Smart cities require smart management systems
Faced with worsening traffic problems and increasingly aware of the climate emergency, more and more cities are exploring ways to manage their transportation systems within the concept of the smart city.
Reducing traffic requires proactive management. Cities of a certain size are increasingly aware allowing residents to travel unrestricted is unsustainable and only generates congestion and frustration and in response are reducing the number of vehicles on their roads through tolls or congestion charges, as well as restricting access to certain areas of the city.
This is the field of transport economics, founded in 1959 by John R. Meyer to study the distribution of transportation resources, which has strong links to civil engineering. It tends to be applied more in large cities, where competition for resources is greater and the problems arising from their mismanagement are critical. New York is one of the first major cities that proved that fleet-based transport systems were not a panacea and required centralized and proactive management: traffic jams in the Great Apple are mostly caused by taxis and as companies such as Uber, Lyft and the like entered the equation, traffic has worsened, which led to the establishment of limitations both on the number of vehicles and the amount of time they can circulate without passengers.
