It was a couple weeks before Christmas, and the federal government dangled a $40 million prize in front of America’s cities.
Find ways to use new automated driving and sensor technologies and big data tools to cut traffic and auto emissions, and the U.S. Department of Transportation will fund the best of the bunch as a model for the country.
Seventy-eight cities, or teams of cities, jumped in, representing more than 30 million Americans from Anchorage to Tallahassee. But after all that enthusiasm, what happens to the 77 cities that don’t win?
Citing the “overwhelming response,” transportation secretary Anthony Foxx on Saturday named seven finalists in the “Smart City Challenge,” rather than the five originally planed. San Francisco; Portland, Ore.; Denver; Columbus,Ohio; Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Austin will get $100,000 each to further flesh out their ideas, Foxx said in a session with selected mayors at the South by Southwest festival in Austin.
The plans are ambitious and varied, from Columbus’s push to build a network of on-demand driverless shuttles to Portland’s plan to connect electric vehicle charging stations to its streetlight system.
The winner will be selected in June, and given up to $50 million, including $10 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
“We were expecting 15 to 20 cities to apply and to get 78 was just astonishing to all of us,” said Spencer Reeder, senior program officer for climate and energy at Allen’s Vulcan Inc., one of several technology-focused companies partnering on the competition and advising participants. “The last thing we want is to see all these great ideas stay on paper.”
Reeder said he’s met recently with like-minded philanthropists about finding new money to aid cities that didn’t make the cut, and to help local officials ferret out existing federal funds. There are limits, however.
Despite passage of a transportation funding bill in December, “a huge hole” remains, said former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, co-chair of the bipartisan advocacy group Building America’s Future. A group of civil engineers pointed to trillions of dollars in needed infrastructure spending by 2020, Rendell noted.
