A mid-size transportation department spends the better part of a year assembling a SMART Grants application — narrative, budget, letters of support, a data-management plan nobody on staff has written before — and then waits. Two days ago, on March 21, the U.S. Department of Transportation answered that wait for the program’s first cohort of applicants: $94 million split across 59 projects in 33 states, out of 392 applications submitted. For every agency that spent the winter drafting a proposal, roughly six others did the same thing and got nothing. That ratio is the first real data point the industry has on a brand-new federal funding line, and it’s worth reading closely before the next round opens.

The Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation program — SMART, inevitably — is a five-year, $500 million discretionary grant program created under the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act specifically to fund technology-forward transportation pilots: connected vehicle infrastructure, curb and right-of-way data platforms, smart sensors, automated safety systems, and related smart-city mobility tools. It’s structured differently from older programs like ATCMTD, and its first award round gives planners, procurement officers, and the vendors who sell to them a concrete look at what USDOT is actually willing to fund, at what price point, and for which kinds of agencies.

What the SMART Grants Program Is Actually Structured to Fund

SMART runs in two stages. Stage 1 funds planning and prototyping — feasibility studies, pilot deployments, data-collection frameworks — capped at $2 million per award. Stage 2 funds implementation at larger scale, but is only open to jurisdictions that have already completed a qualifying Stage 1 planning grant (either through SMART itself or a small set of predecessor discretionary programs). That two-stage design matters for how an agency should think about the money: this first round is seed funding for pilots, not a source of capital for a citywide rollout. A department expecting SMART to bankroll full deployment of, say, a networked parking-guidance system across every downtown garage will be disappointed; a department that wants $2 million to prove a concept in a defined zone before asking for more is exactly who the program is built for.

The statute names eight eligible project types, and this round’s winners map onto most of them: coordinated automation, connected vehicles, sensor-based infrastructure, systems integration, delivery/logistics, smart grid/EV integration, smart traffic signals, and — most relevant to this audience — smart technology for the traffic-safety and mobility problems that curb and parking data platforms address. USDOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg framed the round as an investment in “technological progress” toward safer, more reliable transportation systems, which is standard grant-announcement language, but the underlying eligibility list is genuinely broad. That breadth is part of why competition was so intense: a lot of very different project types were drawing from the same pool.

Inside the First $94 Million Round

The headline numbers are straightforward. USDOT received 392 applications and funded 59 — a win rate just above 15%. Awards ranged up to the $2 million Stage 1 cap, and the geographic spread (33 states) suggests USDOT was, deliberately or not, avoiding a round dominated entirely by the largest coastal metros, though large cities still took a disproportionate share of the dollars given their capacity to staff sophisticated applications.

A useful, non-exhaustive sample of what won funding: San José, California received close to $2 million to build a real-time curb-monitoring and reallocation system; Los Angeles received $2 million to build a digital inventory of curb-lane assets — meters, pay stations, signage — across downtown; Minneapolis received funding for an open-data approach to curbside management built on public APIs; and Philadelphia received $2 million for a Digital Right-of-Way and Mobility project that extends the city’s existing Smart Loading Zones pilot, which had been running since fall 2022. Outside the curb-and-parking space, funded categories included connected-vehicle corridor projects, roadside sensor networks for cyclist and pedestrian detection, smart traffic signals capable of monitoring air quality and pavement temperature, automated truck-mounted crash attenuators, on-demand microtransit integration, and a multi-state Work Zone Data Exchange deployment.

That list is a reasonable proxy for where USDOT’s evaluators saw the strongest applications, or at least the ones that cleared whatever bar the review panel set. Curb and parking-adjacent data platforms were clearly one of the program’s most active categories in round one — several of the largest, best-known awards went to exactly that kind of project — but they shared the pool with a wide range of other transportation-technology proposals, and a proposal built purely around parking guidance or payment technology, without a curb-data or safety framing, doesn’t appear prominently among the public examples.

Why So Few Agencies Won

A 15% success rate is low enough to be worth unpacking rather than treating as a fixed cost of applying. A few patterns are visible in the round’s public examples, though USDOT hasn’t published scoring rubrics or reviewer notes for individual applications, so some of this is informed inference rather than documented fact.

Prior pilot activity reads as credibility. Philadelphia’s winning application builds directly on a pilot — the Smart Loading Zones program — that had already been running for roughly six months before the SMART application was submitted. An agency with existing operational data, even from a small pilot, is able to make a more specific, evidence-backed case than one proposing a concept from scratch. For agencies weighing whether to fund a small pilot internally before chasing federal money, this is a data point in favor of doing the small thing first.

