Introducing smart mobility in polish functional urban areas with a use of innovative individual transport systems – Supply and demand, diversity, spatial distribution

Abstract

Low emission policy, eco mobility and sharing economy are popular modern trends in urbanism and urban transportation development. The use of innovative individual transport systems is a part of popular ‘smart city’ concept, where smart mobility plays an important role. It has a crucial meaning for sustainable development of functional urban areas (FUAs), that are sub-regions emerged from the strong impact that cities have on hinterlands, usually defined using land use, settlement, population density and travel-to-work flows. Congestion and growing air pollution are common side effects of urbanisation. In order to avoid or reduce their impact in Polish FUAs local and regional authorities introduce popular sharing systems such as bike sharing and encourage private sector to launch new solutions in eco mobility on the market. This paper discusses the supply and demand, history and spatial distribution of bike-sharing in Polish FUAs as well as diversity of other low emission sharing systems in Poland. The aim of this study is to identify main directions of smart mobility development that should be taken into consideration while creating and implementing low emission policies in Polish FUAs. For the purpose of this study empirical studies with a use of different sources have been carried out. Comparative analyses of diversity and spatial distribution of eco mobility solutions were supported by GIS tools, their results are visualised on maps.