The Role of Technology in Smart City Transportation: Report Writing Assignment Help

This is a report on the role of innovation and technology in smart city transport, written for a management student to a 1,500 to 2,000 word brief in APA 7th edition. It defines the smart city, reviews the literature briefly, and works through six UK case studies: London, Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester, Oxford and Liverpool. The numbered structure is the student's; we re-sourced the six case studies to primary documents (council plans, funding announcements and programme reports published between 2013 and 2025) and rewrote the report's prose around them. A section on what has changed in London since the report was written, built from Transport for London's 2025 figures, comes before the reference list.

For a related technical report, read our report on security challenges in connected vehicles. For a shorter report on an urban services topic, see globalization in hospitality.

What Is a Smart City?

A city that uses digital technology and data to make better decisions about services and infrastructure. The term has been in the literature since the 1990s and was popularised by IBM in 2010; there is still no agreed definition (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). This report uses six dimensions, governance, mobility, environment, economy, living and people, with transport running across all of them.

How Does Technology Change Urban Transport?

By changing what planners can see, what travellers can choose, and how capacity is managed. Ticketing and sensor data show how people really move. Real-time information changes mode choice at the point of travel. Adaptive signals and demand-responsive services let a city manage the network instead of only enlarging it. The London case below shows all three.

Assignment Question

Analyse the role of technology in transforming transportation systems within smart cities. Discuss the impact of innovation on urban mobility, using examples from cities like London and Manchester, and explore strategies for sustainable and efficient transportation development.

Word Count:
1,500 to 2,000 words as set by the brief. The sample below runs to about 4,700 words plus references because it keeps all six case studies. Read it as a model of structure and of how sources are used, not as a model of length: a submission of this size against that brief would lose marks for not following the instruction. To fit 2,000 words, keep the definition, two case studies (London and one city shaped by competitive funding, such as Glasgow), section 4 and the conclusion, and cut the rest.

Referencing Style:
APA (7th Edition)

Smart Cities: The Role of Innovation and Technology in Transportation

1.0 Introduction

More people live in cities than outside them, and the number is still rising. London expected to add a million residents between 2011 and 2021, to approach ten million by 2030, and to carry more than 600,000 extra public transport passengers at peak times by 2031 (Greater London Authority, 2013). Pressure of that kind lands on transport first: a journey that took twenty minutes takes forty, a bus that was reliable is not, and the roads built for the traffic of one decade carry the traffic of the next. The question this report starts from is why a city would respond to that pressure with digital technology rather than with more concrete, and what the evidence from six British cities says about whether it works.

The case for a digital response rests on three problems that building alone does not solve. The first is network use: a road system is congested at particular places and particular hours, and knowing where and when is a data problem before it is an engineering one. The second is choice: a traveller who can see the next bus, the next train and the nearest bike will use a different mode than one who cannot, so information changes demand without any new infrastructure. The third is energy: as city fleets move to electricity, the transport network and the power network become one planning problem, and managing charging demand needs data the old arrangement never collected.

1.1 Aim of the Study

The aim of this study is to examine the role of innovation and technology in the transport systems of cities described as smart cities, using UK examples. Three objectives follow from it. The first is to establish what a smart city is taken to mean, since the term is used loosely. The second is to describe how technology is being applied to urban transport in practice: ticketing and payment, real-time information, network management and the data infrastructure beneath them. The third is to identify what limits those applications, which the evidence suggests is rarely the technology itself (Future Cities Catapult, 2017).

Two conditions run through those objectives. A city authority rarely delivers transport technology alone: the systems are bought, and authorities that procure millions of pounds of services a year rarely consider how digital technology could change what they are buying (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). And transport technology sits on top of physical planning decisions, so the road layout, the location of housing and the capacity of the network set the limits within which any system can operate.

1.2 Structure of the Study

The report is organised in six sections. Section 2 reviews the literature: how the term smart city has been defined, and how UK cities took up the idea after 2012. Section 3 works through six UK case studies. Section 4 analyses them under two headings, social innovation and what the six cases show as a set. Section 5 concludes and section 6 states the limitations of the study. Throughout, the distinction that matters is between the systems a city buys and the strategy that decides what they are for.

