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In the context of accelerating urbanisation, cities must ensure a viable economy, social well-being, and a healthy environment. Transport is one of the key conditions for economic development and meeting the needs of countries, regions, and cities. However, transport must meet not only the physiological but also the social needs of society, one of which is environmental security. Urban transport accounts for around 40% of CO2 emissions and 70% of other pollutants from road transport. Thus, one of the most difficult issues for any city to address when building bypasses is the growing number of cars in the city, traffic congestion, and the reduction of all greenhouse gas emissions. The documents adopted in July 2020 aim to revitalise the EU’s economy by moving towards a green economy and sustainability. In addition to the systematic and comparative analysis of concepts published in the scientific literature, the article also presents an analysis of the concepts of the sustainable city and sustainable transport, as well as a study of the social impact of bypasses and the assessment of the security of the social environment in the Baltic capitals. The aim of the article is to assess the impact of the growing number of vehicles on the security of the city’s social environment. Research results show that the number of pollutants and a direct dependence between the number of pollutants and the driving speed were established. Therefore, it needs to make investments in the transport sector: improving roads, the construction of bypasses, and the technical parameters of purchased cars.

The decarbonisation of the electricity grid is expected to create new electricity flows. As a result, it may require that network planners make a significant amount of investments in the electricity grids over the coming decades so as to allow the accommodation of these new flows in a way that both the thermal and voltage network constraints are respected. These investments may include a portfolio of infrastructure assets consisting of traditional technologies and smart grid technologies. One associated key challenge is the presence of uncertainty around the location, the timing, and the amount of new demand or generation connections. This uncertainty unavoidably introduces risk into the investment decision-making process as it may lead to inefficient investments and inevitably give rise to excessive investment costs. Smart grid technologies have properties that enable them to be regarded as investment options, which can allow network planners to hedge against the aforementioned uncertainty. This paper focuses on key smart technologies by providing a critical literature review and presenting the latest mathematical modelling that describes their operation.

Bicycling appears in the literature on urban mobility as a more sustainable transportation mode for future transportation, based on empirical evidence of the potential benefits of bicycling on the environment, society, and health. In this context, public interventions to promote and maintain bicycling as a sustainable practice and its positive effects are salient. This article reviews different cycling policies with respect to cycling facilities present in the literature and compares them with a case study in Valencia (Spain). We collected information on the public policies implemented in Valencia and the traffic intensity in bike lanes over detecting loops distributed around the city. The results show a strong increase in bicycle use accompanying the implementation of public policies that promote bicycling. The effectiveness of public policies and their impact on bicycling and sustainability are discussed.

The term eco-innovation has been coined to label those innovations expected to reduce the life cycle environmental burdens resulting from their use. Claims of environmental superiority are usually supported by technology-oriented analyses, such as product-level life cycle assessment. However, the environmental superiority of an innovation depends not only on its technical characteristics but also on technology-demand interactions. In this article, such interactions are incorporated through the concept of the environmental rebound effect. Using the Dynamic IPAT-Life cycle assessment with Environmental Rebound effect or DILER model, environmental superiority claims of seven alleged transport eco-innovations were evaluated by comparing alternative macro-level scenarios (with and without innovation) for Europe. The results support the claims of environmental superiority of only three out of seven studied innovations. That is, a majority of innovations actually induced increases in various environmental pressures. Such increases can be attributed mostly to the influence of generally noteworthy environmental rebound effects. The magnitude of the rebound effect is found to be highly correlated with two variables: the total change in effective income resulting from the use of the innovation and the difference between the environmental pressures per monetary unit of the studied innovations and that of the rest of consumption. The article contributes to the literature by (a) applying a comprehensive approach to the rebound effect and its relationship with the eco-innovation concept, (b) by calculating original rebound estimates of specific transport innovations and assessing these in absolute terms, as well as by (c) obtaining novel insights into the drivers behind the rebound effect. The counterintuitive results of this study also invite to re-assess the use of technology-oriented tools for guiding environmental policy. Other policy implications of this study relate to the relevance of transport cost differences, the targeted promotion of actual eco-innovations and its combination with broader policies as well as the achievement of higher quality mobility.

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works Electric vehicles use 10 to 25 kWh batteries. After their use in cars, these batteries are still in good condition to be used for energy storage in stationary applications and smart grid systems at all stages: generation, transmission, and distribution. However, before their reuse, there are some changes to be made on these batteries, such as those concerning communications. Electric vehicle batteries use a battery management system that controls functionality and safety, transmitting their condition and status, but also containing confidential information. This article studies two strategies to deal with communications difficulties in their second life as storage energy devices. Peer Reviewed

Smart mobility systems offers solutions for traffic congestion, transport management, emergency, and road safety. However, the success of smart mobility lies in the availability of intelligent transportation infrastructure. This paper studied smart mobility systems in three Asia-Pacific countries (South Korea, Singapore, and Japan) to highlight the major strategies leading their successful journey to become smart cities for aspiring countries, such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), to emulate. A robust framework for evaluating smart mobility systems in the three countries and Saudi Arabia was developed based on the indicators derived from the smart mobility ecosystem and three major types of transport services (private, public, and emergency). Sixty indicators of smart mobility systems were identified through a rigorous search of the literature and other secondary sources. Robots, drones, IoT, 5G, hyperloop tunnels, and self-driving technologies formed part of the indicators in those countries. The study reveals that the three Asia-Pacific countries are moving head-to-head in terms of smart mobility development. Saudi Arabia can join these smarter countries through inclusive development, standardization, and policy-driven strategies with clear commitments to public, private, and research collaborations in the development of its smart mobility ecosystem. Moreover, cybersecurity must be taken seriously because most of the smart mobility systems use wireless and IoT technologies, which may be vulnerable to hacking, and thus impact system safety. In addition, the smart mobility system should include data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in developing and monitoring the evaluation in terms of user experience and future adaptability.

Adopting more sustainable modes of transportation and shorter daily commutes remains a fundamental challenge in the struggle for the sustainable transition of cities. While past studies on the sustainability of commuting behaviours partly focused on the place of residence and how the characteristics of commuters or residential neighbourhoods impact sustainable travel, other studies looked at the place of employment to analyze these dynamics. In this study, we investigate the extent to which the recent phase of the rise of peripheral employment has promoted more sustainable travel behaviour, based on the hypothesis that polycentricity has recently favoured a better job–housing balance and co-location. We develop a general typology of employment centres, using Census microdata at fine spatial scale over the 1996–2016 period to observe commuting modes and distances by subcentre types for six major Canadian cities. Our results show that despite recent developments in planning practices—transit-oriented development, transport infrastructure, and changing travel behaviour, the emergence of peripheral subcentres promoted less sustainable commuting patterns in most Canadian metropolitan areas over the period. However, we find sustainable commuting emerging in subcentres where large public transport infrastructure investments have been made, such as in the case of Vancouver’s Millennium and Canada lines. Our study also shows that central business districts (CBDs) and downtown subcentres are becoming relatively more sustainable over the period, which confirms the positive effect of the back-to-the-city movement and changing behaviour toward active transportation in these locations.