Analyst Insight: Smart City Transportation Megatrends

Transportation and mobility have long been at the forefront of smart city development. Implementing smart services and technologies in transportation allows cities to increase operational efficiencies and decrease their overall carbon footprints. Technological advances in AI, digital twins, and EV charging are helping cities decrease traffic, plan future infrastructure projects, and decrease carbon emissions. While cities’ needs differ, multiple avenues exist for these technologies to help them prepare for climate change’s challenges.

As the COVID-19 pandemic gradually subsides, people have returned to driving cars and traveling by plane, bus, and train—accompanied by renewed congestion and rising carbon emissions. In addition, the pandemic highlighted alternative methods for constructing transportation systems that caused cities to reexamine their existing systems and quickly adapt them to ensure that people can use them safely and sustainably. These systems’ success will depend on finding creative ways to apply solutions that accommodate this resurgence in travel.

This Guidehouse Insights report focuses on three megatrends that can affect transportation (visual AI, digital twins, and EV charging capabilities) and looks at solutions that can create sustainable and resilient cities. The topics, based on the Smart City Tracker 1Q23, include market drivers and barriers, assessment of tracked smart city projects, case studies for each megatrend, highlights from the last two years’ Smart City Trackers, and recommendations for stakeholders in the smart city industry.