What Community Leaders Can Learn from Smart Columbus
In 2016, the City of Columbus won the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge. Since being selected for the $40 million award, the City of Columbus and its partners have developed and implemented the Smart Columbus initiative, an effort to reinvent mobility. For the hundreds of municipalities, regions and states pursuing smart community initiatives, Smart Columbus offers some good lessons and makes available valuable resources. In this post, I highlight three key lessons and identify several helpful resources for those championing smart and connected initiatives in their communities.
National Conference of State Legislature’s Smart City Summit
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to address the members of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) at the organization’s Smart City Summit. Hosted by the City of Columbus, the Summit provided NCSL members with an opportunity to examine the policies and programs that create smart communities and explore the role that states can play in coordinating and encouraging smart and connected communities.
The NCSL Smart City Summit included a tour of the $1 million Smart Columbus Experience Center — where this author enjoyed his first ride in an autonomous vehicle! — and presentations on the Smart Columbus initiative from key stakeholders including Mike Stevens, CIO, City of Columbus, James Barna, Exec Director, DriveOhio and Jordan Davis, Director of Smart Cities & Collaboration, Columbus Partnership.
We learned that Smart Columbus’ objective is no less than to transform transportation and mobility in its region and to share its experience with communities across the country and the globe. In terms of specific goals, speakers provided details (NCSL has posted the presentations delivered at the Summit) about several initiatives designed to increase electric vehicle adoption in the region by nearly 5X and to decrease single occupant vehicle commutes to major workplaces by 10 percent.
Three Key Takeaways from Smart Columbus and the Columbus Way
Via our visit to the Experience Center and through interactions with the Smart Columbus team, NCSL Smart City Summit attendees saw first-hand the impressive impact of the Columbus Way, a phrase coined by a 2015 Harvard Business School case study. Indeed, the unique collaborations between the city, non-profit and academic institutions and businesses located in the region that characterize the Columbus Way were on full-display. Per Smart Columbus, collaborative efforts around transportation and mobility that started in response to a $40 million 2016 US Department of Transportation challenge grant, have yielded an estimated $522 million in leveraged investment in the Columbus region. Wow.
The example of Smart Columbus highlights a few key points for all would-be smart city champions to keep in mind:
1. The Smart Columbus Experience Center, the Route 33 Smart Mobility Corridor initiative and the Acceleration Partners Program are all by-products of a shared vision for what Smart Columbus should mean and accomplish.
2. The vision for Smart Columbus draws-upon and incorporates distinctive attributes of the Columbus region (e.g., the presence of auto manufacturing, the presence of a Tier 1 research university) and seeks to address an acknowledged challenge for the community (e.g., traffic congestion).
3. Broad-based support for Smart Columbus’ vision is so important to overall success of the initiative that Smart Columbus developed a two-hour interactive activity (“Smart Columbus Live”) to generate buy-in from community stakeholders. According to Smart Columbus, more than 1,500 people participated in 96 Smart Columbus Live sessions.
All of us working to advance Smart Community efforts in our own regions should be excited by the Smart Columbus Playbook — Columbus’ platform for sharing what they are doing and what they’ve learned. The Smart Columbus Playbook includes contracts, program materials and lots of data. Smart Columbus’ storyteller, Donna Marbury, makes certain the playbook also includes compelling vignettes about Columbus’ journey as a smart community. Using the Playbook, Smart Columbus hopes to educate one million city officials, policy makers, business leaders and influencers on their successes and challenges by the end of 2020.
While not all communities have the mobility challenges facing Columbus and few communities should expect the federal funding that Columbus has received, all communities can develop distinctive visions for advancing their smart community goals. In my presentation to NCSL members, I made the case that the time is ripe for municipalities, multi-county regions and states to create a vision for telemedicine, distance learning and aging at home initiatives designed to leverage the growing number of U.S. homes that have access to gigabit networks.
In my next post, I will outline the four questions that I posed to NCSL members with respect to the role that state legislatures can play in the advancement of Smart Communities and Smart Regions.
About this Medium Site
On this Medium site, I intend to explore an array of topics related to the transformative power of smart and connected communities. A central question for this observer of the smart city movement: how will municipalities develop, deploy and support smart and connected community projects at scale?
I welcome feedback and comments from readers.
