Smart cities and electric vehicles: the road to a sustainable and efficient future 

The integration of electric vehicles (EVs) into smart cities is a recent phenomenon in urban mobility. Smart cities use technology and data to manage various assets and processes, such as water, waste removal, roads, and health, to produce better outcomes for their citizens and tackle increasing challenges like climate change and population growth.

At present, a few smart city applications use geospatial data to plan for the optimum potential infrastructure of EVs to address these challenges. However, practical consumer-facing applications focus mainly on micromobility, such as e-bikes and scooters, and to encourage their use in short or last leg journeys (for example, from a pubic transit point to the final destination).

Benefits and challenges of combining smart city solutions and EVs

The combination of smart city solutions and EVs has the potential to revolutionise urban life and make cities more sustainable, efficient, and liveable for residents. The benefits that this combination can offer include the following:  

• Clean energy: EVs run on electricity, a cleaner energy source compared to traditional fossil fuels. Using EVs in smart cities can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and noise pollution, improving air quality and creating a healthier environment
• Efficient energy use: charge points for EVs can be installed almost anywhere, which makes it easy to distribute clean energy across cities. These charge points can be connected to smart management systems that monitor and optimise energy use, ensuring electricity is used efficiently
• Improved traffic management: although not necessarily specific to EV, smart city solutions, such as intelligent transportation systems and routing apps, can help manage traffic and parking more efficiently, reducing congestion and improving the flow of vehicles in cities
• Mobile energy storage and sustainable waste collection
• Smart city solutions can also help cities better manage their resources such as energy. Electricity demand for instance, could be balanced during peak hours by using EVs as mobile energy storage devices. 

City of the future, same challenges

The city of the future will look much cleaner and safer from an e-mobility perspective. However, EVs in themselves still present many of the same problems as conventionally fuelled vehicles, such as congestion. To tackle this, the integration of EVs with smart city solutions is going to be key; especially with the data and insight. This makes the ability to nudge people’s travel preferences from personal vehicles to public transportation, bicycles, and micromobility more likely. However those alternatives do need to be viable, and investment in these modes of transportation must accompany the adoption of conventional EVs.

Bicycles are a clean, affordable, and healthy mode of transportation that can be easily integrated into the urban landscape. Through investment in green vehicles and intelligent transportation systems, public transit can be powered by clean energy, reducing emissions and improving air quality. Micromobility provides a convenient and affordable alternative for several use cases. Last leg journeys, such as commuters driving to and from train stations after train journeys from cities, are where micro-mobility solutions can drastically reduce the need for private vehicles and free up road space for other road users at peak times.

 Another critical aspect of smart cities is data management. Smart city solutions rely on the collection and analysis of vast amounts of data to monitor and manage the day-to-day life of the city, as explored above. Geospatial data is, of course, a key component to realising smart city solutions, as everything that is pertinent to the efficiency and effectiveness of the city, for instance, how smart it really is, happens somewhere. Effective data management allows cities to make informed decisions about allocating resources and implementing policies that can improve the quality of life for residents.

EVs of all types will certainly be a feature of the smart city, as the benefits they provide for the environment and citizens’ quality of life are already manifested. However, cities need to continue investing in this technology and the underpinning data, and incentivising its adoption to ensure that we can create a cleaner, safer, and more sustainable future.