2.0 Literature Review

2.1 Definition of a Smart City

There is no agreed definition of a smart city. The definitions in use share a structure: a set of domains, usually governance, mobility, environment, economy, living and people, and a claim that digital technology and data can improve outcomes across them. Transport appears in every version of that list, as a domain in its own right and as the thing that connects the others, which is why it is the most common starting point for a city strategy.

The term had appeared in the literature since the 1990s, but it was popularised by IBM in 2010 through the Smarter Cities Challenge. After the financial crisis IBM directed its technology offer at city infrastructure and local government, sending experts into cities to propose solutions that would make them "smarter and more effective". IBM defined a smart city as "one that makes optimal use of all the interconnected information available today to better understand and control its operations and optimize the use of limited resources." Cisco defined smart cities as those that adopt "scalable solutions that take advantage of information and communications technology (ICT) to increase efficiencies, reduce costs, and enhance quality of life" (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). Both definitions are built around large city systems, energy, water and transport, and both measure success in efficiency and better decisions. That is the vendor-led conception of a smart city, and the debate since 2010 has largely been an argument with it.

The most useful survey for this report is the Future Cities Catapult's review of 21 cities' smart city strategies, Manchester among them, chosen for a mix of geography, population size and maturity of strategy. It found that the emphasis of strategies had moved from efficiencies in service provision towards quality of life and citizen engagement, and that ICT infrastructure and data analytics nonetheless remained at the core of how every strategy expected to have its effect. Of the 21 cities, twelve had written a separate smart city strategy, five had embedded it in the city's overall vision, and four had thin or no documentation and were operating through projects instead (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). Manchester, the one UK city in the review, is in that last group.

2.2 How UK Cities Took up the Idea

In the UK the decisive event was a funding competition. In 2012 the Technology Strategy Board, the national innovation agency, invited cities to submit feasibility studies for a Future Cities Demonstrator. Thirty cities took part in the competition, 26 of them submitting demonstrator proposals (GOV.UK, 2013). Glasgow won the £24 million main award in January 2013, and Bristol, London and Peterborough received £3 million each as runners-up (Cowley, Joss and Dayot, 2018; GOV.UK, 2013). Cowley, Joss and Dayot's study of six of the bidding cities, Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes and Peterborough, catalogued 68 smart city activities across them and found that the ways they addressed the public were dominated by two framings, the citizen as entrepreneur and the citizen as service user, with deliberative participation much weaker (Cowley, Joss and Dayot, 2018). That finding recurs in the transport cases below: the resident is mostly a passenger to be informed, not a participant in deciding what the network is for.

Two cities outside the case set show the range of instruments in use. Birmingham worked through Digital Birmingham, a council-owned partnership organisation, which formed a Smart City Commission in July 2012 and published a roadmap in March 2014 (Centre for Cities, 2014). The roadmap is organised in three themes, Technology and Place, People, and Economy, and it puts mobility under Economy alongside health and energy efficiency rather than under infrastructure, which tells you how the city expected the benefit to arrive (Birmingham City Council and Birmingham Smart City Commission, 2014). Separately, £26 million went into an Urban Traffic Control scheme integrating transport data from different agencies into a single platform (Centre for Cities, 2014). Milton Keynes took a research route: in October 2013 a consortium led by the Open University won an £8 million grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England's Catalyst Fund, match-funded to £16 million, for MK:Smart, on the argument that growth could outstrip the capacity of the city's transport infrastructure. Its first product was an MK Data Hub drawing together energy, transport and water data with satellite, social and economic datasets, that is, data collection before deployment (Business MK, 2013; Centre for Cities, 2014). The British Standards Institution, commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2013, was at the same time writing PAS 181, a guide to establishing smart city strategies that Birmingham helped to draft (Birmingham City Council and Birmingham Smart City Commission, 2014).

3.0 Case Studies

This section examines six UK cities: London, Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester, Oxford and Liverpool. They are treated separately because their programmes differ in origin as well as in content. London wrote a formal plan; Manchester did not, and ran projects instead. Bristol and Glasgow were shaped by the 2012 competition. Oxford's programme began with connectivity and data infrastructure, and Liverpool's transport work sits with the city region rather than the city. Each case is described in terms of what the city set out to do in transport, what it funded, and what the sources record as the result.

