Smart mobility in Italian metropolitan cities: A comparative analysis through indicators and actions

Unpacking the Smart Mobility Concept in the Dutch Context Based on a Text Mining Approach

“…The smart mobility concept largely comes with promises about addressing traffic flow and traffic safety issues, which is in line with the academic literature, where most often promises are made about the reduction of congestions [4,12,13,28], improvement of traffic management [3,5,7,11,30], and contribution to increased traffic safety [12,13,28]. To address such collective issues, smart mobility solutions target the road user by providing travel support during different moments of the trip, as found in the Dutch case.…”

“…Smart mobility comes forward as a constellation of ICT-related innovations in the mobility sector with much attention for cooperative systems and real-time information services, which resembles academic literature [2][3][4]6,7,[9][10][11][12][13]27,28]. As technologically advanced innovations, the smart mobility concept has a technological and commercial character in the Dutch case, and it is used in relation to economic interests, and to provide opportunities for the private sector.…”

“…To target road users, the individual benefits are promoted. Therefore, a large part of smart mobility innovations mainly focus on improving the travel comfort and convenience of the individual traveler, by increasing travel quality and flexibility [11], improving transfer speed [12], [28], reducing costs, and taking user needs into account [7]. Sustainability receives some attention in the societal discourse, but mainly in the form of an incidental benefit rather than as a top-priority.…”

“…Moreover, in the Dutch case, little evidence is found that smart mobility is brought into relation with a possible larger transformation of the mobility system and the smart mobility developments remain largely associated with an innovative and experimental stage. When aiming for system change, such developments still need to mature and scale-up [3,4,[6][7][8]27,28,31], meaning that along with new technological options, it requires the co-evolution of the industry, infrastructures, business models, legislations, user behavior and preferences, and cultural norms and values [32]. It requires, for example, an infrastructural basis of a high-quality road network [3,7], and a physical high-quality ICT network [3,28]; it furthermore requires users' acceptance and willingness to adapt their behavior [3,4,7], and it asks for collaborative alignments and new forms of governance, involving multiple stakeholders and their diverse set of needs and interests [3,6,8,27].…”

“…The concept emerged around 2010 in relation to a variety of information and communication technology innovations in the mobility sector and more technologically advanced and user-centric traffic management innovations [2][3][4][5][6]. The concept has been brought forward as a possible solution to several urban transport issues, and is linked to the smart city debate [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. In the discussions on transformative change, smart mobility is considered an alternative, more pragmatic, approach to the complex notion of sustainable mobility [6,10,11,13,14].…”