$100k in Funding Available for Mobility Solutions
Who will you meet?
Cities are innovating, companies are pivoting, and start-ups are growing. Like you, every urban practitioner has a remarkable story of insight and challenge from the past year.
Meet these peers and discuss the future of cities in the new Meeting of the Minds Executive Cohort Program. Replace boring virtual summits with facilitated, online, small-group discussions where you can make real connections with extraordinary, like-minded people.
The City of Tomorrow Challenge is focused on Re-Imagining Mobility for People
Ideas are great. Technology is great. But if those new ideas manifest as products and services that don’t serve a need, then why make them? This is a question our City of Tomorrow Challenge team thinks about daily as we partner with Pittsburgh, Miami-Dade, and Grand Rapids to host innovation challenges that place residents at the center of mobility design and crowdsource new solutions that address their needs and local context.
Each City Challenge provides a unique opportunity to learn about local mobility issues, connect with influencers and innovators, and win up to $100,000 to pilot your mobility solution.
The application deadlines for our three 2018 challenge cities are:
- Miami-Dade: September 17
- Grand Rapids: October 1
- Pittsburgh: October 10
This question came to life for me at one of our recent community working sessions where I met Jonah, a college student who leads a number of student organizations and is an advocate for at-risk populations especially those with physical disabilities. For Jonah, who has a physical disability himself, meeting people is both the hardest and most important thing he does. The inability to make an appointment because of lack of infrastructure to transport him or attend community meetings due to rigidity in on-demand transit scheduling is a barrier to him living out his passion for helping people.
How can new mobility technology, data and design help Jonah? How can it help the many others we’ve talked to – such as Sarah, a researcher in Pittsburgh, and Daren a returning citizen? These are the questions we’ve posed to our challenge community, focused on three key opportunity areas:
- Enabling smarter (or simpler) transportation choices
- Extending mobility options
- Encouraging walking, biking and busing
Over the last three months, the City of Tomorrow Challenge Team has been working to learn those experiences and pain points. We are using an approach that is rooted in insight and is developed by focusing on everyday people’s mobility experiences. Creating a baseline understanding of the environment we aspire to serve through existing data sources like transit ridership, income, age and other demographics. To add context to those data points, ethnographic interviews with transit riders help explain some of the insights and trends in the data. Riding with them on the bus or train and listening to them in their homes gives an intimate view into deficiencies that the systems we all rely on have.
Using Analytics and Research to Understand a Narrative
- Use analytics to create a solid baseline of understanding of macro trends
- Have in-depth conversations with people who have mobility struggles
- Generate novel or innovative solutions that meet needs
At every step of the process we are thinking, learning and designing with and not just for the end user.
I don’t want to rely on my boyfriend for rides to my doctor’s appointments… if I’m just physically worn-out and I can’t, then I’ll call him
-Amy
For example, the Challenge team interviewed a number of people in their homes. Some of the stories really illustrate how people’s daily lives can be affected so significantly by their lack of access to resilient transit. For example, in Pittsburgh, a transit rider named Amy was at the mercy of the public system. She doesn’t own a car and also does not have a credit card so ride hailing was not something she could do. Walking was also problematic has she has limited mobility/ health issues and lives in a very hilly area of Pittsburgh. She spoke of the anxiety she has when she would go out as she was always unsure of what the day had in store for her, including if the she could make it up the hill near her house to the bus.
Community working session in Grand Rapids, MI
During community working sessions in Grand Rapids we discovered that invisible barriers cause people mobility stressors and sometimes they cope in ways that is invisible to the outside. Disabilities can be defined in many ways. Lowering the stress of using mobility can help people focus on their personal needs not just how they’re getting around. Derek spoke to this as his wheelchair made trips take significantly longer that they would without. The fact that the system didn’t always support door to door service creates a new stressor for him as now he would need to leave over an hour early to get somewhere on time.
There are people that amaze me with how they get around. Unable to use legs, arms, use a mouth stick. People that are blind and going to work. Disabilities have so many different faces and it’s so subjective, what exactly that is. – Derek
Our application period is open and these opportunity areas are manifesting in ideas submitted by residents, businesses, and community organizations that can impact cities and residents within them who need a shift in the current state of mobility. In the next phase of the challenge, we will select 10-12 semi-finalists per city and work with them to refine their solutions into potential pilot projects before selecting the final team(s) to win up to $100k to bring their idea to life.
The City of Tomorrow Challenge is made possible through the support and coordination of these organizations.
Discussion
Leave your comment below, or reply to others.
Please note that this comment section is for thoughtful, on-topic discussions. Admin approval is required for all comments. Your comment may be edited if it contains grammatical errors. Low effort, self-promotional, or impolite comments will be deleted.
Read more from MeetingoftheMinds.org
Spotlighting innovations in urban sustainability and connected technology
Middle-Mile Networks: The Middleman of Internet Connectivity
The development of public, open-access middle mile infrastructure can expand internet networks closer to unserved and underserved communities while offering equal opportunity for ISPs to link cost effectively to last mile infrastructure. This strategy would connect more Americans to high-speed internet while also driving down prices by increasing competition among local ISPs.
In addition to potentially helping narrow the digital divide, middle mile infrastructure would also provide backup options for networks if one connection pathway fails, and it would help support regional economic development by connecting businesses.
Wildfire Risk Reduction: Connecting the Dots
One of the most visceral manifestations of the combined problems of urbanization and climate change are the enormous wildfires that engulf areas of the American West. Fire behavior itself is now changing. Over 120 years of well-intentioned fire suppression have created huge reserves of fuel which, when combined with warmer temperatures and drought-dried landscapes, create unstoppable fires that spread with extreme speed, jump fire-breaks, level entire towns, take lives and destroy hundreds of thousands of acres, even in landscapes that are conditioned to employ fire as part of their reproductive cycle.
ARISE-US recently held a very successful symposium, “Wildfire Risk Reduction – Connecting the Dots” for wildfire stakeholders – insurers, US Forest Service, engineers, fire awareness NGOs and others – to discuss the issues and their possible solutions. This article sets out some of the major points to emerge.
Innovating Our Way Out of Crisis
Whether deep freezes in Texas, wildfires in California, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, or any other calamity, our innovations today will build the reliable, resilient, equitable, and prosperous grid tomorrow. Innovation, in short, combines the dream of what’s possible with the pragmatism of what’s practical. That’s the big-idea, hard-reality approach that helped transform Texas into the world’s energy powerhouse — from oil and gas to zero-emissions wind, sun, and, soon, geothermal.
It’s time to make the production and consumption of energy faster, smarter, cleaner, more resilient, and more efficient. Business leaders, political leaders, the energy sector, and savvy citizens have the power to put investment and practices in place that support a robust energy innovation ecosystem. So, saddle up.
0 Comments