Mobility in Smart Cities
Fabiana David de Oliveira Gomes
Victor Albanezi de Figueiredo Mesquita
Abstract—he paper explores the definition of Smart City and
your relation with the Urban mobility, assuming that it has been
a constant growth in urban population. As a result of this, the
number of faced problems has also suffer a significant increase,
such as social, ecological and economical changes. This study
will approach one problem that involves a large part of society:
the lack of mobility. To deal with this one, fortunately, the
connectivity has been also growing in a substantial way, resulting
in the expansion of the IoT (Internet of Things), opening up new
opportunities for solving those problems, as well as some barriers
to implement it.
Index Terms—Smart City, Urban Mobility, IoT
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HE Smart Cities concepts comes up from the constant
growing of two tendencies from the past century: the
increasing number of people moving toward urban centers
and the exponential evolution of the ICT (Information and
communications technology) [1].
According to some statistics, the urban population from the
first time surpassed the rural population in 2007 and some
projections shows that by 2050 at least two thirds of the
population will be living in urban areas [2]. These urbanization
process is associated with important positive factors in the
economic and social areas, such as: longer life expectancy,
reduction of poverty lifestyle, better access to education and
health systems, besides opening more opportunities for cultural
and political participation [3].
Along with the urbanization, the connectivity has been also
growing in a substantial way. In 2003, there was only 500
million devices connected to the internet which was about 0.08
devices per person in average. As a result of the explosive
expansion from mobile phones and tablets. In 2010 the number
of devices per person was for the first time bigger than 1. n
fact, this proportion tends to get higher and higher once that
devices that were not commonly connected, are now getting
connected, for example: cars, fridges and watches. Under those
circumstances together with the IoT, the expected number of
devices by 2020 are more than 50 billion [4].
However, in contrast with these positive contributions, if
the extension of urban areas are not done in a planned and
sustainable way, this accelerate growth can creates even more
problems which results in the deficiency of infrastructure to
accommodate a large number of people, decrease of air and
water quality, disparity on wealth and alteration on wildlife
and ecosystems [3].
One of the most challenging problem that can be seen daily
especially in big cities, is the lack of mobility infrastructure,
which affects directly and negatively the quality of citizens’
lives [3]. In response to be possible avoid or at least minimize
these effects, considering the extraordinary number of con-
nected devices already mentioned, there are projects of Smart
Cities known as the new urban paradigm.
With this intention, this study approaches some projects
of solutions already implemented: the Intelligent Tourist Trip
Planning, Car and Bike Sharing, and Autonomous Vehicles.
And It will also presents the challenges faced related with the
security and privacy.
II. U RBAN M OBILITY
Taking as premise the increase in substantial amount of
people living in cities, even nowadays it is already remarkable
the difficulty faced about the urban mobility, which is a issue
to the population as a whole [5].
The deterioration of urban mobility affects the quality life
and the environment in a shocking way. It has been caus-
ing impactive damages to the society, either through global
warming due to greenhouse gas emissions or the number
traffic accidents increased due the lack of adequate planning
infrastructure [3].
In fact, public and private transport is and will continue
to be the backbone for city growth and competitiveness. After
all, trucks will still plays a important role on delivering goods,
buses and subways is responsible for a urban journeys, as the
same ways as cars [6].
For this reason, it’s necessary look for ways to improve the
environment for each one of those classes, with the purpose of
using technologies as a vehicle for the creation of an efficient
urban environment, which seeks to find a balance between
population needs and sustainability.
III. S OLUTIONS
According to European Automobile Manufacturers Associ-
ation, the solutions for future mobility should be based on six
main pillars [6]:
• Integrated approach for sustainable cities: to minimize
emissions and boos mobility with better regulations
• Connectivity revolution: increasing connectivity be-
tween vehicles (V2V) and also between vehicles and
infrastructure in order to prevent traffic jams, manage
better parking, therefore saving time and resources.
• New business and mobility models: Using cars as
integrated components of IoT, collecting and managing
information from roads, drivers goods and other sources,
opening new possibilities for citizens, companies and
services providers.
 • Better public transport systems: making public and
private transport as a single network in order to increase
efficiency, avoids congestion and improve safety.
