Using ICT for transport to facilitate 'green' development: threats and opportunities

The current economic crisis affecting negatively a range of European economies has created new geographies, along with new threats and opportunities. Although austerity may have halted various planned projects and investments, it has also accelerated the quest for 'smarter and greener' development based on existing ICT infrastructure. The latter has been reinstated in 2012 by the Green Economy initiative at the Rio +20 summit. The rapid technological advances taking place in the 21st century allow practitioners and policy makers to retain certain levels of optimism. This paper explores the emerging paradigms in an urban context through a review of existing or currently developed smartphone apps promoting sustainable urban transport. This is supported by a SWOT analysis which leads to the identification of key features of emerging business models in the era of the 'green economy'. Subsequently survey results of user perspectives in Europe about the use of ICT to promote sustainable urban transport are reported. For example, traffic jams or journey reliability are found to be very important as anticipated, while information about environmental impacts of trips is not deemed equally significant. These findings are valuable for local and regional authorities since they need to have robust evidence regarding the types of information or incentives users are prone to respond positively to meet individual and city wide objectives. Furthermore, findings offer the opportunity take the use of incentives from policy makers at the next level by providing customisation with higher probability for positive response.