3.1 London

London's programme dates from 2013, when the Mayor formed the Smart London Board in March and published the Smart London Plan later that year (Greater London Authority, 2013). The plan is a growth document first: it opens with the population projections above and argues that data, not only new infrastructure, is what will let the city carry them. Transport is its strongest evidence, because Transport for London already ran the systems the plan describes elsewhere as aspirations. Over 85 per cent of all Tube and bus travel was paid for with an Oyster card, contactless bank cards had been accepted on the city's 8,500 buses since December 2012, and the plan expected them on every mode in 2014. The Countdown service was giving live bus arrivals for all 19,000 stops through the web, text messages and 2,500 roadside signs, the same feed was syndicated to developers who had built more than sixty apps, and 13 per cent of daily journeys, more than 650,000, were using those digital channels (Greater London Authority, 2013).

The bus and Tube network shows the mechanism most clearly. Smartcard and contactless ticketing produce a continuous record of boardings by stop and by time of day, which converts a planning question that was previously answered by survey into one answered by observation. The plan records that Oyster data, used within data protection rules, gave Transport for London information on how customers travelled across the network and on how its own services had operated, and that the data was already being shared with research institutions (Greater London Authority, 2013). That record is generated as a by-product of the fare system, not by a separate exercise, and opening it to developers was part of the same decision.

Two further points from the plan matter for the analysis. It credits the congestion charge, enforced by number plate recognition, with reducing vehicle numbers in the central business district by over 70,000 a day (Greater London Authority, 2013): a regulatory instrument made workable by a digital one, a pattern that recurs in the 2025 figures at the end of this page. And its first aim, putting Londoners at the core, states that not all Londoners have access to the technology or the skills to use it and commits City Hall to a coordinated London-wide response to digital exclusion (Greater London Authority, 2013), an admission that a service delivered through a smartphone is not delivered to everyone. The wider literature finds that most failures are failures of capacity in the buying organisation rather than of the systems bought (Future Cities Catapult, 2017); London is the case where that capacity, an in-house transport authority with its own data and staff, already existed.

3.2 Bristol

Bristol's programme began in 2011 with carbon reduction as its stated objective, a 45 per cent cut in CO2 emissions by 2020, organised around smart transport, smart energy and smart data (Centre for Cities, 2014). Its 2012 feasibility study for the national competition broadened that remit from carbon and transport to environmentally and socially sustainable growth, and the city was awarded £3 million in April 2013 to open a City Living Lab that would combine data from different sources and host hack events so that residents and businesses would use it (Centre for Cities, 2014; Cowley, Joss and Dayot, 2018). For transport, the significance of the living-lab model is that it allows a measure to be tested on a few streets before it is applied to a network.

Two things distinguish Bristol from the other cases. The first is that the council is one actor among many, and the programme is not orchestrated by a single policy document. It runs in two strands: digital infrastructure, coordinated by Bristol Is Open, a joint venture between the council and the University of Bristol; and citizen and small-business engagement, collected under Connecting Bristol and often led by social enterprises rather than the council (Cowley, Joss and Dayot, 2018). The second is the infrastructure itself. Bristol Is Open, launched on 10 March 2015 with funding from the government's Super Connected Cities programme and Innovate UK, built a city-scale fibre, wireless and mesh network linked to the university's supercomputer, intended as a test bed for uses from machine-to-machine communication to driverless car trials (University of Bristol, 2015). A city that owns a programmable network can test a traffic measure as software before it becomes a road scheme, which is a different position from a city that buys a finished system.

3.3 Glasgow

Glasgow's programme was built on competitive funding. On 25 January 2013 the city was chosen, from the 30 cities in the competition, to receive £24 million to host the Technology Strategy Board's Future Cities Demonstrator, with plans for advanced street lighting, programmes to promote healthy living, transport improvements, and a city dashboard and management system that would view the city as an integrated whole (GOV.UK, 2013). Roughly half the award went on a new Operations Centre, fully operational from 2014, which integrated traffic management with public-space CCTV and police intelligence; traffic operators there control the city's signalling and can prioritise late-running public transport (Cowley, Joss and Dayot, 2018; McGinty, 2016). The rest funded demonstrators under four themes, energy, active travel, public safety and transport: intelligent street lighting on the Riverside Walkway and on Gordon Street, where the lights also report noise, footfall and air pollution; a cycling app that gathers cyclists' experiences as data to help people plan journeys and show the council where to improve; and an open data portal that reached 400 datasets from 60 organisations (McGinty, 2016). Innovate UK later reported that apps for walkers and cyclists were helping residents plan routes and record their journeys, that the lighting saved 68 per cent of energy against conventional lights, and that the programme returned £144 million on the £24 million invested (Innovate UK, 2017).