• Optimised urban freight delivery and logistics: imple-
menting innovative urban distribution systems
• Urban access restrictions schemes: used to accomplish
specific urban mobility objectives
Although many large cities have already introduced mecha-
nisms curtailing the movements of certain vehicle categories,
such as alternate plate days and limits on the size of cargo
vehicles allowed to access certain parts of city [7]. More
definitive and broadranging solutions are needed, as the op-
tions adopted so far are merely palliative, with few significant
effects at critical times of the day.
A. Intelligent Tourist Trip Planning
One laborious task that every traveler had already faced
is to plan ahead the logistics to visit points of interest in a
big and unfamiliar city. There are already mobile applications
that can help the tourist with this problem, the user can set
what are his interest (Art, Architecture, Museums, Leisure or
Shopping) and what are his restrictions (time limit, entrance
price, maximum distance) and the software generate the most
efficient path for him. This solution not only solve the traveler
problem, but also give the city administrators a valuable data
to better manage traffic (making the tourist avoid already
crowded areas), contain violence (making the tourist avoid
dangerous streets) or even promote some shopping areas. This
solution was already tested in the city of Barcelona and it
worked with a remarkable accuracy[8].
B. Car Sharing
Frequently most of the people just use their cars to simply
move from home to work, and from work to home, also
frequently these time schedule of work are pretty likely for
most of the people, it is simple to understand what problems
are caused by that. In the first place the cars stays idle most
of the time (while people are working). Secondly, a colossal
traffic jam in these peak hours. Almost every big city from
every continent has a major problem with this. And lastly but
not least important, it is the pollution caused by this huge
amount of cars. All of this without mentioning the costs the
owner of the car (maintenance and taxes) and for the city
administrators (providing all the infrastructure to sustain these
huge numbers of vehicles.
From that it can be seen how that system is not efficient
at all (idle for most of the time, jammed during peak hours,
and really expensive), and the solution for that comes almost
naturally: car sharing. But this was almost impractical some y
ears ago, but today thanks to ICT revolution it became viable
to create some services to provide this.
This kind of service, works this way: the company owns
a lot of cars, and they keep them stored in some strategic
locations (near airports, train stations for example). When the
user needs to use the vehicle, he can request it via a mobile
application, and he’ll get a notification showing the exact
location and which vehicle it is available to him. The car keys
are inside the car, and the car will be unlock to him when also
via the app. Then, after the use, he just need to return In any
pre-approved spot, leave the keys inside the vehicle, and lock
the car via app. There are a few providers for this growing
kind of service, and some examples are AutoShare,ZipCar,
BlaBlaCar, and CityWheels. There is a lot of ways this kind
of service can be charged, and it mostly depends on what is the
profile of the user, if it will use the vehicle just occasionally,
or constantly, or just in a specific period. And depending on
that the company have some specifics plans and rates.
C. Bike Sharing
Few urban mobility systems had spread so fast and is
already well implemented as Bike Sharing, which one is
present in more than 600 cities worldwide and in more than
12 cities in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro is the Brazilian city with the
biggest network of shared bikes, with more than 160 thousand
users and about 260 stations [9].
This service works in the same way as Car Sharing, but the
application usually be more focused on first/last mile cases, a
term used to describe the path to a big transportation hub, ex
railway stations, bus stations, etc. And additionally provides
some other benefits such as, zero carbon emission, car traffic
jams reduction and it also stimulate people to practice physical
activity.
The cities that are most well adapted and working with
the Bike Sharing system are Barcelona with more than 400
stations [10], Paris with about 1450 stations [11] and the
biggest one is Hangzhou located in China, it reached about
60k bicycles and nearly 2500 stations in 2011 [12].
D. Autonomous Vehicles
Neither of the previously presented technologies have a
bigger impact than this one. Autonomous vehicles (AV’s) has
the potential to practically extinguish car crashes, since most
of the times are caused by human mistakes, such as drinking
and drive, sleeping and using mobile phones. In United States,
for example, there are 5.5 million crashes per year and the
93 percent of those crashes are caused by human factor, the
estimated cost of this is 300 Billions USD [13]. Furthermore,
the AV’s has also the potential to minimize the need for
parking, opening up a immense amount of free land to a lot
of new uses, such as houses, stores and hospitals.
