Using Traditional and New Digital Technology Tools to Promote Sustainable Mobility: Current Trends in the Evolving Transformation of the Smart City

Abstract

Sustainable mobility is one of the most emerging challenges in the contemporary car-oriented city, where congestion and lawlessness grow, while funds continue to decline. Greece, so far, remains far behind the European and international innovative channels for transportation and mobility technology-assisted applications, having indeed a considerable increase in recent research and business projects. This paper aims at showcasing a collection of practices that focuses on enabling sustainable mobility policies and measures as well as hard infrastructure projects, both ICT and non ICT-enabled, in order to reach the smart city in mobility terms. The concept of a smart city does not always require the support of web technology tools, but rather integrates their use in a holistic approach to cope with the growing pressure of traffic situation and the existing travel behavior patterns. The study presents five (5) grouped sets of policy interventions and measures consisting of more than twenty five (25) indicative actions to be applied in cities and/or regions, ranging from common traffic calming solutions to smart traffic lights, car-sharing, and innovative parking schemes. The suggested sets of actions focus at the regional level, exploring at first the case of Athens and Attica Prefecture, however they can be applied in several other cases in urban and regional scale accordingly. Actions aim to tackle traffic safety, travel behavior dynamics and patterns, local mobility cultures and mobility and environmental awareness issues, considering the widespread use of information and communication technologies.