What the sources identify as the reasons the award produced results also explain its limits. The council was the single contractor, with a two-year grant period, which produced rapid delivery and little publicised partnership (Cowley, Joss and Dayot, 2018). Freeing the city's data for the portal ran against the working culture of local government, and the account written three years on notes that financial pressure could put the demonstrators in jeopardy once the grant ended (McGinty, 2016). Both points are consistent with the global review: smart city funding is mostly project finance from national government or, in Europe, EU programmes, rarely tied to core city budgets, and support from core funding is easiest to secure where a direct saving can be shown, as with street lighting (Future Cities Catapult, 2017).

3.4 Manchester

Manchester has never adopted a formal smart city strategy. It published digital strategies in 2008 and 2012, ran a Digital Development Agency from 2003 to 2015, and in its 2012 feasibility study framed the smart agenda as consolidating an existing legacy: hi-tech industry, infrastructure investment and the repopulation of the city centre (Cowley, Joss and Dayot, 2018). The global review, which interviewed the council for its Manchester appendix, describes a city "operating as a smart city through action, rather than on paper", building and procuring locally rather than buying off the shelf, and funding its projects mostly from EU and UK government programmes; it could work that way because the conditions a strategy usually has to create, leadership support and networks of businesses already engaged with the agenda, were already present (Future Cities Catapult, 2017).

The transport work is concentrated on the Oxford Road corridor, two kilometres running south from the city centre, where Corridor Manchester, an incorporated body since 2007, brings the council together with the universities, the hospitals, local technology firms and Transport for Greater Manchester (Cowley, Joss and Dayot, 2018). In December 2015 Manchester was selected from 34 applicant cities as the UK's Internet of Things city demonstrator, with £10 million of government funding for CityVerve, a consortium led by the council with Cisco, BT, the two universities and a group of smaller firms (Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, 2015; University of Manchester, n.d.). Its transport use cases were modest and specific: converting flag-and-pole bus stops into "talkative" stops with sensors, beacons and digital signage where a waiting passenger can check in and let the driver know, and a crowd-sourced, crowd-maintained bike-sharing service built on connected bikes, on the argument that docked schemes are expensive to install and maintain (Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, 2015).

Manchester and Helsinki are also partners in SynchroniCity, a European project to establish a single digital market for the Internet of Things through a shared, open-source data architecture (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). The review notes that as the city seeks collaboration with neighbouring authorities across Greater Manchester, a written strategy has come to be seen as the desirable next step, because a project portfolio gives a council leverage inside its own organisation but not among external partners (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). That is the practical limit of the project-led model: it works while the projects are local.

3.5 Oxford

Oxford's programme started from infrastructure for information rather than from any single transport scheme. Smart Oxford is an initiative of the Oxford Strategic Partnership, part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund, and it describes the city as a place of 160,000 people with the full range of large-city problems: deprivation, pollution, traffic and flooding (Oxford Strategic Partnership, 2019). Its two stated core requirements are a ubiquitous device connectivity network, using technologies such as LoRaWAN and 5G to connect traffic and lighting control systems, mobility tracking and air pollution and flood sensors, and an open data platform on which businesses, academics and the public can build solutions and on which the council can map its own data to explain decisions to residents (Oxford Strategic Partnership, 2019).

The transport strand sits inside that frame. The 2019 programme lists, under transport and connectivity, the Mobox and DRIVEN projects, mobility-as-a-service apps, and V2GO, a vehicle-to-grid and electric vehicle charging project; under the built and natural environment it lists air pollution and flood sensors and a Zero Emission Zone (Oxford Strategic Partnership, 2019). What distinguishes Oxford in these sources is the order of operations: connectivity and open data first, applications second. That approach meets a structural obstacle the global review names directly. Much of the most valuable data in a city is held by asset owners, including private transport operators, with little incentive to provide it for free, particularly as doing so carries privacy and security risks (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). A city that builds the platform still has to persuade the operators to put their data on it.

