- +1-513-348-4677
- info@bluekick.com
SmartCity
SmartCity
We did it! We made the Smart Columbus Operation System!
As the winner of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT) first-ever Smart City Challenge, Columbus was awarded $50 million in grant funding and the designation as America’s Smart City. Smart Columbus is embracing the reinvention of transportation to accelerate human progress. And with it, taking on the coveted job of teaching cities as they evolve similarly around the world.
The Smart Columbus Operating System is the nexus where our city becomes “smart.” By ingesting, visualizing and sharing open, secure data, the operating system will equip public sector officials and private sector innovators to use data to activate insights.
Blue Kick, together with many talented collaborators, completed Smart Columbus Operating System, version 1.0. Now what?
The Operating System serves as the backbone of the projects in the USDOT Smart City Challenge grant portfolio, serving to collect and transmit project data and capture performance data reported to the USDOT and the public. To learn more about Smart Columbus and the USDOT Project Portfolio, please visit www.smart.columbus.gov
The Operating System also serves as an open data platform for the region, syndicating public, anonymized open data accessible to other Columbus city agencies, academic researchers, startups and app developers and the community at large. By opening transportation data to the community, we hope that it may be leveraged within or from outside the public sector to help our city move more efficiently and safely.
The Operating System currently stores over 3000 datasets; examples of datasets include traffic characteristics, city infrastructure inventory, crash records, weather readings, emergency response times, food services, parking locations and health behaviors.
The Smart Columbus team engages a range of stakeholders for feedback on user needs and experience. Our collaborators span the public and private sectors and include city agencies, nonprofits, academics, entrepreneurs, data scientists and app users. Select city agencies will pilot tools that leverage the operating system to deliver agency efficiency benefits.
You can support the value of the Smart Columbus Operating System by contributing data that can be used to solve mobility challenges experienced in central Ohio. See Share Data to learn more.
STREAMING DATA FEED SHOWS RIDERS WHERE THEIR BUS IS IN REAL-TIME
The Central Ohio Transit Authority is the region’s public transportation leader, with nearly 19 million passenger trips in 2017. For many residents, the COTA bus is their ride to work, to school, to the doctor or to the grocery store. COTA was named Outstanding Public Transportation System among midsize agencies in 2018 by the American Public Transportation Association. Innovation was one of the qualities that earned it this distinction, and technology played no small role. One of COTA’s recent advancements was the introduction of real-time bus GPS data, which debuted in the Transit App in 2016. COTA shares this data with the Smart Columbus Operating System, and for the first time riders can now see all buses in the vicinity on a map visualization.