Intelligent transport systems and smart mobility Chapter | 18 203are able to provide passengers with real-time mobility information. This was
the mainstream viewpoint for the prospects of smart mobility back in 2015.
Today, only a few years later, people and governments have realized that smart
mobility is more than this. Technology is of equal importance, but new concepts
have emerged aside including both the human factor and the current business
models. Smart urban mobility is now shaping its future by adopting new energy
sources; automation of vehicle control and network monitoring; new models of
ownership and use; and IoT and mobile technologies to provide more control
and convenience to drivers and passengers. Finally, it seems to have even more
opportunities and be profited by city and services redesign that minimize the
need to travel around the city or for long distances.
According to Benevolo et al. (2016), smart mobility is emerging in three
main axes— (1) the digital city that is built around a ubiquitous network of in-
terconnected devices that allow companies, and organizations to cooperate and
share information and services in order to provide citizens with online services
that facilitate mobility, (2) the green city that capitalizes on the ecological and
sustainable development of cities, and (3) the knowledge city that invests in
research and innovation for giving value to transportation data and services.
They also recognize the following objectives that are related to smart mobility:
(1) reduction of air and noise pollution, (2) reduction of traffic congestion and
transfer cost and time, and (3) increase of people’s safety.
The smart mobility actions can be grouped in the following major groups:
- public mobility, which involves all the actions that aim in improving public
transport in multiple ways (e.g., by upgrading transport vehicles and adopt-
ing electric ones, by introducing automated driving) or improve the quality
of public services (e.g., new ticketing systems, or shared ride and taxis). - private and commercial mobility that gathers individual citizens and compa-
nies under the same initiatives, which are supported by the public adminis-
tration. Interventions may comprise the development of special vehicles or
innovative multimodal transportation plans that affects the citizens’ behav-
iors, - infrastructure projects (e.g., bicycle lanes or zones of controlled traffic) that
facilitate smart and eco-mobility, and the development of policies for sup-
porting smart mobility. Such policies can provide incentives to citizens that
use better fuels, or can be higher taxation to those that use polluting fuels. - last but not least are the intelligent transport systems that comprise various
applications that improve the resource usage efficiency and allow to better
manage urban traffic flows. Applications include parking assistance in de-
fined areas, urban-traffic control, area surveillance and sensing, weather or
traffic information and forecasts, etc.
Most smart mobility applications from autonomous vehicles, data collec-
tion, and traffic monitoring systems to planning and scheduling applications
mainly target private cars and public transport. However, there are more means