International Transportation (67) 1 | 2015 3 Miroslav Svítek POINT OF VIEW Urban transport - a big challenge S ustainable urban transport becomes an integral part of the “Smart Cities” concept, which seeks to maximize the use of available information and telecommunication technologies for the urban agglomerations management. This will allow close integration of diferent sectors such as transportation, logistics, safety or energy supply, which in turn will lead to synergies that help improve the quality of life in cities. For example, urban transport accounts for 40 % of CO 2 emissions and 70 % of pollutant emissions arising from road transport. Urban traic management uses many diferent types of sensors, ranging from traic detectors to satellite image processing (weather forecasting, urban heat island maps, or air pollution maps). In fact, with the Smart Cities concept, even private cars can function as smart sensors, providing important data about the current trafic situation or other environmental parameters. For processing the resulting large volumes of data, systems increasingly rely on supercomputers, including Cloud computing services. This is gradually shifting urban traic management away from the original traicactuated signal systems towards adaptive control systems that are able to coordinate traic across the entire urban area. Microscopic simulations are very often used to validate diferent control strategies. Real-time validation even allows optimizing the control algorithms directly. Urban traic management technology includes advanced actuators, either in the form of physical signalling devices on the infrastructure side, or virtual navigation systems ofering convenient route recommendations based on the available information. In the future, reliable navigation of autonomous (driverless) cars will also be possible. Driverless subway trains are already in operation today, and in rail transport there are successful development projects for automatic train operation systems (CBTS - Communications-Based Train Control). In future public transport, electro-mobility in a broad sense - i.e. including also trams, trolleybuses and fuelcell-powered vehicles (hydrogen and other) - will play an invaluable role since they emit only minimal local pollution. In particular, their motors do no emit nanoparticles, which have been proven to be very harmful to human health. Currently the widespread introduction of electro-mobility is still slowed down by high costs and limited battery capacity. However, if batteries continue to become 5 to 7 % cheaper every year while their capacity increases by 5 to 7 % in the same period, the turning point will be reached in 2020: Then electro-mobility will become an economically advantageous way of transportation. Urban traic management will also increasingly depend on various sharing models for means of transport, such as bikesharing, carsharing or taxi-sharing concepts, which must be integrated not only into the overall transportation concept, but also into planning stationary traic infrastructure (including monitoring parking availability, vehicle navigation to the parking areas). And there is deinitely a need to develop new business models for sharing or maximizing the freight transport capacities in city logistics. Future users will treat the urban transport system as a mobility service, which they will expect to deliver highquality services, just like they do today in the area of telecommunication services (SLA - Service Level Agreement). The use of smartphones for the optimization of individual routes, door-to-door navigation, or mobile payment for these services will help guarantee the quality parameters of mobility. In the context of increasing urbanization, urban mobility is progressively becoming a decisive factor for the further sustainable development of cities. Ensuring eicient urban mobility through the adoption of new technologies, innovative business approaches and novel organizational models is going to be a big challenge - for all of us. Yours Miroslav Svítek, Prof. Dr. Ing., dr. h. c. Czech Technical University in Prague (CZ) Chairman, European Platform for Transport Sciences (EPTS) Board