X

Ford's City:One Challenge wants to help Austin improve its mobility

Winning groups will get up to $100,000 to develop pilot projects.

Andrew Krok Reviews Editor / Cars
Cars are Andrew's jam, as is strawberry. After spending years as a regular ol' car fanatic, he started working his way through the echelons of the automotive industry, starting out as social-media director of a small European-focused garage outside of Chicago. From there, he moved to the editorial side, penning several written features in Total 911 Magazine before becoming a full-time auto writer, first for a local Chicago outlet and then for CNET Cars.
Andrew Krok
2 min read
nemt-7819-hr
Enlarge Image
nemt-7819-hr

Ford's GoRide Health, which provides on-demand transportation to help the elderly and disabled get to their medical appointments, would be a pretty good example of the solutions you might see from the City:One project.

Ford

Improving a city's mobility landscape is about more than just throwing hundreds of scooters onto the sidewalks. It's about coming up with clever ways to improve transportation for everyone, and for latest venture in Austin, it wants everyone in the city to chime in with their ideas and maybe get the money to flesh it out a bit.

Ford announced on Monday that it has launched the Austin City:One Challenge in Texas, with the help of the Austin Transportation Department's Smart Mobility arm. It's a crowdsourcing program of sorts, allowing Regular Joes and Janes to pitch mobility ideas and, if it has legs, people could receive up to $100,000 to test the ideas in pilot-project form.

Here's how it works. Austinites can head to the City:One Challenge's website to share their experiences with mobility in the city, and there are community workshop sessions that people can join, as well, to help come up with ideas and potential solutions. Ford, as well as its collaborators including Dell , AT&T and Microsoft, will help the ideas take shape and actual ideas can start being pitched in the last week of August. In October, a committee will pick 12 finalists who will then create a final proposal, and the top ideas will receive up to $100,000 in funding to see if those ideas really can help.

Again, the isn't on throwing more wheeled vehicles at the populace. The Austin City:One Challenge is more about improving access to the necessities like grocery stores and doctors' offices. It will place a priority on creating solutions for underserved communities and those who actually need better mobility options, not bros who are too lazy to walk six blocks to the next bar.

Austin is now the fourth city in which Ford has operated a City:One program this year, following Indianapolis, Detroit and Mexico City. Last year, Ford kicked off the initiative in Pittsburgh, Miami-Dade County and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Some of the winning ideas in 2018 included reducing student pick-up lines at schools and devising safer transportation methods for people who work night shifts.

Digit is a robot that wants to put parcels on your porch

See all photos
Watch this: 2020 Ford Explorer ST shows us the power of the EcoBoost