GETTING THEREwith demo technology and electric cars that
people can take out and test-drive. Behind
this display space, the Smart Columbus
team toils in an open office. A glassed-in
conference room says “Connected” on its
door. There are many bagels.
Brandi Braun, the city’s deputy innovation
officer, sits in the Green Room, so called be-
cause of its vivid chlorophyll- colored wall.
She explains that a lott of people are expected
to move to the area by 2050—up to 600,000,
based on data from a regional planning com-
mission. Braun looks excited and afraid, like
someone locking in the harness of a roller
coaster. “We can’t build our way out of that,”
she says. Car lanes, she means.
What to do about it? “It can be easy to
immediately think of the tools—like the
sensors, the data, the internet of things, the
whiz-bang,” she says. And she does tick off
those toys: ad hoc devices that can give older
cars intelligent features such as collision-
avoidance, or traffic signals networked to
buses, and an operating system that collects
anonymized data for researchers who will
use it to keep the inevitable traffic flowing.
But more important to neighborhoods
like Linden are Smart Mobility Hubs, every-
mode gathering places where a person can
grab a bike or a scooter or a bus or a ride-share
or a pay-by-the-hour rental car. In the hub at
St. Stephen’s, residents will be able to charge
devices at USB ports while using free Wi-Fi.
Or peruse job boards and community events
at kiosks not unlike those interactive guides in
fancy malls. They’ll be able to load cash onto
transit cards—all without a bank account or
data plan. An app will let users map out multi-
leg trips using every service the city has to
offer. So, if you want to ride a scooter to a bus
and then walk to the pharmacy and ride-share
to pick up your kid from school, the app will let
you organize and pay for all of that, no credit
card required. Six such hubs across Columbus
will link Linden, specifically, to loci of educa-
tion, jobs, and commerce.
It’s a start. But it’s not going to equalize
areas of the city overnight—or ever, neces-
sarily. Which is hard, when expectations are
so high. “There is this perception that we’re
going to have flying cars and light rail, and
we won’t have traffic in four years,” Braun
says. That’s not true, of course. But the goal
is to help people who’ve been left behind in
the past, whetherthat almost 75 percent of New York’s Citi Bike riders are
men. A 2017 review of 54 research studies suggested that
women want more separation between their bikes and traf-
fic. Moreover, women are often on daisy chains of errands
and caretaking trips shuttling the kids or buying food; many
studies show that even in relationships based on egalitar-
ian ideals, women do more of the housework and childcare.
So while scooters and bikes might be great for riding home
from happy hour, they’re subpar with kids or cargo. “These
new modes are hard for people who have responsibilities
other than themselves,” Kaufman says.
Creating systems that work for everyone is the basis of
an approach called universal design. In 1997, a group of
engineers and designers at North Carolina State Univer-
sity established its seven basic principles: that facilities
and services should be equitable; flexible; simple and
intuitive; include easily perceived information; tolerate
errors; require low physical effort; and provide size and
space for all users. When transportation engineers imple-
ment accessible ways for more people to get around, they
are embracing the spirit of that philosophy.
Some cities have begun to make accommodations. In
Hangzhou, China, you can rent bicycles with kid seats. For-
taleza, Brazil, has child-size bikes. In 2018, Detroit offered
ones with hand pedals or cargo carriers in a pilot program.
But pointing to individual examples at all means that the
distribution of last-mile wealth still has a long way to go.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is trying to
help midsize cities with these disparities. In late 2015,
it launched the Smart City Challenge, offering a com-
petitive $40 million grant to municipalities that want to
modernize and data-drive their transportation. Out of 78
applicants, Columbus won the money with a proposal that
focused on Linden and its last-mile problems.
TWO YEARS ON, MUCH OF WHAT SMART COLUMBUS HAS
achieved, including in its work with One Linden, remains
invisible from the outside: PowerPoint presentations,
meetings, back-end app development, building per-
mits. But over the next two years, the city— using federal
money and $10 million from Vulcan, the late Micro soft
co- founder Paul Allen’s investment and philanthropic
arm—promises to build better, more-accessible transit
hubs, user-friendly software to help everyone get around,
and smart systems to collect data on how people use it all
in order to make ongoing improvements.
Right now, the Smart Columbus staff is trying to get
both buy-in and input from residents. Part of that hap-
pens inside a very visible building called the Smart
Columbus Experience Center. Located downtown next
to the winding Scioto River (about a 15-minute drive, an
18-minute walk plus a 17-minute bus ride, or a $14 Lyft
trip from St. Stephen’s), it’s a sleek-looking black beast of
a building, curved at one end. Inside, there’s a showroom
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