Smart Cities and Mobility: Does the Smartness of Australian Cities Lead to Sustainable Commuting Patterns?

ABSTRACT

Smart cities have become a popular concept because they have the potential to create a sustainable and livable urban future. Smart mobility forms an integral part of the smart city agenda. This paper investigates “smart mobility” from the angle of sustainable commuting practices in the context of smart cities. This paper studies a multivariate multiple regression model within a panel data framework and examines whether increasing access to broadband Internet connections leads to the choice of a sustainable commuting mode in Australian local government areas. In this case, access to the Internet is used as a proxy for determining urban smartness, and the use of different modes of transport including working at home is used to investigate sustainability in commuting behavior. The findings show that an increasing access to broadband Internet reduces the level of working from home, public transport use, and active transport use, but increases the use of private vehicles, perhaps to overcome the fragmentation of work activities the Internet creates. How to overcome the need for car-based travel for fragmented work activities while increasing smartness through the provisioning of broadband access should be a key smart city agenda for Australia to make its cities more sustainable.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart cities
• smart mobility
• sustainable commuting
• sustainable urban development
• Australian cities

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers, who provided constructive comments on an earlier version of the paper.

Notes on Contributors

Tan Yigitcanlar is an associate professor at the School of Civil Engineering and Built Environment, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. His research interests include knowledge-based urban development, sustainable urban development, and smart urban technologies and infrastructures.

Md. Kamruzzaman is an associate professor at the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. His research interests include smart cities, autonomous vehicles, transport disadvantage, travel behavior, planning and decision support systems, and geographic information systems application in planning.

ORCID

Tan Yigitcanlar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7262-7118

Md. Kamruzzaman http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7113-942X