Programs like the UK’s new Local Sustainable Transport Fund are right to emphasise the benefits of local decision-making and regionally appropriate strategies for reducing fossil fuel use and carbon emissions. But one of the big challenges in building truly smart cities is finding a balance between the local with the global: while sustainability efforts might become increasingly local, they succeed best by harnessing the powers of networked intelligence that reaches far beyond a town’s or village’s borders.

Consider transport, for example. You might not find much benefit from smart technologies if you’re simply riding your bike from your home to the library two miles away (though it’s possible your trip could prove quicker and safer if traffic lights along the way are connected to a system to optimise travel times and reduce congestion). But if you’re riding your bike to the railway station to catch a train to the next town, your travels will be more efficient through the use of standards like ITSO, which promotes smart-ticketing that can work across multiple applications, transport modes and operating companies.

And local car- and van-sharing programs are a lot more effective when users can tap into online tools like the Wisconsin city of Madison’s Rideshare Etc. or the UK’s Carbon Voyage, which focuses on taxi-sharing.

A consortium of European organisations is taking the same approach toward car travel, working to reduce fuel consumption and improve road safety by using wireless IT to link multiple motorists to a lead truck that could pull them, linked together in train fashion, along stretches of highways.

So as agencies and businesses look to implement home-grown projects to cut energy use and boost sustainability, it’s important that they consider not just local nuts and bolts but things like network integration, data management and real-time communications. Building smarter cities will have to be a matter of “act locally” and “think globally.”

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