3.6 Liverpool

Liverpool's case is about where transport innovation sits organisationally. The city's smart infrastructure investment was made through its universities: Sensor City, a joint venture between the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University with the local enterprise partnership, was designated a University Enterprise Zone and funded with £5 million from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, £5 million from the European Regional Development Fund and £5 million from the two universities and industry, for a £15 million building at Copperas Hill due to open in 2017 as a centre for sensor technology businesses (Liverpool John Moores University, 2016). That is a supply-side investment, in the firms that make the sensors, not a transport programme.

The transport programme belongs to the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, and it is recent. In July 2024 the authority, the University of Liverpool, the technology company Podaris and partners in Busan, South Korea, launched KUDATA, a digital twin of part of the region's bus network funded under Innovate UK's UK-South Korea collaborative programme. The twin lets changes to routes, timetables and fares be trialled on a virtual copy of the network before they are introduced. After a one-year trial the second phase, announced in July 2025, extends the model to the whole city region and to rail, walking and cycling, adds real-time vehicle location, congestion and train signalling data, and asks algorithms to propose network changes that make jobs, education and essential services more reachable for disadvantaged communities (University of Liverpool, 2025). The context is the region's plan to take its buses back under public control, which is what makes a planning tool of this kind usable: a network run by several private operators with overlapping remits cannot be redesigned as one system, however good the model.

4.0 Analysis and Discussion

4.1 Social Innovation

Social innovation is the part of this agenda that does not follow from the technology. It covers who participates in designing a transport service, who is included when it is delivered digitally, and what residents are able to do with a city's data themselves. The case studies show why it matters: Bristol and Manchester, which treated engagement and the local ecosystem as part of the programme, produced durable partnerships, while Glasgow's single-contractor model delivered fast and then faced the question of what would survive the grant. Digital delivery also creates a distributional problem, which the Smart London Plan acknowledges under its first aim (Greater London Authority, 2013): a service that assumes a smartphone and a bank card excludes people who have neither, and in transport that means excluding them from the network itself.

Payment is the clearest example. Contactless and account-based ticketing remove the need to understand a fare structure before travelling, which lowers a real barrier for occasional and unfamiliar passengers, and they generate the demand data described in the London case (Greater London Authority, 2013). The same infrastructure supports location-based information: disruption and alternatives at the moment a traveller can act on them. None of this requires new vehicles or new track. It requires ticketing, point-of-sale equipment and customer contact channels to be upgraded together, which is an operational decision rather than a capital one.

Scale determines how well this works. London could do in 2013 what other cities were still bidding for, because it had the ticketing system, the data and the staff already. Smaller authorities close part of that gap by collaborating, and the global review lists cross-city collaboration among the four recurring gaps alongside procurement, private sector engagement and interoperability (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). Transport data does not stop at a boundary, and neither do the journeys it describes: a commuter crossing three authorities is one traveller, and a system that only sees its own area cannot plan for that journey. Liverpool's digital twin and Manchester's move towards a Greater Manchester strategy are both responses to that fact, and both put the useful unit of transport planning above the level of the city.

Tel Aviv is the case most often cited for doing this on a small budget. The Inter-American Development Bank's case study of the city, quoted in the global review, credits its ability to harness a dense start-up ecosystem to deliver solutions without large public expenditure, including support for at least three transport apps the city did not itself build; the benefits are described as threefold, a service that keeps improving under market demand, lower public spending, and support for new local businesses (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). The Helsinki region makes the same argument in its strategy, calling for regional innovation ecosystems as test beds for user-driven prototypes (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). The trade-off is worth naming: a service delivered by a start-up is a service the city does not control, and a start-up that fails takes the service with it.

4.2 What the Six Cases Show

Read as a set, the six cases make four points. First, the instrument varies more than the content. A formal plan (London), a competition grant (Glasgow, Bristol), a project portfolio (Manchester), a partnership with a data platform (Oxford) and a city-region tool (Liverpool) all arrive at the same three elements, ticketing or location data, a shared platform, and a small number of visible services. Second, the money is almost all external and time-limited: a national competition, a research council, the European Regional Development Fund, an Innovate UK bilateral programme. London alone built on systems its transport authority already ran, and only for Glasgow has a return on the public money been published, by the funder. Third, the transport change residents can see is modest in every case except London, where it rests on a fare system built before the phrase smart city existed. Fourth, none of the six programmes is statutory. Each depends on a council or a combined authority choosing to continue it, which is the limitation the next two sections return to.

