European Smart City and Urban Transport

Cities are facing challenges to increase sustainability in the current and future scenarios. Smart city is a possible solution for facing these challenges. This paper has the main objective to investigate the level of advancements of the smart city paradigm at European level. A specific focus is on the Urban Transport, which is one of the three pillars of the European smart city paradigm, with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Energy. Two approaches are followed for the investigation: a top-down approach, from the indications of the European Commission (EC) to the smart city projects implemented by the European cities; a bottom-up approach, from the initiative promoted by European cities about sustainable urban mobility, with a specific attention to the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) paradigm. The obtained results show that EC is spending great efforts for implementing the smart city paradigm to increase sustainable urban mobility. However, the integration among the three pillars is, at today, limited. In the smart mobility sector, this is even more apparent. The great part of the MaaS initiatives pay a specific attention to ICT issues but they require more insights about integration among ICT, Transport System Models (TSM) and Energy productions and consumptions. The final aim is improving transport planning and designing processes aimed at improving urban sustainability.