As well as improving the safety, AV’s could dramatically
reduce congestions, once it can better anticipate moviments. It
could organize intersections in a most efficiently way or even
predict better traffic distributions, instead of everyone using
the same avenue, it could spread them via smaller streets and
finding a optimal way for everyone. With this technology of
moving predictions, the AV’s can use the brakes and adjust
the speed in smoother way, ir order to provide a better fuel
efficiency.
It will also drastically transform the internal compartment
of the vehicle, since there is no need for a driver seat, in matter
of fact, there is no need for a driver. The car could potentially
transform itself into a place to work, eat a meal, read book,
watch a movie, sleep, in fact, anything, most important: safely.
The first successful autonomous vehicles tests was on 2004,
on DARPA Grand Challenge, a event promoted by DARPA
(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) [14] in order
to promote technical approaches to enable self driving cars.
This event is a field test to autonomous vehicles be tested on
real terrain. The goal on 2004 was to complete a 150 mile
route, but the best team completed 7.4 miles [15]. A year
later five team successfully completed the course [16]. And
in September of 2016 have driven over 2 million miles [17].
So is noticeable that the evolution of these technologies are
evolving in exponential steps.
The prediction by the biggest car companies is that self
driving cars will be ready for mass market between 2022 and
2025 [14].
IV. C HALLENGES
It is also important to realize that with new possibilities,
also comes a new range of challenges. There are some urgent
economics challenges that can be divided in Security, Privacy,
Costs and Legal Considerations.
Additionally of these topics, that are some matters that can
not be even imagined yet, problems that will be appearing as
the mature of technology.
A. Security
The most critical challenge is related to ensuring security
on internet applications. It is absolutely critical to increase the
reliability, stability, and resilience in order to promote trust to
the use of these applications [18].
As a result of the increasing number of connected devices,
the vulnerabilities grows on the same rate, and could be used
as entry points for cyberattacks. Just to illustrate the problem,
a not so well protected fridge, a security camera or even
a temperature sensor, could became a target for malicious
individuals to enter a specific network and infected it with
some harmful spam [19]. And as has been already noted most
of our daily activities will be more and more internet-based.
Taking this issue into the mobility point of view, besides that
the vast majority of car crashes are caused by human mistakes,
and using driverless cars would decrease substantially the
number of accidents [20], but on the other way, hacking into a
car could turn into a numerous kinds of misconducts including
disabling brakes, shutdown the engine and locking the doors
[21]. Additionally it has already been showed that hacking into
connected infrastructure is also a big threat [22]. Therefore
this security in IoT must been a big, if not the major topic of
discussion.
B. Privacy
Respect for privacy is one of the most basics rights of a
human being, it impacts the ability for individuals to speak
and acts in a freely way. That why collected data from the user
must be treated respecting the individual expectations [23].
The gathering of some data can be a powerful benefit to
the user, since it can be used to make some applications more
customized for the user profile. But on the other hand, this
raises a question to what, and to whom this data can be used
for. For instance, an bus with geo tracking service, may record
data of all users inside the vehicle, whether they want or not.
Those type of data, together with big data analytics can be
used to create detailed profiles of users, that could be used in
discrimination ways.
This matter should be seriously considered, because if users
lose confidence in the IoT because of privacy issues, a great
value of the whole Internet will be lost [24].
C. Cost
One of the great barriers to implement some of these
solutions are the cost. The technology needed in most of the
cases includes a lot of sensors, a well designed network, and
lots of software.
Using Self Driving cars as an example, just the Light
Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) used on top of Google’s Au-
tonomous Cars costed about 70 thousand USD, and in addition
to all other sensors, softwares and required computing, the
price is estimated to be more than 100 thousand USD [14].
Which is way too high than a standard vehicle. It is natural
that the price of these technologies will decrease, and soon
will be more get-a-ble to the mass market. There are already
some surveys 44 percent of the respondents said that they are
very likely to buy a fully autonomous car in 10 years [25].
