Shift is brought to you by Eaton. We make the Electric Revolution work. Hi everybody.

Welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility.

I'm your host Pete Bigelow. Hi everybody, this is Leslie Allen and welcome to the show.

Joining us on the show today is Mandy Bishop.

She is the program manager for Smart City Columbus.

I've always thought Columbus was a pretty smart city

Pete but what exactly does that mean smart city Columbus? That is a good

question Leslie. For those who don't remember back five years, there is a Department of Transportation competition called the Smart City Challenge that challenged cities across the country to come up with innovative transportation projects

that could really better serve their citizens. In Columbus, Ohio, short version was the

winner of the competition, and today we'll talk to Mandy about what really

transpired over the last five years talk about some of the optimistic goals of the program,

what they were what they were able to do, what sort of, you know, reality-inducing

stumbling blocks they ran into along the way.

So a really good conversation and Leslie it's it falls kind of perfectly time-wise because obviously this week President Biden has has passed his infrastructure bill in the Senate as of right now and there's a lot to do

with optimistic transportation projects in the in the Senate bill.

Certainly and what was really remarkable is that this was a pretty bipartisan effort.

The measure passed 69 to 30, and you don't really hear of that kind of bipartisan support these days in Washington.

So, I mean, this is a lot of money.

This is a trillion dollars and a lot of it's going toward transportation initiatives

some including you know we've mentioned before what is it about 7.5 billion dollars

for EV charging you know to really help jumpstart a nationwide charging network.

So pretty good news for automakers and for fans of electric vehicles, of course it's all depending on

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