We are leading Columbus to the future and ensuring your place in it. As a city, we are already known as “smart” and “open.” Now, with disruptions happening in transportation, technology, and city life…our moment has arrived.
As the sole winner of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) first-ever Smart City Challenge, Columbus was awarded more than funding and designation as America’s Smart City. We won the coveted job of “becoming smart” by embracing the reinvention of transportation to accelerate human progress. And with it, the responsibility to be a teacher for cities as they evolve around the world.
We cannot do it alone. We’ll need collaboration from across our community to become a truly smart city.
Join us for a weekend focused on building intelligent solutions by leveraging the Smart Columbus Operating System (SCOS). We’ll provide a platform for open data as well as some vetted smart city use cases for you to leverage, to create innovative solutions for our community.
Data is the foundation of a smart city and the SCOS, and the SCOS will be the data backbone of the USDOT grant projects. There is a vision that the SCOS will evolve into a integrated, holistic data platform, aggregating a robust set of public and private data that may be harnessed to uplift quality of life in our city.
Select a track or bring your own use cases to focus on — the choice is yours.
The Hackathon is open to individuals of all backgrounds and skillsets.
Whether your team is using the data available to build your own smart city idea or if your team is focused one solving one of our provided problem statements, everyone can lend a hand.
We are looking for software and hardware developers to create working prototypes of solutions using the Smart Columbus Operating System.
We are looking for industrial and graphic designers to help us bring form to the function of our solutions.
We need individuals to help in the validation of your solution, people with ideas, people with marketing experience, financial projections, presentation skills...
There is a place for everyone. Please join us!
By publishing this story, we hope the development community will help us innovate solutions that help Columbus Parking Services identify key drivers of parking demand and the causes of critical violations. This information could be used to meet the parking demand at peak hours and mitigate violation causes.
We aim to provide Parking Services with a visualization dashboard that identifies the daily and seasonal variability in parking demand at a block or zone level. This dashboard will provide Parking Services the opportunity to manage their parking infrastructure to meet the existing demand, and also for planning future infrastructure placement.
The purpose of this use case is to improve the range and timeliness of available data about the transportation system. Developing a resource for gathering, storing, analyzing and visualizing real-time and historic data about the transportation network will provide a more complete picture of travel conditions and allow for more proactive identification and addressing of safety issues.
A successful solution developed from this use case will allow users to query, access and procure relevant and timely data beyond that which is currently available to analyze unsafe conditions (i.e., ODPS crash records). Ultimately, a successful resource would be expected to lead to such outcomes as decreased crashes, reduced aggressive driving behaviors (e.g., running red lights or driving over the speed limit) and faster response times to incidents.
By publishing this data story, we hope the development community will help us innovate solutions that help food insecure individuals/families find, share and/or access food in central Ohio. We aim to provide families looking for emergency food supply with a clear path to access food based on their transportation needs, location, demographics and food preferences. This path would provide eligible families access to the healthy food they want to eat in an equitable, timely and cost- effective manner.
This data story may also present an opportunity for pantries and non-profit providers to identify shifts in demand for emergency food and coordinate the response of providers in a fair and equitable manner.
By publishing this data story, we hope the development community will help us innovate solutions to identify transit options that meet the transportation needs of older residents of underserved communities who do not drive cars in order to connect them to critical destinations. Successful solutions will help route users to appropriate transit options based on their mobility ability, using static and dynamic data sources.
To solve the challenge, successful teams will need to identify concentrations of older adults in areas of the community that are characterized as underserved based on density and vulnerability data. From that population, the team should be prepared to capture personal mobility information from individual end users to help tailor transit recommendations. The team will need to identify key destinations for these travelers (workplaces, shopping, food, healthcare, religious centers, social spaces, recreation, leisure facilities, etc) and include dynamic age-friendliness data about destinations that help inform choice and scheduling (e.g. accessibility information, crowd levels, appointment times, etc.).
Right now, no system exists to advise drivers of available spaces to stop for a break or to take their mandated rest, which occurs if they have been behind the wheel for 11 hours– the maximum driving limit set by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
Applications of truck parking data stand to be transformative: truckers, freight operators and logistics companies could improve safety, reduce delivery costs and increase freight movement connectivity, reliability and access to local, regional and international markets. Police could use the app to help direct drivers to available parking areas. Our ultimate vision is an application enabling truckers to reserve a spot, even before they leave distribution centers, that will also show parking site amenities from showers, to food options, to religious services. Help us take the first step.
We all praise the GPS apps that help us get around, but there is no current resource that tells drivers if the vehicle they’re operating is too tall for the upcoming bridge. As atruck, bus driver or fleet operator, this is pertinent information that is currently lacking while navigating our streets. Far too often, this results in "can opener" accidents, where the bridge peels off the top of the truck. These “bridge strikes” can cause damage to not only the truck and bridge, but they can sometimes be fatal to the drivers. In addition, many people have been hit by falling bridge debris after the accident.
That’s why we’re publishing the following data on bridge dimensions in Franklin County. By sharing this data, we hope the development community will help us innovate solutions that can prevent bridge strikes, proactively re-route oversized trucks, make it easier to report bridge damage and more.