Steve Rogerson visited last week’s Move conference in London.

What is a smart city?

Given the thousands upon thousands of words I have written on the subject, you might think I know the answer. I don’t, but I am not alone, as so-called experts, equipment makers, transport companies, city officials and just about everyone else have spouted volumes on this subject, and we are all still none the wiser.

OK, in fairness, we know some elements that make up a smart city. We know applications that fit into the category, such as sensors that say when public rubbish bins need emptying or route planning software for council maintenance vehicles, but the full vision of the ultimate smart city comes in as many versions as there are people who have an opinion.

Nowhere was this more evident than at last week’s Move conference and exhibition in London. This is a show where city planners and techies meet and share ideas, and hopefully solve the world’s problems, or at least the problems in a particular city somewhere in the world. But, as I found yet again – I have been to this show before – the gulf between what people want and what others think people want is as wide as ever.

A big factor in this is public transport and the part self-driving vehicles will play. Lukas Neckermann, founder of Brussels-based Pave Europe (pavecampaign.org/europe), a group set up to educate the public on autonomous vehicle technology, believes cities can improve their infrastructure now in ways that benefit both existing human drivers and future robot drivers because if these cars are being built to imitate humans then what benefits one should also benefit the other.

This includes better pick-up and drop-off zones, more shared transport, and more space for public transport.

“Our cities can adapt to reap the benefits of what autonomous vehicles can bring,” he said. “The most important resource in a city is space. Everybody is fighting for it – e-scooters, bikes, e-bikes, delivery bikes, autonomous delivery robots, buses and so on. Every city is battling with the allocation of space.”

He said anything that could be done to make a city more loveable made it smarter. For example, if you had autonomous shuttles broadcasting live data about demand then those data could be used to send more of the shuttles to the busiest places.

“That will make the city more loveable,” he said.

But he said autonomous vehicles should not initially be used to replace existing public transport but to fill in the gaps that existing buses and trains don’t reach. For example, a double-decker bus with one driver and 80 passengers was good value, but not so in areas where there were only four passengers. Here, an autonomous shuttle might make more sense.

From the city official point of view, Matthew Shelton from the UK’s Transport for West Midlands (www.tfwm.org.uk), said cities often did not have the money to make the type of infrastructure investment needed.

“It is hard for local authorities to find the finance to continue adapting the infrastructure,” he said, adding it was also difficult to convince people of the benefits and safety of autonomous transport.

“There is a huge responsibility on safety,” he said. “We have been working with the general public, but they don’t feel very comfortable with it yet. What we have to do is be really transparent. If people have issues with the technology, we have to face up to it. Transparency is key to winning the public over.”

However, he said he did not think autonomous vehicles were ready yet to replicate what was already out there.

The progress in China towards autonomous vehicles has been helped by the government being more relaxed about trials. Helen Pan, general manager at Baidu Apollo (en.apollo.auto), wanted to see this attitude replicated elsewhere. “I want the public to be more open minded about the technology and governments to be more tolerant,” she said.

A cheaper option for most cities, and one that has been taken up, though not smoothly as I mentioned in a recent blog (iotm2mcouncil.org/iot-library/articles/transportation/smart-cities-will-fail-if-people-are-not-on-board), is the use of e-bikes and e-scooters to bring cheap and personalised transport to many citizens.

Caroline Samponaro, vice president at mobility company Lyft (www.lyft.com), said e-bikes were a “game changer” in that they were available to all.

“Low-income people rely on these,” she said. “The e-bike is bringing more people into transport.”

And that is really key, because however you define a smart city, the way that most people react with it is through transportation. Is the journey home from work one big traffic jam or a comfortable trip on a tram? Can you breathe the fresh air as you ride your e-scooter or did someone else’s e-bike just knock you over on the way to the bus stop? Getting this right is what really makes a city smart, and loveable.