The Internet of Things

14Road Transport and Air Quality

Charles Carter¹, and Chris Rushton²

¹Smart Cities Journalist, UK

²Connected Places Catapult, UK

14.1 Introduction

Transport touches all our lives in many ways. Whether it's enabling us to go from our home to our place of work and back each day, visit friends, access health services, or move goods, materials, and machines from their origin to place of utility, transport drives society. Every activity that anyone has ever done outside their home was and is enabled by the transport system. Every building, product, and machine ever made by humankind would not have been possible without transport. Things do not tend to happen in the same place – the world is distributed. Domestic and international trade are transport. As innovation moves us forward the nature of transport is changing. Transport is becoming ever more connected.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has reached many areas of today's transport system, powering a more intelligent, optimized, and user‐centric network. Its impact looks set to increase over the coming years as transport becomes more complex and integrated. As set out in earlier chapters, IoT's ability to rapidly gather information over distance from a wide range of sensors is well suited to the spatiotemporal nature of transport.

The transport system can be described in terms of six pillars: they are Pillar 1, people or things being moved; Pillar 2, people that facilitate the movement of people and things, i.e. the workforce; Pillar ...