The Dumb City

It turns out Big Tech isn't the savior we thought it would be.

Columbus beat the likes of Austin, Denver, Kansas City, Portland, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and 70 other cities in 2016 to win the $40 million Smart City Grant from the Department of Transportation, which included another $10 million from something nefarious called Vulcan Inc.

This was a big deal for a city that desperately wants to be acknowledged as the next best thing by people who don’t live in Columbus. Instead of taking that money and investing in proven modes of mass transportation like buses or trains, we were regaled by Big Tech gremlins who promised us self-driving cars were right around the corner!

Let the gremlins tell it, and the cutting-edge technology would land where it always does in America: With poor people to help them get to work or to the hospital where they would immediately be asked if they had insurance.

From Rick Rouan of dispatch.com who broke the story in 2016:

Public officials will make a formal announcement about the grant on Thursday in Linden, an area that the city plans to target for transportation upgrades.

In its application, the city pointed out that Linden has “a high proportion of carless households, unreliable access to employment and health services, a lack of access to digital information, and a high portion of cash-based households.”

A transit pass payment system that could be used for multiple forms of transportation, including COTA and app-based car services, could help those who don’t have credit cards or bank accounts. Kiosks could be built to reload transit cards, or the city could use a smartphone app as a universal payment system.

“This grant will help meet the transportation needs of Ohioans who live in the low-income neighborhoods in and around Columbus to ensure they can get to their job, or receive a good education,” Sen. Rob Portman said in a statement.

Our first warning sign should have been that Senator Portman was lauding this as a way to help “low-income neighborhoods around Columbus.” Portman does not care about those kinds of people, especially in Democratic strongholds like Franklin County.

But hey, $50 million is $50 million and naturally Columbus did what it does best: Building a fabled public-private partnership.

From Teena Maddox of techrepublic.com in 2017:

Columbus officials are skilled at putting together public-private partnerships. In just two months, from when the federal grant was announced in December 2015 until applications were due in February 2016, officials were able to pull together $90 million in pledges from local businesses around Columbus. The private funding supported the city's goal to transform its transportation system with electric vehicle deployment and other carbon emission reduction strategies if it received the federal grant.

"We've set a goal of $1 billion in private sector money in the next four years," said Alex Fischer, president and CEO of the Columbus Partnership, while speaking at Smart Cities NYC '17 in early May in Brooklyn, NY.

$90 million to “transform its transportation system with electric vehicle deployment and other carbon emission reduction strategies” is the kind of language you get when some dead-eyed bureaucrat is trying to spindle their boss’ vapid vision into something that only makes sense to people who receive and report on press releases.

But hey, Alex Fischer, the CEO of the Columbus Partnership and avid defender of sex-pest Les Wexner, told a bunch of New Yorkers that our goal was to raise $1 billion in private sector money, so it all must have been true!

From Nancy Tores of datasmart.ash.harvard.edu in 2018:

Two of the challenges going forward, according to [Jordan Davis, Director of Smart City Strategy and Collaboration at the Columbus Partnership], are ensuring the sustainability of funding for the city as well as keeping up with the technology industry. Given that the industry is evolving so quickly, Columbus will need to start making big bets on which technologies to deploy for its efforts.

Right now, the city is focused on securing another $500 million investment, to reach a goal of $1 billion in aligned investment by 2020. Other goals include having 100 companies in the Accelerator Partner Program, increasing electric vehicle adoption rates by 4X, and reducing single occupancy vehicle use by 10 percent. With respect to the timeline for the city’s projects, deployments are expected start in late 2018 and extend into 2019, and the city will share learnings in 2020.

A year later, our heroes were “focused” on securing another $500 million investment to gamble on technology that had not yet proved adaptable to our overcrowded streets and dilapidated infrastructure.

Why gamble on 19th century things like busses and trains? This is the era of Big Tech! Surely we can simply build an app to reduce infant mortality rate in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

From Ann Miller of delltechnologies.com in 2019:

Can a transit app save babies’ lives? Columbus, Ohio will soon find out.

The infant mortality rate in South Linden, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, is about four times the national average, reports City Lab.

Travel times to distant doctors’ offices are an obstacle, especially when pregnant women don’t own cars, can’t afford taxis, and have young children in tow (a public service that provides transportation to prenatal appointments for low-income women won’t take soon-to-be-siblings). And if the patient is late, a doctor might cancel the appointment. Missing prenatal checkups has been tied to increased rates of infant mortality.

Could technology that offers a better transit option, including better ways to schedule trips, help solve those issues and reduce infant mortality in the city?

Yes, why wouldn’t pregnant women want to deal with some convoluted app on their phones instead of taking reliable mass transportation to their doctor’s visits? I’m starting to see why we’re calling ourselves The Smart City.

Unfortunately for Smart Columbus, you can only fire off so many press releases to tech reporters who repackage them for their own story before the bills come due and it’s time to see what we spent all this money on.

Aarian Marshall of wired.com posted an article yesterday entitled, “America’s Smart City Didn’t Get That Much Smarter.” You probably won’t be shocked to learn that Columbus didn’t become a mecca of self-driving cars, though the pandemic made for a convenient scapegoat for not reaching a goal that wouldn’t have been realized regardless. Curiously, the article doesn’t mention any of the $1 billion or $500 million goals the private sector that were bandied about by city leaders.

So let’s concentrate on the wins of the program, as told by Columbus:

What works, according to Columbus: Once the pandemic hit, the project transformed the autonomous shuttle into a food bank delivery operation, which self-drove 500 boxes of food a month between summer 2020 and spring 2021 to a local food pantry, bringing it closer to people in need. (A safety operator was always on board to monitor the tech.) Twenty-seven Columbus residents with cognitive disabilities tested an app to help them navigate public transit, with which 70 percent reported “satisfaction” afterwards. Seventy pregnant women tested an app-based Uber-like service to get to medical appointments. Compared with a control group that didn’t use the on-demand service, they visited doctors, pharmacies, and grocery stores more often. The report says the rides alone were unlikely to guarantee safer births and healthier babies, but suggested they could be a “valuable contribution.”

A couple points on what $50 million got us:

• If a “self-driving” car requires a safety operator to always be on board to “monitor the tech,” is it actually a self-driving vehicle?

• We developed an app that was rated “satisfactory” by 19 people.

• Women that were given access to an “Uber-like service” got to medical appointments, pharmacies and grocery stores “more often” than women who didn’t use the “on-demand service.” Uh, no shit? Don’t think we needed a $40 million grant to prove that, although of course none of this helped the original goal of reducing infant mortality.

“A lot of people were expecting a lot from this project, and perhaps too much,” Harvey Miller, a geography professor and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at Ohio State University, told Wired.

I don’t think anybody other than city leaders and people who who were getting paid by Smart Columbus expected anything other than a boondoggle. This is anecdotal obviously, but I live in an “underserved community” and interact with its populous on a daily basis and not once in years of living here have I ever heard anybody mention “Smart Columbus,” let alone how it’s improved their lives.

From what I’ve seen, the biggest impact it actually had on Columbus was its empty self-driving shuttle that taxied people at 4 mph up and down Front Street but had to be shelved because it hit the brakes too hard and hospitalized one of its few riders.

It’s not like I expected Columbus to turn down a free $50 million, and it’s not like that amount is anything other than peanuts to the federal government.

But next time, please don’t try to regale me with how self-driving cars and computers are going to revolutionize our cities. Our bum leaders refuse to even invest in proven commodities like busses and trains. Maybe they should tackle that before their next pie-in-the-sky project comes around.

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