Guiding cities to pursue a smart mobility paradigm: An example from vehicle routing guidance and its traffic and operational effects

The concept of 'smart cities' is rooted on the approach taken by cities to reconcile the three often conflicting objectives of economic efficiency, environmental quality and social equity. The expectation that smart cities may promote the adoption of scalable solutions that take advantage of information and communication technologies (ICT) to increase their effectiveness, reduce costs and to improve the quality of life is great among academia, business and governmental stakeholders. Traffic management systems in its multiple applications (including re-routing) are an example of ICT solutions that can expectably lead to the purpose pursued by 'smart cities'. This paper develops a performance evaluation of re-routing for passenger and commercial vehicles with a case study in the city of Lisbon, Portugal. The paper examines how the provision of guidance information to drivers affects traffic performance, operational costs and environmental conditions at different spatial references, namely route level and urban network level. The simulation results indicate that the re-routing can not only reduce travel times, but also enhance the efficiency of roads in the city network and as well the traffic performance at the route level of analysis. The improvement at local route levels (such as corridor/route) is more significant than at the city network level. For the urban network level, simulation results suggest that re-routing can bring variations in travel and delays that may reach 2% and 6%, respectively, when a 10% drivers’ compliance rate is considered. Individual drivers are more likely to comply to deviate than urban logistics drivers and bus drivers.