The Sustainability Dimensions in Intelligent Urban Transportation: A Paradigm for Smart Cities

Lorena Reyes-Rubiano,Javier Faulin,Jairo R Montoya-Torres,Adrian Serrano-Hernandez

doi:10.3390/su131910653

Lorena Reyes-Rubiano, Javier Faulin + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su131910653

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Abstract

The transportation sector has traditionally been considered essential for commercial activities, although nowadays, it presents clear negative impacts on the environment and can reduce social welfare. Thus, advanced optimization techniques are required to design sustainable routes with low logistic costs. Moreover, these negative impacts may be significantly increased as a consequence of the lack of synergy between the sustainability objectives. Correspondingly, the concept of transport optimization in smart cities is becoming popular in both the real world and academia when public decision making is lit by operations research models. In this paper, however, we argue that the level of urban smartness depends on its sustainability and on the level of information and communication technologies developed in the city. Therefore, the operations research models seek to achieve a higher threshold in the sustainable transport standards in smart cities. Thus, we present a generic definition of smart city, which includes the triple bottom line of sustainability, with the purpose of analyzing its effects on city performance. Finally, this work provides a consolidate study about urban freight transport problems, which show that sustainability is only one facet of the diamond of characteristics that depict a real smart city.

Highlights

The current transport system poses growing and significant challenges for sustainability, while current mobility schemes have focused much more on the private vehicle, which has conditioned both the ways of life of citizens and cities, such as urban and territorial sprawl
We address the concept of the smart city as a headway of a sustainable city
Here, we present an analysis of the sustainability relevance in the transportation sector

Summary

Introduction

The current transport system poses growing and significant challenges for sustainability, while current mobility schemes have focused much more on the private vehicle, which has conditioned both the ways of life of citizens and cities, such as urban and territorial sprawl. Transport has a very considerable weight in the framework of sustainable development, due to environmental pressures, the associated social and economic effects and interrelationships with other sectors. The continuous growth that this sector has experienced over the last few years and its foreseeable increase, even considering the change in trend due to the current situation of generalized crisis, make the challenge of sustainable transport a strategic priority on local, national, and global scopes. Transport logistics has an important role in the economic growth of a city. According to Eurostat [1], the transport sector employs around 10 million people and accounts for about 5% of the GDP in the EU.

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