Characteristics of the Smart Cities Towards Sustainable Disclosure Essay

Smart cities are defined as urban development frameworks that are rooted in innovations of concepts and processes that characterize the twentieth-century technological advancements (Angelidou et al, 2017). The local government of a region is responsible for implementation of initiatives related to smart cities and as such, they play the role of the director in coordinating all other stakeholders (Alaverdyan, Kucera, and Horak, n.d). Vienna holds the number one slot as a smart city. The city has collaborative policies that aim to integrate planning of transport and the urban setting. The city adopted its share of the modes of public transportation. For instance, in 2010 the modal share of public transportation was split as follow; twenty-eight percent for walking, thirty-one percent for privately-owned cars, and five percent for cyclists, thirty-six percent for public transportation.Additionally, the city has incepted various measures for improving transportation towards sustainability. These have been undertaken in the form of increasing the image and quality of public transportation, through the enactment of strict management policies for parking spaces and awarding pedestrians and cyclists with improved conditions (Embarq Network, 2018). These initiatives have seen the two and a half million occupants of Vienna enjoy five subway lines operating on 79 kilometers of track in 104 stations. The public transportation network also serves 850, and in 2016, for instance, it carried about 954 million passengers in total ("Smart Mobility", 2018).

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The city continues to root for further investment in the railway transportation that is underway in light of achieving its future-oriented policy of transportation. The city also wishes to modernize it buses by adopting electric buses, a move that saw Wiener Linien in 2013 receive an award from the Austrian State Prize for Mobility. The city also mostly embodies modern technology. One way this has been integrated into the service delivery sector is through quando; a smartphone-enabled application that lets transport users know the estimated arrival and departure time for buses, subway trains, or trams. It also offers the information about the stops, the schedule, and disruptions to reduce complexities for commuters around the city.Vienna also houses 1,379 kilometers of cycle route, lanes, and path hat traverse in zones experiencing low traffic. This helps residents and visitors enjoy exploring the site of Vienna from a bicycle. The city also offers bicycle outlets, such as Citybike visitors to Vienna can access a bike to pedal around the city by making a one-off registration fee payment amounting to EUR1 and with that comes access to over 1,500 bicycles that are distributed around 120 stations within the city ("Smart Mobility", 2018). One particular way that the efforts for achieving a sustainable environment can be seen is through the concept of sharing models in the city. Despite offering the many different kinds of bicycles for rental purposes, there is a faster alternative to the bike that comes in the form of SCO2T electric scooter. The application is readily available to smartphone and Windows users offering a sharing service that is free-floating. There are also free-floating systems on offer in the city that deal with the renting of smart vehicles, an initiative dubbed as "Carsharing" ("Smart Mobility", 2018).

Conclusion

The move towards sustainable environment involves reducing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the environment. The infusion of information technology into the sustainability-driven agenda is also visible in the endeavoring competitive placing through research and technology. In fact, the United Nations Habitat New Urban Agenda together with the European Union's Urban Agenda, which are the international bodies safeguarding sustainability agendas, acknowledge the need for technology in deliver...