As Jack Marchbanks, director of the Ohio Department of Transportation, accurately says: “there is a paradigm shift happening in the transportation industry.” Connected cars, autonomous vehicles, traffic management solutions—we, as an industry, are developing the transportation system of the 21st century. 

5 pieces of smart transportation advice

At DriveOhio, an initiative of the Ohio Department of Transportation, we are charged with developing and deploying some of these transportation technologies, like automated and connected vehicles, both on the ground and in the air. 

We’re still relatively early in the process, but we’ve learned an immense amount about the ingredients that are going to be critical for smart transportation success. As such, I want to share five pieces of advice we’ve learned on how you can get started with your smart transportation projects.

1. Secure leadership support. For smart transportation projects to be successful, you’ll need support from your local and even state leadership. In our case, the DeWine-Husted administration sees these transportation initiatives as the future. We all want this to happen in Ohio. There's a lot of history here when it comes to transportation—the Wright Brothers, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong—and we want to leverage that history and also our current ecosystem to build an environment where people “come  here to test and stay here to grow.” The amount of funding being invested in smart transportation is astounding. So, in order to secure your leadership support, it’s just a matter of how you approach and inform your leadership about the benefits of these projects. Build a dedicated a team of people, track down the pertinent information, and then make your case.

2. Start having the conversations. You’re not going to solve all of your transportation problems at once. However, the earlier you start having conversations about the potential of smart transportation projects, the better off you’re going to be. Create multiple touchpoints within your community—your citizens, your businesses, and your city, county, and state governments—to discuss what the technology can do and what it’s not going to do. To be successful, you’re going to need everyone’s different perspectives. You’re going to need to come together and find out what works and what doesn’t, which brings me to my third piece of advice…

3. Build coalitions and partnerships. I can't stress enough how important and necessary partnerships are to any smart transportation project success. There needs to be a holistic approach between the public sector, private sector, technology providers, and academia, (in our case,  The Ohio State, Ohio University, University of Cincinnati, etc.) to identify and solve transportation problems. By building partnerships, you can collectively determine what is your problem, and then what are the solutions necessary to solve that problem. Ask the questions first and then try to match those answer with the technological needs.

4. Prepare to pivot. As with any project, you start with the thesis. Now, you work towards that thesis, but sometimes, things don’t always go as planned. You have to be prepared to pivot. What we’ve learned is that what ultimately makes something successful or not successful is the ability to read the data and then pivot based on that data.

5. Set to scale. When you’re building out your plans, you want to be cognizant of setting yourself up to scale. We are at the beginning of trying to develop the best solutions for communities that can be scaled. At the end of the day, these projects aren’t science experiments. You want to build solutions that you can scale to solve real world problems and establish trust with your community. 

Smart transportation for safety

At the end of the day, for us at DriveOhio, it all comes down to safety. It’s why we do what we do. We believe these smart transportation technologies will make our communities safer, which is why we’ve made it our mission to connect communities and technology providers to solve local problems and ensure the safety of our citizens, both on our roadways, and in the sky.

To learn more about smart transportation, contact us.