Smart Cities—A Vision of the Future or the Present? - Technology Management for Sustainable Production and Logistics - page 124

800 billion in the nearest decade. Some of them are to join continents. The growth in
the share of rail transport will not only speed up the process of sending goods ena-
bling logistic companies to introduce a fast delivery of parcels. This will relive the
road infrastructure which constitutes the next step towards handling the problem of
congestions and a negative impact of means of transport on the natural environment.
3 Smart Cities—Examples of Practical Solutions
The notion of a smart city cannot relate to every city regardless of its location, the
size and the character. A smart city means development urban space offering a high
quality life thanks to elements of sustainable development being implemented and
distinguishable from other cities, solutions in the field of ecology, services offered
by public institutions, the policy of local governments implemented in the urban
area or technology. The combination of above elements into one common system
is a condition to create a smart city which is unique due to a variety of its elements.
It is estimated that by 2020 the industry involved in creating smart cities will be
worth over USD 400 billon globally (Lindert-Wentzell 2014 ). It results from the
fact that a growing popularity of smart cities is accompanied by solutions enhanc-
ing effectiveness of managing urban space. All over the world urban authorities
incur huge expenditure for technologies of sending, managing and analyzing data
to support creation of innovative services improving the quality of inhabitants' life.
This denotes good development perspectives for ICT companies (Information
and Communication Technologies, ICT). According to the elaboration of Frost &
Sullivan The Role of ICT in Building smart Cities—Infrastructure in the process
of creating smart cities a major development opportunity is given to enterprises
specializing in providing smart energy solutions and providers of intelligent trans-
portation systems (ITS) ( 2014 ).
In the above context a city may be called smart when it meets three basic
criteria:
• ICT infrastructure should be lexible and should develop together with changes
to the digital economy and not merely respond to current needs,
• an urban system should be fully integrated with an individual citizen and easily
accessible,
• the role of urban authorities is to provide tools for creating solutions and to dis-
seminate among inhabitants knowledge about digital development of cities and
provide access to digital devices (Wojtas 2013 ).
• In terms of solutions introduced in the public transport Budapest may be called
a smart city as compared to other European cities of similar size and the level of
development.
According to analyses of a Hungarian website portfolio.hu ( 2014 ) Budapest has the
most dense public transport system. It is twice bigger than in Vienna or Prague. Data
from the Real Estate Developer Forum shows that Budapest has more stations than