One thing is clear about the Smart City grant. Columbus and its sprawl is about to become a petri dish to “creatively reengineer our urban transportation networks” so to avoid global warming and connect the underserved to good jobs. This is the altruistic vision some national pundits have consecrated Columbus with.
The grant is heady stuff for “Test City USA.” A $150 million public and private work-in-progress to test sci-fi transportation technology such as driver-less cars. A plan to build neighborhood hubs with electronic vehicle charging stations that will also have bikeshare and carshare services.
The US Department of Transportation and host of corporate partners – including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., which chipped in $10 million – chose Columbus over 78 other cities, such as Austin, San Francisco, Portland and Denver.
And while our traffic congestion and its pollution doesn’t compare to Denver’s problems, Central Ohio needs to reengineer its transportation and do it in a hurry. For the last several years anyone who commutes into Columbus has painfully dealt with ongoing major road construction to end the outerbelt’s bottlenecks.