The U.S. Department of Transportation will award up to $40 million in federal funding for a mid-sized city to conduct a smart city demonstration as part of its recently launched “Beyond Traffic: The Smart City Challenge.”
USDOT is encouraging cities to put forward their best and most creative ideas for innovatively addressing the challenges they are facing. The vision of the Smart City Challenge is to demonstrate and evaluate a holistic, integrated approach to improving surface transportation performance within a city and integrating this approach with other smart city domains such as public safety, public services, and energy. The USDOT intends for this challenge to address how emerging transportation data, technologies, and applications can be integrated with existing systems in a city to address transportation challenges. The USDOT seeks bold and innovative ideas for proposed demonstrations to effectively test, evaluate, and demonstrate the significant benefits of smart city concepts.
The USDOT will make an award of up to $40 million award for one mid-sized city that can demonstrate how advanced data and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) technologies and applications can be used to reduce congestion, keep travelers safe, protect the environment, respond to climate change, connect underserved communities, and support economic vitality.
The USDOT will issue two separate solicitations to carry out this challenge. This solicitation will result in selection of an estimated five Smart City Challenge Finalists who will receive funding to support concept development and planning activities. The follow-on second solicitation, which will be released in March 2015, will invite the Smart City Challenge Finalists to apply for funding to support implementation of their proposed demonstration.
Applications are due by February 4, 2016. Complete information on how to enter the challenge is available atwww.transportation.gov/smartcity/nofo. Entries and questions should be emailed to SmartCityChallenge@dot.gov.