Open-data and interoperability commitments appear to have mattered. Minneapolis’s winning framing centered explicitly on public APIs and open-source data structures rather than a proprietary vendor platform. That’s consistent with USDOT’s broader posture across its technology programs — the department has pushed data standards like the Curb Data Specification through its work with the Open Mobility Foundation — and it’s a reasonable signal that applications built around vendor lock-in, versus applications built around portable, standards-based data, land differently with federal reviewers.

Multi-agency or multi-city framing shows up repeatedly. Philadelphia’s application explicitly referenced work already underway with eight other cities and organizations, including the Open Mobility Foundation and Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard. That kind of shared infrastructure and cross-city coordination appears often enough among winners to suggest evaluators favor projects that aren’t purely local, one-off efforts — a pattern regional planning bodies and multi-city coalitions should note before this program’s next round opens.

None of that is a guarantee. USDOT hasn’t published a public rubric breaking down exactly how these factors were weighted, and a smaller agency without partners or a track record can reasonably ask whether the program favors well-resourced cities. That’s a fair critique of a program this new, and one likely to get scrutiny as more award rounds accumulate a track record.

What This Means for Technology Vendors

For companies selling curb-management platforms, sensor hardware, parking-guidance systems, or connected-vehicle infrastructure into the public sector, this round is a signal about what municipal customers will be shopping for over the next contracting cycle. Agencies with a winning Stage 1 award now have roughly 12–18 months (grant periods vary) to execute a planning-stage deployment before they can credibly apply for Stage 2 implementation money — meaning procurement activity tied to these 59 awards should start showing up in RFPs relatively quickly.

The open-data emphasis visible in several winning applications is also worth flattening into a procurement takeaway: vendors whose platforms can demonstrably export data in standards-based formats — the Curb Data Specification (CDS) being the most relevant example for curb and parking use cases — have an easier story to tell a city trying to satisfy a federal grant’s data-sharing expectations than vendors built around closed, proprietary formats. That’s not a new dynamic in this sector, but a federally funded pilot with public reporting requirements sharpens the incentive considerably.

Preparing for the Next Round

SMART is a five-year program with roughly $400 million still to be awarded across the remaining four years. USDOT has indicated additional funding rounds will continue on a roughly annual cycle, and agencies that didn’t win this time, or that want to apply for the first time, should start building the record that seemed to matter in round one: a documented small-scale pilot, a data-sharing plan built on open standards rather than a single vendor’s proprietary format, and — where feasible — a partnership with a neighboring jurisdiction, MPO, or a national organization already working in the same space.

For agencies that did win Stage 1 funding in this round, the practical next step is treating the planning grant as exactly that: a proving ground. USDOT’s Stage 2 implementation funding is explicitly gated on Stage 1 completion, and given how competitive round one was, a well-documented, well-measured pilot is likely to matter as much for a future Stage 2 application as it did for this round’s Stage 1 wins.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the USDOT SMART Grants program?

SMART (Strengthening Mobility and Revolutionizing Transportation) is a five-year, $500 million discretionary grant program created under the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It funds Stage 1 planning and prototype projects (up to $2 million) and Stage 2 implementation projects for technology-forward transportation initiatives, including connected vehicles, sensors, and curb or right-of-way data platforms.

How competitive was the first SMART Grants round?

USDOT received 392 applications and funded 59 projects across 33 states — a success rate just above 15%. That makes the program’s first round meaningfully more competitive than many state-level infrastructure grants, and comparable to other high-profile discretionary federal transportation programs.

Can a city apply for SMART funding for a parking-guidance or payment system alone?

The public examples from round one skew toward curb-data platforms, sensor networks, and connected-vehicle projects rather than standalone parking-guidance or payment technology. A narrowly framed parking-payment proposal is technically eligible under the program’s broad categories, but pairing it with a safety, data-standards, or curb-management framing appears to align more closely with what evaluators funded in this round.

What’s the difference between Stage 1 and Stage 2 SMART funding?

Stage 1 funds planning, feasibility work, and small-scale pilots, capped at $2 million per award. Stage 2 funds larger-scale implementation, but is only available to jurisdictions that have already completed a qualifying Stage 1 (or equivalent predecessor) planning grant — so Stage 2 money isn’t accessible on a first application.

When is the next SMART Grants funding round expected?

USDOT has structured SMART as a multi-year program with additional funding rounds anticipated in subsequent fiscal years, drawing down the remaining balance of the program’s five-year, $500 million authorization. Agencies planning to apply should watch USDOT’s grants pages directly for the next Notice of Funding Opportunity, since timing and specific eligibility details can shift between rounds.