GETTING AROUND
City pairs with Ford to find tomorrow’s transit solutions today
For Pittsburgh officials, collaborating with Ford and a team of experts to attack local transportation problems likely will provide more than $1 million worth of results for about $250,000 of local investment, and do it in about half the time of a normal government program.
Mayor Bill Peduto and John Kwant, vice president of Ford City Solutions, announced Tuesday that Pittsburgh will be the first city to work with Ford’s City of Tomorrow Challenge. The program calls on the public to identify mobility problems and then offer solutions with the help of a team of private experts. One or two ideas would receive a total of $100,000 to move ahead to a demonstration project.
Mr. Peduto said local foundations have contributed grant money plus another $150,000 for administrative work to gather information from community meetings, engage residents at neighborhood events, and operate a website. The foundations contributing to the project are Heinz, $100,000; Benter, $50,000; and Pittsburgh, $25,000. In addition, $30,000 will come from the city Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, $25,000 from city planning, and $20,000 from the city Parking Authority.
Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership and Port Authority also are involved.
Ford and its partners — AT&T, Dell Technologies and Microsoft — will analyze the problems and work with residents to help develop solutions. Pilot projects could begin by the end of the year.
Karina Ricks, hired early last year as the city’s director of mobility and infrastructure, said one of the first stories she heard when she arrived here was about a recent Carnegie Mellon University graduate from Homewood who had turned down his dream job because he couldn’t make the commute to Cranberry.
“That should never, ever, ever be the case,” she said. “We need to provide for each and every one of our residents. This [City of
Tomorrow Challenge] is daylighting those stories and using the innovations to find solutions.”
Ford began its City of Tomorrow program about five years ago to help urban areas develop innovative solutions for mobility issues and previously has worked with Detroit and New York City, Mr. Kwant said. But this is the first time the program will use a website and crowdsourcing to identify problems and propose solutions, and the hope is that possible solutions will come from a variety of sources.
Mr. Kwant said Ford’s decision to kick off the program here evolved after Ford’s announcement in February 2017 that it would invest $1 billion over five years in Pittsburgh-based Argo AI to develop technology for a self-driving vehicle. He called Pittsburgh “the ideal partner” because of its leadership in areas such as smart traffic signals through CMU.
In an earlier interview, Aniela Kuzon, Ford’s global lead for the challenge, said the key to developing solutions is hearing from residents about the mobility challenges they face. The company expects to announce other cities for the program over the next few months.
“The idea is to understand from the residents what are some of the points they want to be addressed,” she said. “What are the ways we can improve transportation experiences for them?”
In Detroit, for example, bus riders were concerned about long waits at isolated stops. To address that issue, the city developed smart bus stops, where information is posted on how soon the next bus will arrive.
The challenge will involve four public meetings over the next six months as well as a website where the public can post transportation issues. In addition, city officials will attend neighborhood events and do other outreach programs to identify “transportation deserts.”
Although Ford isn’t contributing cash to the project, Ms. Ricks said, its team of experts and the wealth of information they have developed likely would cost the city at least $1 million if it went out for proposals and it could take as long as two years to begin a pilot project.
Mr. Peduto said this is the type of program he had hoped Uber would develop with the city before Pittsburgh’s relationship with the ride-hailing company soured last year.
“We have the opportunity to be ahead of the curve,” the mayor said. “We want to be on the cutting edge of transportation in the 21st century.”