With more than two-thirds of the global population expected to live in urban contexts by 2050, the deployment of smart cities technologies, and intelligent transportation services (ITS) in particular, will reportedly become key policy areas for local governments. By 2025, penetration of ITS technologies in smart cities will range from 20% (autonomous vehicles) to 98% (traffic management).

“While numerous smart city projects are currently testing or deploying multimodal transportation, traffic management, adaptive traffic signaling, transit ticketing and smart parking payment solutions, the focus will shift to urban tolling and freight systems to address rampant congestion and pollution issues, especially in developing regions,” said Dominique Bonte, vice president and practice director for ABI Research. “However, more structural approaches based on eMobility, cooperative ITS and V2I, autonomous vehicles, and widespread adoption of car sharing and on-demand taxis will be needed by the start of the next decade to cope with the unstoppable urbanization trend.”

Meanwhile, inter-vertical technologies such as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) will be required to realize the synergies offered by an urban IoT strategy. In this respect, it is essential that city governments and technology providers adopt holistic approaches to maximize the combined effect of technologies within and across the energy, transportation, communication, education, retail, construction, public services, and healthcare verticals in order to unlock the full potential of smart cities in terms of sustainability, quality of life, efficiency, and economic growth.

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