Secretary Anthony Foxx
Press Call Remarks for Smart City Challenge NOFO Announcement
Washington, D.C.
December 7, 2015
Hi, everyone, and thank you for joining the call. I also want to acknowledge Barbara Bennett. Barbara is the President and COO of Paul Allen’s Vulcan Incorporated. And I am excited to have her here with me for this announcement.
We do not have a top-down transportation system. We have a bottom-up system. And while we are grateful that Congress passed a five-year bill last week, our national vision for transportation is still constrained by 20th century thinking about technology.
Our department is working hard to change that. We are trying to reposition government so we can solve problems at the local level. We also want to increase our ability to rapidly absorb new technology into the transportation space – so we can do things that previous generations only imagined as science fiction.
We are imagining connected and autonomous vehicles that practically eliminate crashes.
And we are imagining this technology interacting with wired infrastructure to eliminate traffic jams as well. But we are not only imagining it happening. We are making it happen.
We are moving quickly to require all new cars to be equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle technology. As part of this effort, we also launched a pilot program to demonstrate connected vehicles in three U.S. markets, including New York City.
We are updating our policy position on autonomous vehicles and working to integrate unmanned aircraft into the national airspace. We even hired our first chief data officer.
So we pushed as hard as we could at the national level – and now we are working locally. And ultimately, we know that the best laboratory we have for emerging technology is where it is most needed – our cities.
Another forward-thinking thing we did was look at our transportation system over the next 30 years. Our report, Beyond Traffic, tells us that America will add 70 million more people, and that our cities will absorb most of this growth.
This is part of the reason it’s been said that the 21st century will not be dominated by any one country – it will in fact be dominated by the city, by urbanization. Along these lines, the entire world is now having a conversation about smart cities, which is really a conversation about what our cities should look like in the future. And now our cities will need to show us. They’ll need to define what a smart city is.
So today we are issuing a challenge to mayors and city leaders across America to pioneer what we are calling the first-ever smart city.
This is a competition targeting mid-size cities. And it’s pretty simple: the city that develops the most innovative, most forward-thinking plan to harness technology and reimagine how people move will receive up to $40 million to become the first city in the world to implement it.
That’s not all, though. Our partner in this, Vulcan, is offering an additional $10 million to the winning city. Furthermore, our hope is that cities will see this as an opportunity to partner with firms like Vulcan and other innovators that are developing this technology at such a rapid pace.
This is an opportunity for the winning city to define what it means to be a Smart City when it comes to transportation. We encourage cities to develop their own unique vision, partnerships, and blueprints to demonstrate to the world what a fully integrated, forward-looking transportation network looks like.
American can remain the global leader in maintaining the safest, most efficient transportation system in the world. I am looking for Mayors who share that belief to join us in pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
We are asking cities to submit proposals by February 4. Our goal will be to narrow proposals down to five finalists by May and announce the winner in June.
We’ll have a robust outreach process through this competition. We’ll hold a national webcast tomorrow for interested participants and a Smart City Forum on the web on Dec. 15. You can expect more webinars in coming weeks.
With that, I’ll end there. Thank you all for joining the call. We’re exciting about this. And I look forward to answering any questions.
###