D. Legal Considerations
A scenario with every vehicle fully autonomous is unlikely
to happen in a near future, but it already worth to be consider
the changes on legislation this will require. In UK, if a car
assistance system presents a failure and comes to cause a
accident, the liability is with the car users, not matter if their
actions affected the accident or not, and the user must process
the manufacturer legally for the problem [?] .
V. C ONCLUSION
R EFERENCES
[1] M. A. Cunha, E. Przeybilovicz, J. F. M. Macaya, and F. B. P. d. Santos,
“Smart cities: Transformação digital de cidades,” 2016.
[2] U. Nations, “World urbanization prospects: The 2014 revision, high-
lights. department of economic and social affairs,” Population Division,
United Nations, 2014.
[3] A. K. da Silva, “Cidades inteligentes e sua relacao com a mobilidade
inteligente.”
[4] D. Evans, “The internet of things: How the next evolution of the internet
is changing everything,” CISCO white paper, vol. 1, no. 2011, pp. 1–11,
2011.
[5] “Cidades inteligentes e mobilidade urbana,” Tech. Rep., 2015.
[6] E. A. M. Assosiation, “The 2030 urban mobility challenge,” 2016.
[7] P. Camara and L. Macedo, “Traffic management schemes: the london
congestion charge and the sao paulo rodizio programme,” 2004.
[8] P. Mrazovic, J. L. Larriba-Pey, and M. Matskin, “Improving mobility in
smart cities with intelligent tourist trip planning,” in Computer Software
and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), 2017 IEEE 41st Annual,
vol. 1. IEEE, 2017, pp. 897–907.
[9] I. de Politica de Transporte e Desenvolvimento, “Sistemas de bicicletas
compartilhadas em belo horizonte, distrito federal, rio de janeiro e sao
paulo,” 2016.
[10] H. H. Yang, “Green urban public bikes rental system: A case study of
taipei youbike,” in Advanced Materials Research, vol. 723. Trans Tech
Publ, 2013, pp. 968–975.
[11] S. Bührmann, “Bicycles as public-individual transport–european devel-
opments,” Rupprecht Consult Forschung und Beratung GmbH, Köln,
2008.
[12] Y. Yao and Y.-j. Zhou, “Bike sharing planning system in hangzhou,”
Urban Transport of China, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 30–38, 2009.
[13] C. Systematics and M. Meyer, “Crashes vs. congestion-what’s the cost
to society,” Prepared for the American Automobile Association, 2011.
[14] D. J. Fagnant and K. Kockelman, “Preparing a nation for autonomous
vehicles: opportunities, barriers and policy recommendations,” Trans-
portation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, vol. 77, pp. 167–181,
2015.
[15] DARPA, “Grand challenge 2004 final report,” 2004.
[16] ——, “Grand challenge 2005 final report,” 2006.
[17] “Google self-driving car project montly report,” 2016.
[18] I. Society, “Values and principles,” 2015.
[19] M. Starr, “Fridge caught sending spam emails in botnet attack,” h
ttp://bit. ly/1j5Jac1, 2014.
[20] B. W. Smith, “Human error as a cause of vehicle crashes,” Center for
Internet and Society, http://cyberlaw. stanford. edu/blog/2013/12/human-
error-cause-vehicle-crashes, 2013.
[21] F. B. of Investigation, “Motor vehicles increasingly vulnerable to remote
exploits,” 2016.
[22] B. Ghena, W. Beyer, A. Hillaker, J. Pevarnek, and J. A. Halderman,
“Green lights forever: Analyzing the security of traffic infrastructure.”
WOOT, vol. 14, pp. 7–7, 2014.
[23] R. Wilton, “Four ethical issues in online trust,” 2014.
[24] K. Rose, S. Eldridge, and L. Chapin, “The internet of things: An
overview,” The Internet Society (ISOC), pp. 1–50, 2015.
[25] X. Mosquet, T. Dauner, N. Lang, N. Rubmann, A. Mei-Pochtler,
R. Agrawal, and F. Schmieg, “Revolution in the driverâs seat: The road
to autonomous vehicles,” Boston Consulting Group, p. 11, 2015.
[26] G. Yeomans, “Autonomous vehicles handing over controlâopportunities
and risks for insurance,” 2014.