials stressed that the Smart City project has not been a failure. In fact, the latest report was a success for the project. Now Columbus wants to rethink the slippery slope.
“It’s not like someone is competing with more sensors or something like that, and I think we’re a little confused at some point,” says Jordan Davis, director of Columbus Smart, the organization that is committed to continuing the challenge. . Some of the challenge projects will continue. Davis says the focus will be on, “How do we use technology to improve the quality of life, address community equity issues, mitigate climate change, and achieve forecasts in the region?”
Think about 2015, and the technosolutionist goals of the challenge made sense. The future was fast approaching, and the DOT expected its seed money to be pre-planned by a medium-sized city like Columbus in partnership with equity in mind. When he selected the city, the department said he was impressed with the number of local businesses that provided additional support to the project. The challenge is to “use advanced tools to make life better for all people, especially those living in underserved communities,” said then-Secretary Anthony Foxx. (He is now in charge of Lyft’s policy.)
It is now clear that private companies cannot predict the future of cities and may not have their best interests in mind. Davis said Columbus ’selections were ultimately difficult to manage and led to a flood of proposals from companies that were“ sometimes distracted ”. Meanwhile, Uber (and Lyft) get out of autonomous vehicles, especially after an Uber test vehicle hit a pedestrian and killed him in Arizona. Google siblings In 2017 it was commissioned by Sidewalk Labs Toronto to build a smart neighborhood of the future. But he killed the project last year pandemic and fierce political struggle with privacy advocates and local groups and developers.
Still, smart city projects continue around the world. Toyota the car driving community is building a car-friendly community Out of place. Sidewalk Labs has just announced it advises real estate developers “Innovation plans” in a few U.S. cities. And Alibaba-led “smart traffic” projects continue in China, Malaysia and Macau.
In the end, it could have been an ambitious revolution in Columbus ’smart cities from the beginning. “A lot of people were expecting a lot from this project, and maybe too many,” says Harvey Miller, a geography professor and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at the University of Ohio, who helped plan and evaluate the challenge. He pointed out that $ 50 million ($ 40 million from the federal government, $ 10 million from Microsoft Allen founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc.) isn’t a lot of money, mostly spread over five years. It is not the fault of the settlers that the industry promises to be too overwhelmed about the imminent arrival of car drivers.
[ad_2]
Source link