5.0 Conclusion

Technology is changing daily life in cities, and cities are changing in response. That is not new: lifts made tall buildings possible and cars made cities spread outwards. What is different is the pace, because digital technology reaches people's lives faster than physical infrastructure ever did. The term smart city was popularised around 2010 to describe the use of new data and computing to govern cities and deliver services better, and interest in it has grown since, together with the criticism (Future Cities Catapult, 2017).

That is why reviewing smart city transport strategies matters. A strategy is one of the few mechanisms a city has for renewing how it operates, and how it is delivered matters as much as how it is written, because in most countries these strategies are not statutory. A stand-alone strategy can be flexible, but it can also become a reference document that never enters the city's overall vision, which is why the review recommends embedding it in existing statutory frameworks so that implementation and funding are secured (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). In most regions the review observed, strategies are made through collaborative engagement with stakeholders and citizens, which produces a better-suited strategy with more buy-in at the cost of time; governments in rapidly urbanising regions, particularly in China and South East Asia, take a top-down route that limits consultation to internal departments in return for speed (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). The six British cases sit at the collaborative end, and their weakness is the mirror image: slow, dependent on grants, and rarely converted into a commitment that survives the funding.

The study finds that the shift from a technology-led to a citizen-centred conception of the smart city is reflected in the strategies written over the last five years, and that the officials leading them name quality of life, citizen empowerment and safety as their drivers (Future Cities Catapult, 2017). Two instruments remain underused. City authorities procure millions of pounds of services each year, yet rarely consider how digital technology could change the scope of what they buy. And in spatial planning, little attention is given to how planning policy could require developers to install digital infrastructure as they build (Future Cities Catapult, 2017).

6.0 Limitations of the Study

The main limitation the underlying research identifies is not technical. It is the shortage of leadership, skills and capacity across local government. Political support is what sustains momentum, and that support is vulnerable to the electoral cycle, so a strategy has to be expressed in terms that survive a change of administration. The other recurring constraints are procurement practice, cross-city collaboration, engagement with the private sector and interoperability (Future Cities Catapult, 2017).

Two limitations belong to this report itself. The evidence base for the six cases is made mostly of plans, funding announcements and programme reports, so it describes intentions more fully than outcomes; only Glasgow and London publish figures that bear on results, and Glasgow's return-on-investment figure comes from the funder. And a UK-only case set cannot speak to the gap between planning and delivery in fast-growing cities elsewhere, where the review found top-down strategies and national mandates rather than voluntary collaboration. A study that wanted to test whether smart transport strategies work, rather than how they are written, would need outcome data of the kind Transport for London publishes, which the next section uses.

What Has Changed in London Transport Since This Report?

The measurable change is in the vehicle fleet rather than in the strategy documents. In central London the share of car kilometres driven by conventional diesel vehicles fell from about 53 per cent in early 2019 to about 22 per cent in September 2025. Those two values are read from Figure 26 of Transport for London's Travel in London 2025 annual overview, which plots the proportion of car kilometres by engine technology and by area from February 2019 to September 2025; the report's own text gives the corresponding battery-electric share as about 13 per cent of central London car kilometres in 2024 and states that zonal compliance with the Ultra Low Emission Zone standards reached 97.6 per cent in central London as of September 2025 (Transport for London, 2025).

TfL public transport demand in 2024/25 as a share of two pre-pandemic baselines

Chart data

Item	Value (%)
All TfL modes, versus 2019/20	94%
London Underground, versus 2019/20	91%
Buses, versus 2019/20	88%
All TfL modes, versus 2018/19	90%
London Underground, versus 2018/19	88%
Buses, versus 2018/19	83%

Share of London trips made by walking, cycling or public transport

Chart data

Item	Value (%)
2019	63.6%
2023	63%
2024	63.4%
2041 aim	80%

Where London's fleet stood in 2024 and 2025

ULEZ compliance, central London, September 2025

97.6%

Licensed private hire vehicles meeting ZEC and Euro 6, September 2025

60% Some 57,800 of 96,200 vehicles.

