Autonomous Mobility

Autonomous mobility is the smart-city framing of self-driving technology in Kyle’s notes — the bundle of vehicles, infrastructure, and municipal data that lets a city move people and goods autonomously. It centers on the City of Dublin, Ohio, an early-adopting small city (~45K people) where Doug McCullough serves as CIO. Dublin is part of the 33 Smart Mobility Corridor council of cities and used a USDOT grant to build fiber/wireless infrastructure enabling Autonomous Driving along the corridor, while running an IBM Watson instance and partnering with Ohio State on sensors and with vendors like TTS and NoTraffic on traffic-signal timing.

The notes treat autonomous mobility as a govtech adoption challenge as much as a technology one: McCullough’s “Dublin Digital Experience Lab” exists precisely to vet immature ideas and let vendors pitch, and he hunts for procurement “loopholes” to fund $10–15K experiments. It threads into The New City and City Building as a concrete instance of a city building new capabilities, and is closely adjacent to the Autonomous Vehicles research thread.

Context: “Autonomous mobility” broadly refers to deploying self-driving vehicles and connected infrastructure as part of an urban transportation system. Mid-to-late-2010s programs like USDOT’s Smart City / Smart Mobility grants funded cities to pilot connected corridors and data platforms supporting these systems.

Where this appears

• Doug McCullough — Dublin’s CIO, whose portfolio centers on autonomous driving, IoT, and AR pilots.
• City of Dublin — the Smart Mobility Corridor city building the infrastructure and data layer for autonomous mobility.