Central London car kilometres driven by battery-electric cars, 2024

13% Approximate average; excludes private hire.

Traffic on the TfL Road Network, 2024/25, versus pre-pandemic

95% Constant since 2021/22.

Demand has recovered but not fully. Journeys on TfL-operated public transport reached 94 per cent of the 2019/20 pre-pandemic level in 2024/25, with the Underground at 91 per cent and buses at 88 per cent (Travel in London 2025, figure 2 and the accompanying text). The same report notes that 2019/20 itself included a period affected by the start of the pandemic; measured against 2018/19 the figures are 90 per cent overall, 88 per cent for the Underground and 83 per cent for buses, so the recovery is weaker than the headline numbers suggest. For a student updating this report, that gap is the interesting number: it implies that hybrid working has changed the shape of demand permanently, which is a different planning problem from the growth assumptions most smart city strategies were written against.

Both figures illustrate the point made in section 4.2. A city-led strategy backed by a regulatory instrument, in this case a charging zone, produced a measurable change in behaviour, while the technology-led elements of the same strategy are much harder to attribute an outcome to.

Two further figures from the same report are worth adding to an updated version of this study, because they bear directly on the argument in section 4.1. The first is mode share. The proportion of all trips in London made by walking, cycling or public transport, which Transport for London calls the active, efficient and sustainable mode share, was provisionally estimated at 63.4 per cent in 2024, against 63.0 per cent in 2023 and 63.6 per cent in 2019 before the pandemic. The Mayor's stated aim is 80 per cent by 2041. In other words, after a decade of smart ticketing, real-time information and open data, the share of journeys made by sustainable modes is roughly where it was in 2019, and the report names hybrid working and cost-of-living pressure as the things holding it back. That is a finding about the limits of information as an instrument: it changes which service a traveller chooses at the margin, and it does not change how many journeys they need to make or what they can afford.

The second is regulation acting on the fleet rather than on the traveller. Licensing rules for private hire vehicles changed in January 2023 so that every newly licensed vehicle must be zero-emission-capable, emitting no more than 75g of CO2 per kilometre, and must meet the Euro 6 standard. By September 2025, 60 per cent of the 96,200 private hire vehicles licensed by Transport for London, some 57,800 vehicles, met both requirements (Travel in London 2025). Traffic on the TfL Road Network, meanwhile, was at 95 per cent of its pre-pandemic level in 2024/25 and has been at about that level since 2021/22. Put together with the diesel and mode-share figures, the pattern is consistent: the measures that produced a measurable change in London were licensing conditions and charging zones, both of them regulatory, while the digital systems made the network legible enough for those measures to be designed and monitored. A student updating this report should make that distinction explicit rather than crediting the technology with the outcome.

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Sources and References

• Birmingham City Council and Birmingham Smart City Commission (2014). Birmingham Smart City Roadmap. birminghamsmartcity.wordpress.com (PDF)
• Business MK (2013, 23 October). £16m funding backs 'smart' economic growth in Milton Keynes. businessmk.co.uk
• Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Research and Innovation (2015, 3 December). Manchester announced as UK's Internet of Things (IoT) City Demonstrator and awarded £10m investment. research.cmft.nhs.uk
• Centre for Cities (2014, 29 May). Smart cities: case studies. centreforcities.org
• Cowley, R., Joss, S., and Dayot, Y. (2018). The smart city and its publics: insights from across six UK cities. Urban Research and Practice, 11(1), 53–77. eprints.gla.ac.uk (PDF)
• Future Cities Catapult (2017). Smart City Strategies: A Global Review. cp-catapult.s3.amazonaws.com (PDF). The 21-city review cited throughout; its Manchester appendix is based on an interview with the city council.
• GOV.UK (2013, 25 January). £24 million investment will make Glasgow a city of the future [Press release]. gov.uk
• Greater London Authority (2013). Smart London Plan: using the creative power of new technologies to serve London and improve Londoners' lives. london.gov.uk (PDF)
• Innovate UK (2017, 7 November). Glasgow: a world-leading smart city with support from Innovate UK [Case study]. gov.uk
• Liverpool John Moores University (2016, 28 July). Sensor City moves into Liverpool Science Park. ljmu.ac.uk
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